Harry's Place Arts

A guest post by de Bentvueghels

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“When Alfonso entered Naples in 1443, he was met by a procession in which moved a large tower. Its gate was guarded by an angel, and from its top four Virtues sang to the king. This is placing Virtues in a castle container just as one might today put celery stalks or dahlias in a bowl or vase.”

George Kernodle, From Art to Theater: Form and Convention in the Renaissance. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1944, p.81.

Hitchcock’s four Virtues, understood as the components of a signature system which traverse all his works, may be defined as follows:

1) Cameo – “The indignity of being a ham is thrust upon me.” Hitchcock answer to a question about his cameo appearances in What’s My Line?, 1954.

2) MacGuffin – its self-cancelling logic where what a MacGuffin actually is, is never explained.

3) the ‘bar series’ – “The view is through the bars of the banister, and the frame is dominated by the bars in the foreground. I call this pattern of parallel vertical lines Hitchcock’s //// sign. It recurs at significant junctures in every one of his films. At one level, the //// serves as Hitchcock’s signature: it is his mark on the frame, akin to his ritual cameo appearances. At another level, it signifies the confinement of the camera’s subject; we might say that it stands for the barrier of the screen itself. It is also associated with sexual fear and the specific threat of loss of control or breakdown.” William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982, p. 33.

4) A combination of the preceding three effects, which when combined produce the delayed time bomb of a master saboteur – a fragmentation bomb which never stops exploding in the consciousness of what we might call the global media network. See Tom Cohen’s Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2005, for Hitchcock as arch saboteur.

Alfred Hitchcock appears as the mystery guest in What’s My Line?

“[M]oving shows devoid of either action or dialogue, or at least only employing their aid by way of supplementing and explaining the living picture.”

A Ward’s definition of a pageant, quoted by Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, 2 vols. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, London, 1918, I, p. 3.