Hitchcock and Painting: Spellbound by Images

Spellbound by Images
The Allure of Painting in the

Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock
Hitchcocks films constitute a unique link between the early cinema of attractions, the avant-garde affinity towards painting and the conventions of
classical storytelling. The article presents how the significance of the paintings
in Hitchcocks films is not only connected to the solving of a particular story of
mystery or mysterious identity, but it also consists in raising questions about
the interpretation of images in general. 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.
GNES PETH
Painting for the cinema constitutes a forbidden object of desire.
(Angela Dalle Vacche, 1996, 1.)
The Painting as a Demonic Image and the

Embodiment of Nothingness
Hitchcocks films constitute a unique link between the early cinema of attractions, the avant-garde affinity towards painting, and the conventions
of classical storytelling, displaying in certain films a marked propensity
towards abstract imagery characteristic of the visual ornamentalism of
modernist cinema. Paintings often occupy key roles his films where they
always have the potential of opening up an abyss, a rupture in the texture
of a fundamentally classical narrative.1
Susan Felleman notes in her book on art in the cinematic imagination:
the portrait [] hangs as an index of Art and Death on the walls of the
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moving picture gallery and its movement there should remind us that this
gallery is anything but static (FELLEMAN, 2006: p.24), and without doubt,
the relationship of portraiture in Hitchcocks cinema and the theme of
death, Oedipal identification as well as the aestheticism of vision is even
more complex than we grew accustomed to in the film noir canon. Both in
Rebecca (1940) and in Vertigo (1958) we have a painting that represents a
dead woman and in both films there is a live woman (the object of the male
protagonists gaze and desire) who assumes a visual likeness to the woman
represented in the painting, as if the live woman were a reincarnation of
the dead one. In the earlier film, Rebecca, the young and shy second wife
(Joan Fontaine) of the rich and elegant Max de Winter (Laurence Olivier)
tries to escape the shadow of the prematurely departed first wife (Rebecca),
who was supposed to have been a glamorous society lady. The new Mrs.
de Winter with her plain grey clothes and frail body is introduced to the
viewer against the backdrop of the huge aristocratic castle towering over
her. The architraves of the castle become similar to empty frames that have
clearly not been conceived to surround her. In order to assume the role
she is longing for, the young Mrs. de Winter has to be transformed into a
picture that is adequate for these imposing architectural frames. And this
is exactly what happens when she accepts the demonic suggestion of Mrs.
Danvers to appear in a costume that copies one of the paintings hanging
in the hallway of the castle, having no idea that her rival, the first Mrs. de
Winter, chose to dress up in exactly the same way. The process of dressing
up becomes, without her being conscious of it, the process of becoming
a double for the dead wife, Rebecca. The dead woman, however, remains
for her a fabrication of pure fiction, as the information that she has about
her is so scarce that she can only fill in the gaps with her own imagination.
As we later learn in the film, Rebecca compared to the angelic young
second wife was a demonic woman who caused her husband much suffering. So the young woman played by Joan Fontaine is actually a rival
of an image that she tries to resemble, an image that has no referent, that
does not actually exist. The scene in which Joan Fontaine dresses up to
become the painting emphasizes both the coming alive of a false fantasy
and the demonic power of a mental image. The majestic presence of the
painting that she contemplates in the presence of Mrs. Danvers becomes
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ILL. 1
A Selznick International Picture, George Barnes.
the metaphor of an entire world that she longs for, and at the same time
it represents the symbolic doorway through which she believes she may
enter the world of her dreams. (Ill. 1)
When Joan Fontaine appears as a tableau vivant, a personification
of the painting, Hitchcock emphatically confronts her with the painting,
having her look at the painting as if she were looking in a mirror, then
proceeds to frame her with the architrave of the hallway, ultimately showing her almost literally as if she were stepping out of a picture frame. After
the vehement negative reaction of the husband who covers his eyes as
to protect himself from this phantom-like tableau vivant the confused
young woman casts another desperate glace at the treacherous mirror
painting, and at the end of the scene, as the ironic reversal of her figure
dressed all in white, Hitchcock shows us the dark figure of Mrs. Danvers
from the back, framed in a similar way as we saw the beaming young Mrs.
de Winter a few minutes before.2 The mirror-like symmetry of the images
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closes the scene upon itself: instead of being a symbolic doorway for the
young wife, the painting proved to be a trap.3
The use of the painting and the structure of presenting the figures in a
frame, the way the living is made the double of the dead image (and
dead character) serves primarily the purposes of suspense, and postpones
the solving of the mystery. On the other hand, the two Mrs. de Winters
appear in the film as Max de Winters objects of desire as two reflections
or copies of the same image and as such (romantic and ironic) doubles of
each other. Rebecca, who is revealed as the hidden referent of the painting
in the scene, is not only dead, but as the matter of fact she is also completely
unknown, and the medial alterity of the painting is also virtually effaced by
the integration of the painting as merely an object and an image linked to
the narrative and to the protagonists fantasies: the painting itself in this way
becomes a multiple sign of absence and uncertainty, a medium of the void.
The story progresses towards a double revelation. The information withheld from the viewer and from the young wife becomes the main source
of suspense. The viewer is intrigued by the question why the first Mrs. de
Winter died, but is equally anxious to find out how the two reflections of
the portrait, the two wives can be related to each other (and to the possible
third reflection, the figure of the housekeeper). There is a continuous
dramatic tension between the imaginary portrait of the dead woman and
our impressions of the portrait of the live protagonist. Rebecca hovers
over the narrative like a demonic image, a vampire who exerts an inexplicable attraction toward the female characters (the fiendish Mrs. Danvers
can also be seen as a kind of double) who are trying to identify with her
and sucks them into a terrible vortex threatening to make them lose their
identity.4 In the scene analysed before we see both how strongly a picture
is connected to the imagination, and, most importantly, what demonic
power rests in the hands of those who use images as tools (see the fiendish
actions of Mrs. Danvers). In contrast with a classic dramaturgy that neatly
solves all mysteries, the painting emerges as the medium of the unknown,
as a fracture that disrupts the order of the narration and threatens to throw
the mind of the character involved into its abysmal depths of the uncanny
and the unidentifiable.
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In essence Vertigo carries on the same theme. In this film the protagonist
(who is a detective, and as such a perfect embodiment of an epistemological pursuit), Scottie Ferguson falls in love with a picture and tries to revive
a dead woman by way of her image.5 It is not by chance that the location
for the first encounter with the woman of his affection is a cemetery. The
Pygmalion-like story takes interesting turns in Hitchcocks film thematizing
the relationship of representation and life, of identification and copying. In
this case we have a woman who is not only dead and therefore unattainable, but we also have to deal with multiple fictions, and an intrigue that
involves lies, misleadings, swindles and ultimately, sins. The main theme
is introduced into the film by Gavin Elster who hires Scottie as a detective.
In the scene in which they meet we see them in Elsters office where the
walls are all packed with pictures. The pictures hanging on walls become
ominous signals of the thematization of questions related to images (similarly to the use of the stuffed birds in the Bates motel that are signs of past
and future horrors to be revealed through the plot in Psycho, (1960). (Ill.2)
It has often been pointed out that Kim Novak, as Elsters wife, in the now
famous scene at the restaurant, appears like a painting. This is not only the
result of being shown in a relatively static pose and in profile, so somewhat
two dimensionally against the background plane, but also the result of a
carefully chosen chromatic scale and the presence of multiple inner framing.
This picture, however, will ultimately become an abysmal experience for
Scottie.6 First the woman played by Kim Novak lies that she is Madeleine,
the wife of Scotties employer, who being in a somewhat troubled state of
mind believes to be the reincarnation of a certain Carlotta Valdes. This lie
is supported by the supposedly mesmerizing qualities of a painting portraying Carlotta. The images of the film emphasize the similarities between the
painting and the live woman, strengthening the mystification. The second
time the woman played by Kim Novak appears in the film as Judy, she denies
to be the same person as he knew in the first half of the film, although the
two women are one and the same. Both, however, appear to Scottie as the
image of another woman (in the case of Madeleine, it is Carlotta, in the
case of Judy it is Madeleine), both women being or supposed to be dead.
The painting is not only the image of death, but in this case in its relation
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ILL. 2
Paramount Pictures, Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, Robert Burks.
with reality it proves to be a multiple fiction and a lie, a duplicitous sign

