Hitchcock’s Vertigo and DeepDream: Perception Across Cinema and Artificial Intelligence

This article examines the comparison between Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and DeepDream through visual, narrative, and historical perspectives. It first considers formal affinities between DeepDream’s amplification of learned visual features and the perceptual construction of “Madeleine” in Vertigo, while stressing the functional and ontological differences between human perception and artificial neural networks. The analysis then turns to the film’s opening credits and nightmare sequence, asking how their treatment of the eye, fixation, light, and visual instability may be reconsidered in relation to contemporary research on vision. Rather than proposing any direct influence or shared genealogy, the article uses the work of William Grey Walter, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel as a form of historical mediation. Some of this research was contemporary with Vertigo, while some would also, through substantial conceptual and technical transformations, contribute to the history of artificial visual-recognition systems. The comparison thus provides a way to historicize certain affinities between Vertigo and DeepDream while also clarifying the limits of their correspondence.