Alfred Hitchcock was raised a Catholic and educated by the Jesuits.  The influence of his Catholic upbringing is evident in his films, sometimes in surprising ways.

On a purely psychological level, Hitchcock was attracted to stories in which someone is judged unfairly, mistaken for someone else and asked to pay for that other person's sins.  This is a common enough response to the harsh and demanding educational system of the Jesuits -- a sense of living under perpetual (and seemingly unjust) accusation.  In many Hitchcock movies the unfairly accused protagonist redeems himself by heroic actions -- which in theological terms might be related to the doctrine of justification by works, the idea that a man can, with a little help from God, save himself by his own actions.

But there's deeper and more complex theology at work in certain of Hitchcock's films -- most notably in I Confess and The Wrong Man.  Interestingly enough, these are two of the director's most naturalistic films, shot in great part on location and in black and white.  It's odd that when he wanted to delve most deeply into religious themes he should have chosen to present them in a quasi-documentary form.

In I Confess a priest, played by Montgomery Clift, is unjustly accused of a murder.  The real killer has confessed to him, but he can't, as a matter of religious conviction, tell anybody about it.  In this film, the protagonist does not redeem himself except by passive sacrifice.  His heroism is simply to accept his fate humbly, stick to his faith.

His convictions here are church-related -- he must sacrifice himself to the principle of the sanctity of the confessional, to ecclesiastical procedure.  He's saved from paying the ultimate penalty by the witness of another character, who sacrifices herself to reveal his innocence.  Presumably his own sacrificial posture has inspired her to this act.

So far we are well within the Catholic tradition, which sees the church, personified in the figure of the priest, as a divine agent in the world -- adherence to its doctrine and ritual leads to salvation.

But something very different is going on in The Wrong Man.  Here an innocent man, played by Henry Fonda, is accused of a crime and his whole life is shattered.  He's a religious man, and carries his rosary beads with him through his ordeal -- but it doesn't seem to help.  The wheels of justice, the oppression of the legal system, operating quite reasonably on the face of it, crush him like an insect.

Finally his mother asks him to pray -- and he does, not with the rosary beads, not in a church, but directly to an image of Jesus.  Instantly, the real criminal appears and is caught -- the accused man is redeemed.

This is a long way from Catholic theology in that the church plays no mediating role.  It's just between "the wrong man" and Jesus.  He's saved by no action of his own, not even by the humble acceptance of his fate.  He's saved by a simple cry for help.

We're now, oddly enough, in Protestant theological territory, closer to the doctrine of justification by faith, in which neither the church nor the suffering man play any role whatsoever in the man's salvation, which is a gift of Grace from God, pure and simple.

It's clear that in these two films Hitchcock was not just expressing resentment over the terrors and the residual guilt inculcated by a Catholic education.  He was articulating complex themes in Christian thought, trying to dramatize them in an entertaining way but also to situate them in the real world, in a plausible evocation of modern-day Quebec, where I Confess is set, and New York, where The Wrong Man is set.

"Film is not a slice of life," Hitchcock famously said, "it's a slice of cake".  But there's very little cake on display in either of these films -- and in the mean streets of The Wrong Man, in the suffocating rooms and cells and hallways of police stations and prisons and courthouses, there is only wormwood and gall.

The two films stand out as great and profound works of Christian art, explicit meditations on Christian theology in a century (and an industry) not noted for such concerns.  Like all good parables they can be enjoyed simply as stories, but Hitchcock makes it very clear (see the image from I Confess at the beginning of this post) that he had heaven on his mind when he made them, that he was asking deep questions about the nature and the mechanism of salvation.

Frank Tashlin was the nut-case genius who unleashed the nut-case genius of Jerry Lewis as a filmmaker.  Before Lewis became a director, Tashlin directed him in some important movies that helped set the tone and strategy for Lewis' later work.

Tashlin basically showed Lewis that if in a film you deconstructed the process of making movies and let the audience in on the deconstruction in a lighthearted, complicitous way, you could vastly expand the range of comic eccentricity possible in a mainstream film.  As long as the audience knew you were violating convention deliberately and "just for laffs" it would then allow you to do and say almost anything.