of a world that does not exist.7 Moreover Hitchcock continuously plays with
the duality of presenting the figure of Kim Novak alternately as an erotic,
bodily presence moving in three dimensional space and as a two dimensional figure, often a silhouette framed within a painterly composition. In
this way he practically re-enacts the main theme of the film on the level of
cinematic representation: the carnal appearance of Kim Novak is repeatedly
objectified and aestheticized as a beautiful and enigmatic painting. And this
is in fact a one way process in the film: the live woman becomes a picture
(and can be transformed into a picture as Scottie demonstrates with Judy)
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but the picture ultimately resists being assigned a single referent, it resists
coming alive definitively and undoubtedly as a single person.
From the point of view of the films meta-narrative about images we may
note the significance of the scene in which Scottie is admiring Madeleine
in the gallery as she is sitting in front of the painting as if in front of a mirror. The figure of the man is presented as standing in between two other
paintings that frame him: on one side we have the image of a respectable
gentleman in a wig, on the other side there is an image of a young boy. It is
as if symbolically he would also be deconstructed into multiple identities,
making the viewer unable to decide whether to see him in the posture of
the mature and cultured, self-possessed man, or as a boy who is a victim of
his own curiosity and instincts (it is no wonder that several psycho-analytic
analyses of the film emphasize the collusion of cultural and instinctual factors within the film). The scene may also suggest that the enigmatic and
multiplied appearance of the image of the female protagonist will be a cause
of an even more disturbing shattering of the identity of the male character.
(And indeed between the first and the second appearance of the character
played by Kim Novak, Scottie suffers a nervous breakdown.) The theme is
emphasized throughout the film also by the multiplication of the images
seen in mirrors at different points of the narration. One of the effects of
such compositions is an abstract fragmentation of the realistic image. The
most extreme case of the shattering of cinematic realism can be seen in
the hallucinatory sequence after Madeleines supposed death. What we see
as the projection of Scotties troubled mind, the clear geometrical forms
and stylizations of the image (making the cinematic image fuse with the
medium of graphic and painterly animation) is in fact indicative of something that runs as an undercurrent throughout the whole film (e.g. the
abstractions in the seemingly realistic details like the whorl in Madeleines
hair resembling a vortex, or the image of the spiral staircase becoming like
a cubist painting in motion in the protagonists subjective projection of
vertigo, the bold use of colours and points of view, etc.). (Ill. 3)
In this way the end of the film can be seen as an allegory of the impossible
mission of Hitchcocks cinema acting as Pygmalions camera: the multitude
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ILL. 3
Paramount Pictures, Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, Robert Burks
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of images, fantasies, dreams and tableaux vivants can only fleetingly assume the form of a bodily shape and the illusion of reality within the film.
This on the one hand can be interpreted as the metaphor of cinematic mediality itself: it presents the primeval attraction of cinema originating in the
fascination with phantom images. Consequently, the kind of necrophilia
that appears in the painterly objectifications running as a leitmotif through
the film can be seen as the equivalent of the directors (and the spectators)
cinephilia, the fascination with seeing the lights and shadows produce the
magic presence of things that are in actuality unattainable for us, the revival
of dead persons and long lost worlds for us.8
On the other hand it is also remarkable how the tangible form of the
desired woman appearing in the film always means the identification with
another image, and how ultimately the object of desire falls by way of the
whirlpool of images9 into the void, into a mesmerizing nothingness. Slavoj iek who analysed Hitchcocks film from the point of view of Lacans
psychoanalysis sees one of the main problems raised by Vertigo in the fact
that reality is ruptured by the presence of the female image that acts as a
vertiginous gap into nothingness. The painting and the woman presented
as a painting is nothing else but the material form, the embodiment of
nothingness (IEK, 1992: p.83).
Painting as the Dislocation of the Narrative, the

