Sixty five years ago, on 9th May 1958 Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was released in San Francisco. In August 2023 in Dublin, we celebrate the 65th Anniversary of Vertigo with this three-day international film conference that will focus exclusively on all aspects of what makes Vertigo a masterpiece in cinema. Vertigo, regarded as Hitchcock's most personal film, sees the director grapple with the recurring theme of obsession set against the backdrop of San Francisco. This film conference brings together international scholars and writers on Alfred Hitchcock/Bernard Herrmann from Canada, the US, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Italy, the UK and Ireland, who will explore Vertigo through a series of presentations, together with a screening of the 1958 classic film in the Lighthouse Cinema in Dublin.

In 2012, Alfred Hitchcock's psychological suspense drama Vertigo ousted Orson Welles's Citizen Kane from the top-ranking position of the British Film Institute's (BFI) poll conducted by Sight & Sound magazine. The pre-eminent international poll designates one film, once every 10 years, with the honour of “the greatest film of all time”. Citizen Kane previously enjoyed the top billing every decade since 1962 but, after 50 years of monopolising the top spot, Citizen Kane was finally de-throned by Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 2012. Vertigo only entered the top ten UK poll for the first time in 1982 but rose steadily in the poll's outcome every decade, inching slowly up the rankings over the course of 30 years, reaching 4th place in 1992 and then 2nd place in 2002 behind Welles's 1941 classic, separated by a mere five votes. In the most recent Sight & Sound poll in 2022, Vertigo was ranked at second place below Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).

Note: screening of Vertigo in 4k at the Lighthouse Cinema on Sunday 20th August at 8pm.