Tashlin started out in animation, so he had a good idea of how much surrealism and aesthetic self-reflexiveness a mainstream audience would accept.  It was his genius to show how this receptivity could be appealed to in live-action comedy.

The Girl Can't Help It, Tashlin's masterpiece, starts out in black and white and in Academy ratio.  Tom Ewell, the male star of the film, steps forward towards the camera and announces directly to the audience that the film they're about to see is in Cinemascope.  He waves his hands and the sides of the image expand to a Cinemascope ratio.  He also announces that the film will be in color -- more prestidigitation and the image becomes saturated with color.  "Sometimes," he confides to the audience, "you wonder who's minding the shop."

Instantly Tashlin establishes a bond with the audience based on the suggestion that the powers that be in Hollywood would give their customers less than they wanted if they could get away with it -- but Ewell, acting on the audience's behalf, won't let the industry get away with it.  The implications of this are profound.  Hollywood is the establishment, part of the cultural compact of the nation.  Once you're seduced into suspecting Hollywood, you're ready to suspect everything.

But Tashlin doesn't leave it at that.  As Ewell chatters on, telling us that this movie is going to be about rock and roll, Tashlin tracks in on a jukebox playing the title song, sung by the highly suspect cultural icon Little Richard, and the song drowns out the end of Ewell's monologue.  Don't even trust the star, Tashlin seems to be saying -- don't even trust me.

I think it's probably a mistake to parse this film, and Tashlin's work in general, looking for a programmatic critique of movies or of American culture.  Tashlin, like Nietzsche, is offering a perspective from which a critique is possible, but he leaves the conclusions to the viewer.  Tashlin was interested in creating a transgressive frame of mind, a frame of mind in which anything and everything could be questioned -- he wasn't interested in formulating answers to the questions themselves.  He liked, I think, the giddiness of abandoning, of shattering received forms, the license it gave him to free-associate -- and that's what he does in this film.

The center of The Girl Can't Help It is the iconic, cartoon-like image of Jayne Mansfield.  Somehow Tashlin sensed that the psychic chaos that could be induced by her sheer carnality was somehow connected to the energy of rock and roll -- that there was a cultural matrix that generated both.  There are times in the film when he seems to be mocking this matrix, times when he seems to be celebrating it.  In fact he was just observing it in wonder -- and asking the audience to wonder about it, too.

There's a famous scene in which Mansfield bursts into Ewell's apartment carrying two bottles of milk she's picked up from his doorstep on her way in.  She holds them up to her breasts like extensions of those already preposterous attributes.  On one level it's a dirty joke.  On another level it's a symbol of Mansfield's innocence.  On a deeper level it can be read as an acute analysis of the male breast-fixation in post-WWII America -- not a sexual thing at all, at bottom, but an infantile regression, a lust for the alma mater.

There are any number of such suggestive images in The Girl Can't Help It.  The complex ways African-Americans are presented in the film deserve an essay of their own.  One image can serve as an example -- the gorgeous African-American singer Abby Lincoln, dressed in a spectacular sparkling evening gown, sexy and elegant, is shown on a cabaret stage lit in lurid colors . . . singing a Gospel song.  This is beyond satire, beyond surrealism -- it's an image as strange as American culture itself.

The lines of thought are never clear in Tashlin's best work -- and that's its value.  In the social currents he observed colliding and redirecting each other, echoed in the wildly clashing colors of his cinematography, Tashlin uncovered perplexing contradictions in America culture and threw them in our faces like so many custard pies.  All we can do in response is wipe the custard out of our eyes and wait for the next one.

His work in the Fifties was excellent spiritual preparation for the Sixties -- a cultural slapstick routine that still challenges complacency in any form.

Here are some of the astonishing images of Houston-based artist Lynn Randolph.

At times Randolph's work harks back to the paintings of Frida Kahlo in its contrasts of bold, warm colors and in the placid, self-possessed sensuality of its female subjects. But it also echoes at times the hard lines and the precisely delineated dream landscapes of the painters of the Northern Renaissance. Certain paintings, like the nude on the bed below, entitled The Wetlands Of Desire, suggest the calm derangement of Magritte.