Transposition into an Abstract Space
In several of Hitchcocks films we see the use of paintings or painterly
images as vehicles for a specific philosophy of morals. In these films the
medial alterity of paintings or painterly compositions placed in the context
of cinema become not only signs of a world of fiction as opposed to reality, but appear as the explicit projections of the subjective and inscrutable
world of sin itself.
There is an interesting scene in Suspicion (1941) in which we see a seemingly unmotivated introduction of a cubist painting. In this disruption
Stephen Heath (1986) sees a repetition of other unmotivated spatial jumps
which all convey a sense of unsolved mystery. As the film does not make
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it clear even at the end, whether the charming male protagonist played
by Cary Grant (Johnnie) is a killer who also intended to kill his wife, Lina
(played by Joan Fontaine), or the suspicion was merely the product of the
imagination of the overly sensitive wife (and of the spectator manipulated by suspense). The painting on the wall can be interpreted either as
a materialization of the nervous state of mind that begins to dominate
Lina and the tension of the narration, or it can be seen as a diversion, as
another space wedged into the cinematic space that has nothing to do
with the main story. We will never find out the real significance of these
shots, just like we will never find out whether Johnnie is guilty or innocent. We should note, however, the presence of shadows that fracture
the cinematic space in a similar way to a cubist painting. In the scene
shown after the departure of the inspectors Lina appears as if entangled
in the network of shadows, enmeshed in the spiders web of her doubt
(HEATH, 1986 p.380) Johnnie, on the other hand, appears as an enigmatic
dark silhouette framed by the doorway, thus making the viewer question
whether the handsome and debonair Cary Grant could in fact be a ruthless murderer. What Hitchcock does is nothing more and nothing less
than to challenge our reflexes, and emphasizing once more the obscure
nature of all images. The abstract painting in this way does not seem to
be merely a Hitchcock joke, as Heath considers (op.cit. p.383), it seems
to be much more the representation of the same fictional space that we
see in Rebecca and Vertigo. Compared to the realist space of the narrative,
the painting appears as an opening towards another level of existence: an
abstract space onto which Hitchcock displaces the horrifying presence
(or suspicion) of moral sin, fear or (as we saw in Vertigo: desire bordering on perversion). (Ill.4)
We can see a similar play with the expectations of the viewers and the
use of abstract compositions in Stage Fright, a film made in 1950. Here it is
not only that the narration leaves the spectator uninformed, but the narration deliberately misleads the viewers. The events shown in the flash-back
scene placed at the beginning of the film are not real. But the viewer has
no clue that would suggest that the character is lying, and therefore no
reason to doubt the images. Although Hitchcocks trick works flawlessly,
there are some elements that may betray the duplicity of the flash-back
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ILL. 4
R K O Radio Pictures, Inc., Harry Stradling Sr.
images. In the whole sequence Hitchcock insists on marking the images

