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Spiraling into Control or the Rape of the Lock in Hitchcocki’s moviesii
Michel Valentin, Ph.D.
“How, from a fire that never sinks or sets would you escape.” Heraclitus. While watching Hitchcock’s movies, one cannot help being struck by the recurring, uncanny presence of object-images whose role is not easy to determine. Moreover, these object-images are inscribed within a certain contiguity and continuity of shape and function that seem to be linked to key camera movements, as if these fragments had a life of their own, as if their apparent heterogeneity was breaking down the apparent homogeneity of the fantasy sustained reality of the outside world (Lacan). In many of Hitchcock’s films, there exist metaphorical or metonymical image-objects which escape the representational logic induced by the neurotic dimension produced by repression but obey a logic of their own which is not the logic of the fantasy/reality field. They are also filmically inscribed by, or participate formally or informally into a certain movement which we will qualify as helicoïdal or spiral-like. They correspond to a more ominous, tragic dimension and are products of the violent drama reenacted by a consciousness haunted by something which is not here or there, which does not belong anywhere…, what Lacan calls the Real. iii This shows that Hitchcock’s filmic mastery and art is not only the result of “a single, peremptory consciousness” that imprints “itself on the cinema’s industrial artifacts” but also the specific filmic rhetoric of an unconscious, Hitchcock’s unconscious. iv These artifacts have a quasi-hallucinatory dimension (betraying their unconscious origin), which means that the apparent visual domination/mastery of Hitchcock’s films passes through a written dimension which is “hieroglyphic,” (“ideogramatic”) and which belongs more to the order of what the film critic and theoretician Marie-Claire Ropars calls the figural dimension of cinema or “cinécriture.” These image-objects are in/formed by a recurrent obsession which modulates them according to the specificity of each movie, but which keeps them on a tight leash and makes them converge towards the same cinematic goal. It means that one passes from one to the other diachronically, from film to film, via a glide, like in a musical glissando. The morphology of each one seems to obey the same morphing and metamorphizing as what occurs in the process known in painting as anamorphosis. Born during the Mannerist and Baroque periods, anamorphosis was the “representation” of a carefully calculated, geometrical deformation of the classical, orthogonal representation of Renaissance and Classical painting. What was painted and appeared on the