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Post by Tomas on Feb 15, 2019 9:40:35 GMT
Dear Conservatives,
Loving old movies by Hitchcock I have long held a wish for a thread on both his oeuvre and his person. Here are some questions that would be highly appreciated to have your personal input to:
1. What favourite quotes do you save from this mastermind notoriously accused for both making fun and mischief?
2. What was true about the often repeated lines that he was bad towards women? I have come across this everywhere, and among others also from distinguished Catholic quarters. Is it unfair? What did he do or not do? How much is just slander and parrot talk?
3. How did he practise his pious Catholicism?
Next to these topics I would also be very interested to hear views on the films themselves too: favourite titles, scenes or any other stuff!
The most famous biographies have some years on their neck by now. I have not felt inclined to dip that deep into reading as yet but instead entirely enjoy discovering his most important films one by one.
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Post by Séamus on Feb 15, 2019 12:13:45 GMT
I suppose it would keep several psychologists and theologians busy indefinitely were they to try to fathom any influence from his Catholic schooling and Irish ancestry (his mother's maidenname was Whelan)...I read once that "Bless Me Father" was banned in Ireland as anticlerical. Seems hard to believe from our perspective, priests are depicted and believed to be much worse in our day(I know one group affiliated with SSPX who now sell this on DVD!). Obviously most Freudian theory is hard if not impossible to reconcile with pure Catholicism, and yet, out of the gang-of-three we see Salvador Dali painting religious or pseudo-religious theme again and again, one of the BVM reportedly blessed by Pius XII at one stage, we see a strong working relationship between Hitchcock and Grace Kelly, who, for all that may be said about her was definately proud of her Catholic ethos and then Freud himself was busy looking for buzzards and birds of all sorts in DaVinci's paintings of Our Lady, seeing somehow symbols of his relationship with his mother in them (according to Charles Nicholl,a learned DaVinci biographer "Freud essentially analyses [Leonardo's early memories of birds] as if it were a dream with unconscious meanings and memories coded within it...some of what he says was untenable...he was using a faulty German translation of Leonardo's note, which incorrectly rendered the bird as 'geier',a vulture. His learned excursus into Egyptian vulture-symbolism must be discarded).
"Birds" seems the most Freudian of Hitchcock's movies, and anyone I know, i.e. the 'layman',finds it the hardest to watch. And yet as far as I remember,Dali worked on "Rear Window" also, showing that the influence was there in the enjoyable ones also.
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Post by Tomas on Feb 15, 2019 13:02:28 GMT
I suppose it would keep several psychologists and theologians busy indefinitely were they to try to fathom any influence from his Catholic schooling and Irish ancestry (his mother's maidenname was Whelan)...I read once that "Bless Me Father" was banned in Ireland as anticlerical. Seems hard to believe from our perspective, priests are depicted and believed to be much worse in our day(I know one group affiliated with SSPX who now sell this on DVD!). Obviously most Freudian theory is hard if not impossible to reconcile with pure Catholicism, and yet, out of the gang-of-three we see Salvador Dali painting religious or pseudo-religious theme again and again, one of the BVM reportedly blessed by Pius XII at one stage, we see a strong working relationship between Hitchcock and Grace Kelly, who, for all that may be said about her was definately proud of her Catholic ethos and then Freud himself was busy looking for buzzards and birds of all sorts in DaVinci's paintings of Our Lady, seeing somehow symbols of his relationship with his mother in them (according to Charles Nicholl,a learned DaVinci biographer "Freud essentially analyses [Leonardo's early memories of birds] as if it were a dream with unconscious meanings and memories coded within it...some of what he says was untenable...he was using a faulty German translation of Leonardo's note, which incorrectly rendered the bird as 'geier',a vulture. His learned excursus into Egyptian vulture-symbolism must be discarded). "Birds" seems the most Freudian of Hitchcock's movies, and anyone I know, i.e. the 'layman',finds it the hardest to watch. And yet as far as I remember,Dali worked on "Rear Window" also, showing that the influence was there in the enjoyable ones also. I don´t know "Bless Me Father" but wonder what substantial they could say about I Confess with the homosexual Montgomery Clift in the priest role. The most Freudian I have seen so far is Vertigo. The "Dark Lady" of that inner drama was some enigma. (Some tenets of deeply unsound urges also in the awfully extreme maniac in Strangers on a Train). It may be a long shot for "Catholic psychology" in all films, but I like to trad on to look for threads a little bit longer. An uncle to one of my close colleagues has combined professional work as psycho-analyst with being a practising layman for decades by the way!