as subjective visions: we see Jonathan peeping through the window, we
see his memories in the form of images overlapping through dissolves.
At one point the protagonist catches a glimpse of an abstract painting on
the wall, in a very similar way as we saw Benson in Suspicion gazing at
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ILL. 5
Warner Bros., Wilkie Cooper.
the cubist painting, and the sight of the painting seems to exert the same
inexplicable attraction for a moment that almost disjoints him from the
flow of the narration: we see him in several shots in the same frame with
this enigmatic painting. The spiral form seen in the painting may be again
a visual representation of the duplicitous vertigo of sin, and, as such, an
image pre-figuring other vertiginous images within the film. The image of
the staircase in itself, enhanced with the unusually frequent repetition of
the dissolves and superimpositions of images, also projects spiral forms
over the close up of the character. The abstract geometry of the vortex is a
recurring visual motif of Hitchcocks cinema, only this time there is no psychological motivation for the characters to feel as if caught in a maelstrom
of emotions. The layering of these vertiginous forms ultimately results in
the shattering of the image into abstract fragments. This can be interpreted,
without doubt, as a conventional figure representing the mad murderers
fabulations, only this time the murderer is not mad, he is more likely cold
and calculated: it is the act of the crime, of the sin itself that appears as
madness, and the evil that is present in the world. (Ill.5)
The fracturing of the visual composition, the displacement of the world of
crime into an other, abstract space (by the introduction of paintings or
visual effects resembling paintings) is something that we can also observe
in Strangers on a Train (1951). In this film we have a murderer who relates
to his victim as a double, an evil doppelgnger, who threatens to dislocate
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the victims whole world into this chaos revealed in the painterly spaces.
The film itself is a nightmarish story of an absurd fantasy coming to life. The
secret wish of Guy (Farley Granger), a celebrated tennis player, to have his
wife killed is fulfilled by a lunatic murderer, Bruno (Robert Walker), who
appears not only as the negative alter-ego of the protagonist, but who is
also frequently associated with painterly compositions, the most revealing
analogy being the painting shown at the beginning of the film. This picture
painted by his mother is remarkable first of all because of its ambiguity:
Bruno considers the ghastly, expressionist style portrait to be a representation of his father, while his mother claims that it is a portrayal of St. Francis,
the viewer, nevertheless, may be drawn to sensing in it a portrait similar
to the picture of Dorian Gray, a romantic mirror image revealing the true
face behind the otherwise impeccable faade of a dandy.10 The murder
itself in the film occurs within the heterotopic location of the Magic Island,
among the carnivalesque constructions of an amusement park enveiled in
darkness: a site of fiction and imagination. And after having successfully
placed his heroes onto the island of fiction Hitchcock also transports
the viewer into an even more surrealistic and painterly setting. The actual
scene of the murder is shown from the non-human, abstract and distorted
viewpoint of the lenses of Miriams glasses that fall on the ground as Bruno
begins to strangle her. The broken glasses that the murderer later proudly
produces as evidence for the accomplishment of his hideous deed become
the emblem of the violently shattered vision and the symbolic gateway into
a world (again a distorted, crushed space) in which such murderous acts
can take place. (Ill. 6) The mesh of dark lines of shadows projected over
the walls of Brunos flat where Guy apparently goes with the intention to
finally pay his debt and kill Brunos father reiterates this visual pattern
established in the film moreover the spider-web composition is remarkable this time also because the shadow projected over the wall that we see
behind Guy can be ambivalently seen as belonging to both of the men. The
shadow that appears between the two doppelgnger characters seems to
be placed in between them, as if the evil embodied in the shadow would
not actually be part of any of them, but would exist only in this immaterial
form: as an abstract image projection that can be linked to both of them
as a third entity.
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ILL. 6
Warner Bros., Robert Burks.
Reading Images in Hitchcocks Spellbound (1945)

In essence Spellbound can be seen as a film about the passion for the interpretation of images: elucidating the enigma of a crime in the film means
no less and no more than solving the enigma of a series of pictures. In the
film we follow the story of John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck), who suffers
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from amnesia and whose identity is therefore uncertain (he might be a

murderer or a victim, or just insane). In the course of an amateur investigation he is helped by a young woman psychiatrist, Dr. Constance Petersen
(Ingrid Bergman) trained in Freudian psychoanalysis who interprets his
dreams. Cinema and painting are intertwined in three major scenes in the
film; all three scenes are at key points in the narration (at the beginning
of the romance between the main characters, at the climax of the film and
at the end, when the mystery is solved. All three scenes can be interpreted
metaphorically and all three scenes are centred on the motif of the eye or
vision (and imply the necessity of reading the images).
1. The Image of the Series of Doors Opening Up
The moment in which John Ballantyne and Constance fall in love is depicted
in the film by a beautiful metaphorical composition of images. John and
Constance look into each others eyes and, suddenly, over the closed eyelids
of the woman images of a series of doors appear that gradually take the place
of the eyes and open up one after the other deeper and deeper within the
frame. The close-up of the eyes would be a typically cinematic solution for
eliciting a direct psychological identification of the viewer (it would seem
as if we ourselves would lean towards the face of the woman and look into
her eyes). The doors appearing instead of the eyes, however, can remind us
of paintings like those of Magritte where similar surprising substitutions
or framings occur. In this way the conventional scene between the two
people falling in love gains an almost surrealist stylization. The meaning
of the scene is far from being explicit. We may interpret it as the opening
up of an inner vision, or as the metaphor of the eye as the doorway to
the soul. But is the image a metaphor standing for the gaze of the man or
the woman? Does the male gaze penetrate the image of the woman here
(and objectify her as feminist theories have taught us), or is this the projection of the inner emotions of the woman (letting down her guard and
opening up)? Unlike in classical Hollywood genre films, the mans gaze
does not make the face of the woman emerge from the background in this
sequence, but instead, quite the opposite happens, the charming face is effaced by the superimpositions, so we might rightfully consider the images
as attributes of the woman herself. The overlaying of the images may also
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ILL. 7
Selznick International Pictures, Vanguard Films Inc., George Barnes.
appear like the metaphor of metaphor itself within cinema, an image of the
image opening up towards yet another image, the way a metaphor always
operates, revealing at the same time one of the basic mechanisms of the
transition from the language of cinema into the language of painting as we
progress from the concrete image towards an abstract composition. (Ill.7)
Hitchcocks unusual poetic moment dislocates the image from the context
of the narrative into an abstract space once more, just like in the previous
examples, surprisingly, Hitchcock places the moment of pure erotic attraction
into the imagery of the same unsettling vortex that is usually the marker of
the inscrutable world of uncontrollable and sinful impulses (crime, lust, etc.).
What is an interesting feature in the sequence in addition to all these is the
fact that it is the motif of the door that appears here and not what would
have been much more conventional the image of the window in association
with the eyes. The window would have emphasized the gaze itself, the world
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as a picture revealed within a frame. In this way, it is an emotion, a sensation

