The video rolls with that familiar Hitchcockian soundtrack, and there is the backside of Kim Novak as she steps from a luxury sedan and gracefully walks toward the Legion of Honor. But this is not Vertigo. This is VertiGhost, a clever video installation that employs exact re-creations of the San Francisco scenes from that famous 1958 film to explore questions of double and hidden identity. Multiple media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson hired a film crew of 15 or 20, plus three models to play the Novak role, to create VertiGhost. The original San Francisco locations were shot with the same angles and lighting used by Alfred Hitchcock. The result is spooky in how precise it is. Spookier still is the setting for Leeson’s installation. It opens Saturday, Dec. 16, at the Legion of Honor in the same gallery that Hitchcock used for the scene in which Novak sits on a bench and studies a mysterious painting called Portrait of Carlotta…
MA for New York University