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Alfred hitchcok1/6/2024 Notions of love, sin, redemption and communion – as taught and lived in the Catholic tradition – are central to understand the worldview of four filmmakers who were raised in the Catholic faith. ![]() The belief system at work in the canon of these Hollywood filmmakers of the studio era is rooted in a Catholic understanding of the human person and his relationship to others, to the world and to God. This article explores the different ways in which a Catholic view of the human condition is reflected in the cinema of John Ford, Frank Borzage, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock. (One of the most eloquent examples of this is the startling image of the squirt of blood “painted” over the black and white images and “thrown” towards the off-screen space, implicitly “at the spectator” at the end of Spellbound.) It seems that for Hitchcock painting acts like an “intermedial demon of the cinematic image,” a medial doppelgänger that is ready at any time to take charge, threatening to disrupt the reasonable (and discursive) order of the world. In contrast with a classic dramaturgy that neatly solves all the puzzles, the Hitchcockian painting, or painterly image emerges as the medium of the unknown threatening to throw the mind of the character (and implicitly of the viewer) into the abysmal depths of the uncanny and the unidentifiable. The article presents how the significance of the paintings in Hitchcock’s films is not only connected to the solving of a particular story of mystery or mysterious identity, but also consists in raising questions about the interpretation of images in general.
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