that is emphasized. Moreover, the door suggests a threshold and an aperture.
The door does not only divide space, but it stands between worlds, signifying
at the same time separation and passage.11 The two worlds that are connected
in this Hitchcock sequence are, of course, the man and the woman, John Ballantyne and Constance. In what follows the dramaturgy of the film will be
built on a chiasmic inversion of the situation (the two sides of the threshold)
presented in these images: instead of the active man who takes possession
of the woman with his gaze, we will see a helpless man under the constant
scrutiny of the woman, moreover, the motif of the closed eyes of the man
will prove to be extremely important, as it will be his dreams that will help
solve the mystery, and the woman seen in this sequence surrendering to the
conquest of the man, is the one who will interpret the dreams of the man
and will be able to actively penetrate his dream world and find the source
of the trauma that haunts the man. The mechanism of the film rests on the
situation of one of the characters (the man) seeing certain images (with his
closed eyes) and the other character (the woman) reading these images
by inverting the relationship seen in the image of the opening doors and
stepping into the mysterious world of the mans dreams.
2. The Dream Sequence
In the famous sequence based on Dalis designs12 in which Constance and
the professor analyse Johns dream, it is not only cinema that is doubled/
overwritten by painting but the protagonist himself becomes also doubled.
On the one hand we have the man (Gregory Peck) we see at the beginning
of the film arriving at Green Manors as Dr. Edwardes, but this proves to be
a misconception, as it turns out to be merely an assumed identity. On the
other hand we have his real self that appears in the dream projection of
his unconscious; however, we can only see this as a painting.13 The dream
appears as a painterly veil that overlays the screen and conceals the images
of reality from our sight (the gesture of covering up reality is emphasized
by the symbolism of the theatrical curtains and the masks that hide the faces
in the dream). What is also remarkable in the sequence is that it reflects not
only Dalis surrealist style put in the service of the Freudian concept, but
it also makes extensive use of the type of deep focus cinematography that
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ILL. 8
became the trademark of Orson Welles and Gregg Toland in the 1940s. In
order to unveil the truth we have to make the correspondence between the
world of the dream (the painting) and the world of reality (the fictive world
created by the film), we have to be able to cut the cover and step into one
world from the other, the image of the giant scissors cutting through the
image of the eyes (as the eyes are in fact painted on sheets that cover another
layer in the dream) suggest the necessity of the cutting open of the world of
the painting in order to reach the transparent cinematic representation
we are looking for in a classical film.14 (Ill.8)
The possibility of cutting through the painting and reaching the reality
hidden behind it is paradoxically facilitated by its inversion. John Ballantyne is for example repeatedly shocked by the appearance of parallel lines
on different objects around him. In his obsession with these lines it is the
transformation of the concrete reality into an abstract visual form that
can make the viewer aware of the existence of another type of perception,
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and the dream sequence only makes this already introduced other gaze
explicit by the introduction of the eye that has to be cut, of the covers that
have to be removed, and allegorizes the whole process of crossing from one
ontological level to another in the form of overwriting cinematic transparency with painterly obscurity, abstraction, and surrealism.
3. The Painterly Effect of the Squirt of Blood towards the Off-Screen Space
At the end of the film when Constance uncovers Dr. Murchison as the
real murderer, we see how the doctor first threatens Constance with his
revolver, then turns the weapon towards himself, and commits suicide. We
see the woman in the far background opening the door and leaving the
room behind the giant close up of the revolver. The weapon is then turned
slowly towards the camera like a cannon barrel and the shot is fired. For a
moment the screen turns blank and, in the context of the black and white
film, as a highly unusual effect, for a few seconds we see a splash of red
colour filling the frame. The splash of red colour lasts only a few seconds
and puzzles the spectator. (One may even not be sure if ones eyes have not
been deceived: did we really see red, or was it just our overexcited imagination?) What is even more important is what this fleeting image performs
in the film: this is a kind of transgression again from a perceptible, outer
world into an emotionally charged inner image, from the visible into the
invisible. What we do not see is the death of the character, Dr. Murchison.
And what is not clear to us is why the splash of red colour covers the screen
as the gun goes off. Naturally, it could be interpreted as the image of blood
spilt by the gunshot, signalling the death of the character. But why does
Hitchcock use such an unusual way of showing the death of the character,
and why the sudden, unexpected use of colour within an otherwise all black
and white movie? Moreover there is also a logical inversion in the scene
that blurs the boundaries between cause and effect as we are shown the
effect (the image of blood that shocks the viewer, spilt as the consequence
of the shot) through the image of the cause (the image of the shot itself is
coloured in red). As a result of this condensation it is the same frame that
shows within a flash as if a mirror image reflected upon itself the gun
and the result of the shot, and elicits the immediate, instinctive emotional
response of the viewer who sees the suicide. (Ill. 9)
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ILL. 9
The image therefore is primarily not recording the suicide, but seems to be
anticipating, triggering in the viewer (as the gun is also pointed at the
spectator) the feeling of the imminent death of the character.
Such a complex performative effect of the filmic image is present in all the
three sequences discussed so far, and it is always made possible through a
painterly vision that cuts through the conventional transparency of the
screen. This does not only facilitate an imaginary leap beyond the world
of the screen, onto another level in the fiction (where crimes and hidden
desires are lodged), but it can as we see it in this final painterly effect
facilitate a transgression into the opposite direction, towards the world in
front of the screen, towards the inner vision of the spectator. The image of
the series of doors opening up one after the other is a metaphor among
a series of other things of the viewers passage from the concrete, tangible representation towards the abstract and the figurative. The dream
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sequence is an allegory: it sets up a parallel between a painting coming