 

Randolph's art exists in lively conversation with the past -- not trying to be new but also transcending pastiche, as her disciplined dialogue with the vanished masters ends up revealing her eccentric sensibility more clearly than aggressive innovation might have.

The painting directly above, which must certainly be a self-portrait, offers an intimate connection with the viewer, as the artist's eyes seem to engage ours in a moment of unguarded confrontation, just as some of Rembrandt's self-portraits do -- yet the painted image within the painted image, raising its hand as though to welcome the sensual touch of the brush, speaks of another kind of intimacy, between the artist and her work, her vision, which we cannot quite share. It has an odd auto-erotic charm.

Recently Randolph has done a series of magical dream-seacapes, like the paintings at the beginning and end of this post, which are really breathtaking.

For more info on Randolph and to see more of her paintings go here:

Lynn Randolph

Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt, from 1942, is a kind of proto-film-noir.  It shares the dark view of human nature and the deeply skeptical vision of "respectable" society that would inform the post-WWII film noir.  WWII was just getting under way for America when the film was made, but much of the rest of the world had already been at war for three years by then, and clearly the global conflagration was beginning to create a deep anxiety in the psyches of sensitive, thoughtful artists like Hitchcock and Thornton Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay.

At the beginning of the century America had participated in a "war to end all wars" and now the continents were aflame again.  There seemed to be some intrinsic, irrepressible evil in the nature of human beings, or in the organization of their societies, which led to wholesale destruction at regular intervals, despite the best efforts of mankind's intellect and collective goodwill.

The fragility of human institutions, especially the family, was acutely sensed.  Shadow Of A Doubt was pre-noir in that it didn't concentrate on the world's corruption or on the impotence of manhood, personified in the devouring femme fatale, but rather on the human being's inward capacity for evil, which seemed to erupt without reason or warning.  "The world needs watching," says the young hero at the film's end -- meaning, mankind needs watching.  There was still, in 1942, a faith in the idea that watching might do some good.  At the core of the post-war film noir was a sense that such a faith was delusional.

But as our suspicions of Uncle Charley grow, we begin to treasure the ordinary goodness of the family he seems to be rescuing from its rut.  Only in the light of their fragility can we appreciate family and community for the treasures they are, the bulwarks they are against the world's insidious darkness.

It's easy to see how this related to the mood of the nation, and the world, when the film was made -- but its resonance has if anything grown deeper as the post-war era has played out, with the family and community in deeper and deeper jeopardy, threatened now in "advanced" societies not by external violence but from within.  Wilder and Hitchcock are still reminding us how truly naked and vulnerable we are in the face of the world's horrors -- still reminding us that those horrors originate in the human heart, and that our few defenses against them are both frail and inexpressibly sweet.

Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece from 1958, is about many things -- that is, it can be analyzed from many different perspectives -- but one of the most important things it's about is the medium of movies itself.

Every work of art is on some level about the medium in which it's expressed -- its nominal subject, sometimes confused with its "content", is often merely an excuse for a demonstration of the metaphysical resonance of a particular set of techniques.  The process of art itself is a subject, a conveyor of meaning, which interacts with the nominal subject of a work in complex ways.

The technique of Jan Van Eyck's Altarpiece Of Ghent testifies to a lifetime of study and mastery in the discipline of painting, a supreme commitment to the medium, which is inseparable from the religious devotion of the work -- they become co-identical.  By the same token, when Robert Rauschenberg wraps bits of an old tire around a tree stump and calls it sculpture, he is expressing a cynicism not just about art but about life, about all human endeavor.

The obvious text of Vertigo, the narrative element which can be rendered into words, clearly has parallels to filmmaking.  A man dresses a woman up and coaches her in playing a part to facilitate a murder, creating an image that another man falls in love with -- and when that other man loses the woman he thinks he's fallen in love with he dresses yet another woman up and coaches her in playing the part of his lost love.