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Post by Séamus on Feb 16, 2019 7:33:03 GMT
I suppose it would keep several psychologists....etc....."Bless Me Father" was banned in Ireland as anticlerical. Seems hard to believe from our perspective, priests are depicted and believed to be much worse in our day(I know one group affiliated with SSPX who now sell this on DVD!)., showing that the influence was there in the enjoyable ones also. I don´t know "Bless Me Father" but wonder what substantial they could say about I Confess with the homosexual Montgomery Clift in the priest role. The most Freudian I have seen so far is Vertigo. The "Dark Lady" of that inner drama was some enigma. (Some tenets of deeply unsound urges also in the awfully extreme maniac in Strangers on a Train). It may be a long shot for "Catholic psychology" in all films, but I like to trad on to look for threads a little bit longer. An uncle to one of my close colleagues has combined professional work as psycho-analyst with being a practising layman for decades by the way!
I CONFESS, was the one I meant to referred to, I think it was an unrelated tv show that had the other title I used. How does your uncle reconcile Christianity with Freud's apparent overemphasis on sex? |
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Post by Tomas on Feb 19, 2019 8:02:24 GMT
I don´t know "Bless Me Father" but wonder what substantial they could say about I Confess with the homosexual Montgomery Clift in the priest role. The most Freudian I have seen so far is Vertigo. The "Dark Lady" of that inner drama was some enigma. (Some tenets of deeply unsound urges also in the awfully extreme maniac in Strangers on a Train). It may be a long shot for "Catholic psychology" in all films, but I like to trad on to look for threads a little bit longer. An uncle to one of my close colleagues has combined professional work as psycho-analyst with being a practising layman for decades by the way!
I CONFESS, was the one I meant to referred to, I think it was an unrelated tv show that had the other title I used. How does your uncle reconcile Christianity with Freud's apparent overemphasis on sex? This uncle (not my own kin) is only a Freudian in secular matters supposedly. How that can be integrated within may be another matter. The links between his professional work and the Church is limited to certain things like at some time having been consultant to one or two religious communities in "conflict and communications" or something like that... By now he is retired and only does some small tasks in the psycho-analyst field. I would like to meet him in person at some time and ask more or less the same question you did! |
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Post by Tomas on Feb 19, 2019 12:58:54 GMT
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Post by Tomas on Feb 21, 2019 9:15:15 GMT
"And yet as far as I remember,Dali worked on "Rear Window" also, showing that the influence was there in the enjoyable ones also."
Seamus, do you know in what way he was working on Rear Window, was he involved in the filmmaking itself by some part? It is one of my favourites and I admit to be a bit fascinated by Dali too.
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Post by Séamus on Feb 22, 2019 1:48:27 GMT
"And yet as far as I remember,Dali worked on "Rear Window" also, showing that the influence was there in the enjoyable ones also." Seamus, do you know in what way he was working on Rear Window, was he involved in the filmmaking itself by some part? It is one of my favourites and I admit to be a bit fascinated by Dali too. He famously worked on dream scenes in SPELLBOUND, as far as I remember it was something similar. I'm largely thinking back to a tv segment from some years back. |
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Post by Séamus on Feb 22, 2019 2:17:28 GMT
"And yet as far as I remember,Dali worked on "Rear Window" also, showing that the influence was there in the enjoyable ones also." Seamus, do you know in what way he was working on Rear Window, was he involved in the filmmaking itself by some part? It is one of my favourites and I admit to be a bit fascinated by Dali too. He famously worked on dream scenes in SPELLBOUND, as far as I remember it was something similar. I'm largely thinking back to a tv segment from some years back. One curiosity about Dali that I read about many years ago in the Blue Army (American Fatima group)'s SOUL magazine was his conversion-of-sorts at Fatima when commissioned to paint the Fatima hell-apparition- apparently he was known to have gone in to Confession while at the shrine. Of course there's probably plenty of short-, as well as long-, term conversions these places. The resultant painting was nothing like the described vision, in a literal way anyway, but the Blue Army and SOUL enthusiastically 'promoted' it for years after. |
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