alive and a filmic sequence of events and the relationship between the two
levels (painting and film) becomes the organizing principle of the narrative: this correspondence has to be discovered, the meaning of the details
in the painterly dream have to be found and from those a logic of cause
and effect must be reconstructed, and in this way the interpretation of the
dream images is equated with the solving of the murder. The last sequence
of the spurt of red colour does something entirely different: namely it does
not metaphorize or allegorize, it does something: it startles us, it exerts
and immediate emotional and intellectual response, it is directed towards
us, it addresses us directly, as if splashing into our face. The connection
between techniques of painting and cinema is established here too (just
like in the dream sequence) through the use of the extreme depth of field
within the frame. Hitchcock seems to consciously give a visual rendering of the feeling we have when seeing such images, as Bazin describes it,
this technique resembles a fully extended slingshot in which a kind of
systematic extension in depth of reality, as if that reality were sketched on
a rubber band that he would take pleasure first in pulling back to scare us,
second in letting go right into our faces (BAZIN, 1997: p.9). This time we
have literally a shot into our faces (not of a sling but of a revolver), the
picture that was previously extended excessively towards the depth of field
now smashes into our eyes making us blink. The image at the same time
seems to paraphrase the emblematic image of the cinema of attractions
that Tom Gunning speaks about: the close up of the gangster shooting towards the audience in Porters The Great Train Robbery (1903) that can be
considered as a direct assault on the spectator (the spectacularly enlarged
outlaw unloading his pistol in our faces) (GUNNING, 1990: p.61).
The sudden appearance of the colour red should also be addressed separately. First of all because it is something that can be directly linked to the
attractive style of Expressionism (as practiced by Eisenstein, for example),
Deleuze considers that: expressionism keeps on painting the world red on
red; the one harking back to the frightful non-organic life of things, the
other to the sublime, non-psychological life of the spirit. Expressionism
attains the cry [] which marks the horror of non-organic life as much as
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the opening-up of a spiritual universe which may be illusory (DELEUZE,