Critics have seen the images of the two men in the film as images of a film director, who on one level constructs drama for cynical, mercenary purposes, but can also, like Pygmalion, fall in love with his creation and want it, like Galatea, to come alive and embrace him.

To the degree that we as spectators enter into the activity of the director, become seduced by it -- first as entertainment, then as the motivation of real desire -- we share the director's dilemma and the director's temptation.  We risk falling in love with ghosts -- the ghosts we've summoned, cynically or narcissistically, from our own psyches.

As I say, this analysis of Vertigo is available to us on a literary, intellectual level just from the plain narrative of the film.  The art of the film, however, lies in the way Hitchcock makes us feel the spiritual jeopardy of his protagonist in personal, often subconscious ways -- to experience his protagonist's jeopardy as our own.  The genius of the film, then, is the way Hitchcock uses the medium of movies not just to express its nominal subject but to internalize it in the psyche of the spectator.

Primarily, Hitchcock does this by encouraging the pleasure we take in being spectators, voyeurs, luring us into a comfort zone about the activity, and then subtly deconstructing our comfort, our distance from the activity.

The film moves with astonishing fluidity between different kinds of images, which place us in different relationships to them.  The simplest example of this is found in the early scenes in which Jimmy Stewart follows Kim Novak's car through the streets of San Francisco.  Location shots in which the moving camera, representing Stewart's point of view, pull us imaginatively through the fascinating urban landscape of a real place, delight us and so pull us imaginatively, emotionally, into the chase narrative.  But these shots are intercut with oddly quiet and dreamlike reverse shots on Stewart filmed against patently unreal backscreens.  Stewart is clearly not driving a real car, he's clearly not really in the streets he seems to be driving down -- he's watching something from a distance, as we are.  Subliminally, we're being told that we can enjoy this chase without having to imagine it as real -- because it's just a movie -- but we're also being told, and shown, that we can choose to enjoy it as real, to whatever degree we like.

This dynamic is a paradigm for the aesthetic strategy of the whole film.  As the Stewart character becomes more and more obsessed by the Novak character, Hitchcock progressively eroticizes her as an image on screen, inviting us to fantasize about her also in purely sensual terms -- but he keeps stepping back and forcing us to step back, to see her once again as merely an image, perhaps a dangerous one.

Finally Hitchcock is able to bring us to the spiritual climax of the film, when Stewart is so thoroughly enchanted by the erotic illusion of Novak that he's willing to suspend his disbelief in her reality in order to possess her, whatever the hell that might mean under the circumstances.  As spectators, we are right with him.  Hitchcock can tell us with every means at his command as a filmmaker that Stewart is living in a dream, that we are watching a dream, but can at the same time so eroticize Novak that we don't care -- we want the dream to be true.  We want it right up until the final shot, when, like someone having a wonderful dream he or she doesn't want to end, we try to incorporate the sound of the alarm clock into the dream, so as not to be forced to switch our mode of consciousness.

The paradox is presented from a predominantly male point of view, but isn't limited to one.  The moment in the hotel room when Stewart waits for the embodiment of his deepest sexual fantasies to walk out of the bathroom with her hair done just so is one of the most erotic moments in all of cinema.  It connects with the hope and suspense of every sexual encounter -- and not just for men.  Kim Novak said that the scene was incredibly powerful for her -- that she was literally trembling with emotion, involuntarily, when she walked out of that bathroom, because the moment connected for her with all those amorous moments in real life when she wanted to be perfect for her lover, wanted to perfectly embody his fantasies.

The self-reflection of a film director, the spiritual jeopardy of voyeurism on the part of moviegoers, thus becomes universalized in Vertigo into a profound reflection on the hope and suspense and illusion (and charity, and fun) of sexual love.  The medium incarnates the message and we receive it not as a message but as an interior insight, a wisdom born of our own experience.

This all but magical ability to incite interior experience in the spectator is of course an attribute shared by all great art, and explains why we can watch Vertigo repeatedly and still have it play out as new -- much like the sex act itself.  We're not just being shown something, not just being told something, not just doing something when we watch Vertigo.  Something is happening inside us over which we have very little conscious control -- and it happens again and again each time we see the film.