1986: p.54). This image of the spurt of red is such a cry, what makes it
remarkable, however, is that it is more like the fragment of a cry which
nonetheless manages to introduce after all the ambivalences disentangled
in the narrative yet another puzzle that remains unsolved. There are a
series of questions that arise in the viewer: is Hitchcock painting the image
of the sound of the revolver (as if in a cartoon?) or does he want to signal
the death of the character in a single metonymic image, is it an icon or an
index? Or is this a way of making a visual representation of the astonishment of the spectator? Is this a banal image of blood or is it again an image
that flashes through the screen coming from a world that only painting can
portray, rupturing the conventional cinematic space of the narrative? Does
this red mirror a sensation or introduce a moment of (ironic) reflection over
the action? What is more emphatic: the cinematic aspect of the image
or the painterly vision? Did Hitchcock film something here (the squirt
of blood) or he merely covered the celluloid with a blotch of red paint, so
literally the realistic filmic image disappeared behind the layer of paint?
(And if we make a frame by frame analysis of the sequence we will see that
this is exactly what was done here: the black and white images were painted
over; moreover, the form of the splash resembles very much the forms we
see in the graphic novels rendering shots or loud noise effects.) But is this
almost subliminal effect a mere play upon our sensations? The spellbinding
bond between cinema and painting has never been more confusing as in
this fracture of a minute. The flow of the narrative denouement subsumes
this strange image, and the film quickly moves towards the finale of the
story, nevertheless, the painterly splatter of colour is also a mark of the
rupture in the cinematic vision, something perceivably other (even if for
a very small time) in the context of a classical film language. So, eventually, while the enthusiastic and ingenious woman psychiatrist continually
works on the deciphering of images, the viewer experiences the irreducible
polysemy and sheer thrill of the synesthetic imagery. Eisenstein wrote: In
art it is not the absolute relationships [between the image and its signification] that are decisive, but those arbitrary relationships within a system of
images dictated by the particular work of art (EISENSTEIN, 1957: p.150). In
this spirit Hitchcocks film, in this last flash of paint, with this arbitrary
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shot, disqualifies the intellectual victory of reading the images that the
narrative presents us. At the end of the film the suspense is released, the
mystery is solved, the murderer is unmasked. Dalis canvas is successfully
ripped open by the Hitchcockian scissors: the symbols of the dream are
given proper interpretation, and we can rest assured that John Ballantyne
will lead the charming Constance Petersen to the altar as elegantly and
self-assuredly as any leading man would in the happy ending of a typical
Hollywood romance. The mystery, however, that is presented in the images balancing on the borderline of painting and cinema, the spellbinding
effect of pure visuality as the essence of Hitchcocks relationship with
painting stays with us.
As a conclusion we may state that Hitchcocks imagery bordering on abstraction is able to activate the fundamental effect of abstract painting: it
drives cinema into the dimension of the unnameable of the unspeakable.
In his films painting does not absorb cinema, nevertheless, it effectively
challenges its transparency. What is characteristic of Hitchcock is that he is
able to show the ambivalence of the images (of being able to both tell and
show things) in a specific duality that resembles the workings of the figure
of the double in a narrative, and that always undermines to certain degree
the self-enclosed order of the narrative, and the seemingly unproblematic
(self-effacing) mediality of classical cinema. His attractive plays with
the visual layout of his films transfer the dramatic tension from the level of
the narrative onto the level of the cinematic language, positing the images
themselves as the ultimate mystery that have to be solved by the viewer.
Painting for Hitchcock is very much like the intermedial demon of the
cinematic image, a double of cinema, something lurking beyond or hovering over the enthralling tale, a shadow, a doppelgnger that is ready at
any time to take charge (just like the doppelgnger characters in the film:
e.g. Bruno appearing beside Guy in Strangers on a Train), threatening to
disrupt the reasonable (and discursive) order of the world and to invade
it with abstract shapes and colours, with images that resist to tell and
impress the viewer with what they show: with their spellbinding visual
presence. On the level of the cinematic narratives Hitchcock usually solves
the mysteries that intrigue the viewer; however, his painterly images forever
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haunt the cinematic universe with the impression of the inscrutable nature
of things, the indelible trace of Nothingness, and the mesmerizing attraction of a forbidden world.
gnes Peth is Associate Professor at the Sapientia Hungarian University
of Transylvania in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) where she is currently head of
the Department of Film, Photography, and Media. She has written several
articles on cinematic intermediality. She is the editor of the volumes Words
and Images on the Screen. Language, Literature, Moving Pictures, 2008, and
Film in the Post-Media Age, 2012, and she is the author of Cinema and Intermediality. The Passion for the In-Between, published in 2011 by Cambridge
Scholars Publishing.
SUMMARY
Spellbound by Images
The Allure of Painting in the Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock
Hitchcocks films constitute a unique link between the early cinema of attractions, the avant-garde affinity towards painting and the conventions
of classical storytelling, displaying in certain films an abstract imagery that
can achieve a self-reflexion of cinema as a visual medium that resembles at
the same time the techniques of modernism. The paintings introduced in
his films always have the potential of opening up an abyss, a rupture in the
texture of classical narrative, and transpose the story over a meta-narrative
plane by dislocating the narrative into an abstract space. The referents of the
painterly images are always revealed to belong to an ontologically different
plane; such images being always strongly connected to pure fiction and
imagination. The article presents how the significance of the paintings in
Hitchcocks films is not only connected to the solving of a particular story of
mystery or mysterious identity, but it also consists in raising questions about
the interpretation of images in general. 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
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mind of the character (and implicitly of the viewer) into the abysmal depths
of the uncanny and the unidentifiable. (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
doppelgnger that is ready at any time to take charge, threatening to disrupt
the reasonable (and discursive) order of the world.
NOTES
1 The article is an abbreviated version of a chapter in my book Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011,
179321). I have also addressed the role of paintings used in film in my article The
Vertigo of the Single Image: From the Classic Narrative Glitch to the Post-Cinematic Adaptations of Paintings, forthcoming in 2013, Vol.6. of Acta Universitatis
Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies.
2 Hitchcock often resorted to construct his scenes (often entire films) on the reversal of significant images/scenes that we have seen earlier (like the scene of
Madeleines death in the church in Vertigo). Richard Allen considers these reversals in the narrative as manifestations of romantic irony in Hitchcocks films (cf.
Allen, 2007).
3 Marc Vernet considers (cf. 1988, 89112) that the introduction of the painting can
be seen as the way in which the paradigm of classical narrative cinema deals with
the power of the imaginary, criticizing it in favour of a sense of realism.
4 Richard Allen notes that Hitchcock emphasizes the figure of the double in the
relationship of the two Mrs. de Winters, and associates the notions of demonic
and sublime with their antithesis. Others see the relationship of the new Mrs.
de Winter and Rebecca in Oedipal terms, as the relationship of a daughter and
a mother figure in the course of which the daughter identifies with the image of
the mother, and she can present herself in society only the way the image of the
mother has been constructed within her imagination (cf. Felleman, 2006, p.16
and Modleski, 1988, p.49).
5 The motif of falling in love with a woman as a picture and the haunting image
of a dead woman has not only several literary antecedents (like Edgar Allan Poes
Ligeia and Gustave Rodenbachs Bruges-la-Morte as Bronfen points out, 1992),
but it became one of the motifs characteristic of film noir narratives as well. Cf.
Elsaesser (2002) and Felleman (2006).
6 Many analyses point out the significance of the fact that Elster does not produce a
photograph of his wife but stages the introduction of a live double within a painterly
setting: a tableau vivant (cf. Felleman, 2006, Modleski, 1988, Peucker, 2007).
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7 The interpretation is further complicated by Truffauts hypothesis that in fact

Hitchcock attempted to use the image of Kim Novak to revive on the screen
another, already unattainable actress for him, Grace Kelly. Truffaut writes: Vertigo
was undoubtedly a film in which the leading lady was cast as a substitute for the
one Hitchcock had in mind initially. The actress we see on the screen is a substitute, and the change enhances the appeal of the movie, since the substitution is the
main theme of the picture. A man who is still in love with a woman he believes
to be dead attempts to re-create the image of the dead woman when he meets up
with a girl who is her lookalike. [] I realized that Vertigo was even more intriguing in the light of the fact that the director had compelled a substitute to imitate
the actress he had initially chosen for the role (Truffaut, 1985, p.325).
8 Susan Felleman considers: Hitchcocks Scottie is not the only one who indulges
in a form of necrophilia. This form of necrophilia, a form without cadavers this
specular necrophilia we all suffer from it: all cineastes, anyway. (Felleman,
2006, p.47-48.)
9 We should note how the main plot of the film is doubled by a subplot involving
Midge, Scotties confidant, who is a designer and an amateur painter and would
very much like to become Scotties object of desire. In her jealousy over Scotties infatuation with Madeleine, she is also presented as a painting, her face being
substituted for that of Carlotta (and implicitly, Madeleine identified with Carlotta).
10 Thomas Elsaesser (1999) describes the dandy not only as a recurring figure of
Hitchcocks films, but as a model for the personal myth of Hitchcock himself. The
main characteristics of a dandy according to Elsaesser are: rituals that give the impression of perfect idleness and self-control, the elimination of randomness from
life, the rule of artifice over naturalness, a wish to be in perfect control over everything, the goal to make life ones own creation (life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde
believed). It is not only Bruno who can be seen as such a dandy, but it is Hitchcock
himself with his trademark, sphinx-like silhouette image who is obsessed with
style and pursues perfection to the point of perversity like a dandy (Elsaesser,
1999, p.4). The attitude of the dandy, the theme of the demonic doppelgnger
connected to the motif of the painting already occurred in a female version in the
already mentioned earlier film, Rebecca. In Strangers on a Train because we see
this Dorian Gray-like painting before the murder taking place and the unfolding
of the nightmarish plot it actually appears as if life in the film would imitate the
art seen in the picture.
11 From an anthropomorphic viewpoint the windows can be equated with the eyes
of the body, while the door to the mouth that leads the way into the inside of the
body (one can see this in drawings made by children or made for children). The
window connecting the notions of knowledge and vision is often interpreted
as the image of consciousness, of being alert, whereas the door is usually seen as
an aperture or closure towards more mystical and hidden contents (cf. Cirlot,
2001, p.373). The archetypal narrative of this can be found beside in several folk
tales in the story of Bluebeards Castle in which a series of locked doors hiding secrets play the central role. Hitchcocks Spellbound could also be compared to Fritz
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Langs film The Secret beyond the Door (1947) in which similarly we have a woman
in the role of an amateur detective who tries to uncover the secrets hidden in the
subconscious of the loved man, and in which these secrets are materialized in a
bizarre collection of rooms.
12 As we know from Truffauts discussions with Hitchcock (1985, p.165), the director adjusted Dalis sketches to his own concept and was only partly faithful to the
original ideas of the painter. Hitchcock confesses: I wanted to convey the dream
with great visual sharpness and clarity, sharper than the film itself. I wanted Dali
because of the architectural sharpness of his work. Chirico has the same quality,
you know, the long shadows, the infinity of distance and the converging lines of
perspective (Truffaut, 1985, p.165).
13 The film offers a notable inversion of the way Rebecca and Vertigo presented
paintings: in those films pictures only seemed to contain relevant information,
but in fact they deceived them. The identification with paintings did not result in
the strengthening of the identity of the characters; on the contrary, they lead to
the questioning of their identity.
14 Brigitte Peucker (2007) suggests several other instances in Hitchcocks films in
which some kind of other representation (e.g. a statue in North by Northwest)
has to be shattered in order to (metaphorically) reach the film itself, in which the
cinematic appears in the cut of representation.
Literature
Allen, Richard. 1999. Hitchcock or the Pleasures of Metaskepticism. October, No. 89
(Summer): 6986.
Bazin, Andr. 1997. Bazin at Work. Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and
Fifties. New York, London: Routledge.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic.
New York: Routledge.
Cirlot, Juan Eduardo. 2001 [1962]. A Dictionary of Symbols. London: Routledge.
Dalle Vacche, Angela. 1996. Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 [1983]. Cinema 1. The Movement-Image. London: The Athlone Press.
Eisenstein, Sergei. 1957. Film Form. Essays in Film Theory and the Film Sense. Cleveland, New York: Meridian Books.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 1999. The Dandy in Hitchcock. In Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, eds. Richard Allen and Sam Ishii Gonzales, 315. London: BFI Publishing.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2002. Mirror, Muse, Medusa: Experiment Perilous. Senses of Cinema, Issue 18, January/February. http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/18/perilous/
Felleman, Susan. 2006. Art in the Cinematic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Gunning, Tom. 1990. The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, its Spectator, and the
Avant-Garde. In Early Cinema. Space, Frame, Narrative, eds. Thomas Elsaesser
and Adam Barker, 5662. London: BFI Publishing.
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Heath, Stephen. 1986. Narrative Space. In: Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip
Rosen, 379420. New York: Columbia University Press.
Modleski, Tania. 1988. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist
Theory. New York: Methuen.
Peth, gnes. 2011. Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Peucker, Brigitte. 2007. The Material Image. Art and the Real in Film. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Truffaut, Franois. 1985 [1983]. Hitchcock. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Vernet, Marc. 1988. Figures de labsence. De linvisible au cinma. Paris: ditions de
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iek, Slavoj. 1992. Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular
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Hitchcock and Painting: Spellbound by Images

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Spellbound by Images

The Allure of Painting in the

The Painting as a Demonic Image and the

with reality it proves to be a multiple fiction and a lie, a duplicitous sign

Painting as the Dislocation of the Narrative, the

images. In the whole sequence Hitchcock insists on marking the images

Reading Images in Hitchcocks Spellbound (1945)

from amnesia and whose identity is therefore uncertain (he might be a

as a picture revealed within a frame. In this way, it is an emotion, a sensation

sequence is an allegory: it sets up a parallel between a painting coming

the opening-up of a spiritual universe which may be illusory (DELEUZE,

7 The interpretation is further complicated by Truffauts hypothesis that in fact

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