A Scene in Hitchcock s I Confess

Analyzing a Scene: Hitchcock and the Male Gaze
There is a scene in Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953) in which the leading lady played by Anne Baxter descends an outdoor staircase to the man she loves waiting below. Hitchcock uses a tilted or Dutch angle camera shot to show the descent and he slows the motion of the camera down so that Baxter’s movements are more ethereal and less ephemeral: she remains in the frame longer than would otherwise be natural and the viewer is invited to gaze upon her loveliness all the more. It is a titillating and beautifully shot segment, framed perfectly to capture the brilliance of Baxter, the outdoor light, and the sensual movement of her descent in a stylized and romanticized manner. As Goffman notes, framing is everything in cinema: it allows the camera to “locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences defined in its limits” (8). By use of framing, lighting, slow motion, and camera angle, Hitchcock is able to convey a very deliberate message of beauty, love, harmony, and wonder to the viewer—all in Baxter’s descent down the staircase. However, as Mulvey pointed out, this technique of filmmaking can also be understood through the theoretical framework of Mulvey’s “male gaze,” which highlights the way in which women are portrayed on screen for the sole purpose of giving male viewers pleasure. From this perspective, there is a cultural meaning to Hitchcock’s scene, especially when it is analyzed within the context of the film’s plot and the context of the culture at the time the film was made. This paper will analyze this scene in I Confess and show how it communicates an effective plot point in the film (the development of love between the two characters) and uses the visual image to generate sympathy in the viewer while simultaneously relying on the male gaze in a way that promotes scopophilia, as Mulvey calls it.
In the film, a priest played by Montgomery Clift hears the confession of a murderer. He is bound by the seal of confession so he cannot tell the police who did it. The police begin to suspect that the priest himself is the killer, as there are clues that point to a motive: the man killed was a blackmailer who had information on the character played by Baxter. It turns out that Baxter and the Clift had had a relationship before he became a priest and the blackmailer was regularly receiving payments from Baxter to keep it quiet because she was now married to a dignitary and did not want the information to get out. To help convince the audience that Clift’s priest could ever have a love relationship with Baxter’s character in their younger days, Hitchcock does a flashback sequence in which the Baxter’s-descent-down-the-outside-staircase scene is situated. The scene is illuminated by outdoor sunlight and is thus brightly lit. The camera angle is tilted so that the viewer has a long view upward of Baxter as she descends smiling towards Clift below. The film is slowed to give the viewer more time to gaze, and as the camera is tilted upward, it is understood that the viewer is actually sharing the same viewpoint and perspective as Clift below. Thus, the viewer is placed into Clift’s shoes and falls in love with Baxter’s character through the manipulation of the visual image and can easily believe in this way that Clift’s character (who is so priestly and chaste as a priest) could also have fallen in love with her as a layman. Thus, the scene is important as a plot point in helping to establish the credibility of the blackmailing story: the viewer can easily see how these two might have had a relationship before.
The visual image is also important in this scene because it creates sympathy in the viewer for the Baxter character. Prior to this scene she has not come across as very understandable—yet here she is shown as smiling and happy, excited to see her love waiting down below. It is clear that she had strong feelings for him at one point in their lives and perhaps may even still. Baxter is made to look younger, more attractive and more endearing in this scene than in any other in the film. According to Jamieson, this is all by design: “illusion is a part and parcel of visual representation” (Visual Communication 7). Hitchcock is presenting the illusion of youth and idealistic love to convey the idea that Baxter’s character is pure, good, innocent and devoted, as only such a girl as this could possibly win the heart of such a man as Clift’s character.
However, from Mulvey’s perspective of the male gaze, Hitchcock is also using the illusion of cinema to project an unrealistic image of womanhood onto the adoring culture. In the 1950s, women were still viewed as domestic creatures whose primary role was defined by her service to a man. Here in the film Baxter’s character is idealized to the point that she takes on a divine quality: she is descending from on high down to the earth where the spiritual and good Clift awaits. She is his reward from Heaven for his being a good man. In terms of the male gaze, the reward is obviously a kind of pure yet sensual beauty expressed in Baxter’s image. She is presented as the ideal image of love to the audience. For Feminists who were taking issues with this kind of image of woman as ideal, such a presentation was problematic. Betty Friedan would go on to oppose it a decade later in The Feminine Mystique (Meyerowitz). Maher would also note that this presentation was using an “ideal body type” to attract the male gaze and thus reinforce the cultural idea that the woman was there to serve the man by giving him pleasure. This idea is what Friedan would oppose and the Feminist Movement would also pick up this idea all throughout the latter half of the 20th century, culminating of course in the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade in which the woman’s ultimate service (childbearing) was no longer deemed a duty but a right (aka the woman’s right to choose whether to bear a child or abort a child in the womb). The ideal image of womanhood presented by Hitchcock in the film was a presentation of an image that Feminists objected to in the years that immediately followed the film. The stylized camera-work of Hitchcock, in which the visual image was heightened and romanticized through lighting, framing, camera angle and slow motion, had enabled the viewer to fall in love for that moment. Future films would become grittier and more “realistic” and would abandon the stylized camera work of Hitchcock, presenting men and women in much different aspects and reflect a more modern view of the male-woman relationship that would in many ways disregard the male gaze. For Hitchcock in this scene, the male gaze was exactly what he was trying to win, which indeed he does succeed at doing.
In conclusion, the scene in I Confess in which Baxter descends the outdoor staircase is one that conveys a certain message to the viewer and helps to move the plot of the film along in the right direction. It is also a scene in which the male gaze is deliberately called upon to help Hitchcock achieve the effect that he desires: he wants the viewer to understand how Clift’s character could fall in love with Baxter’s character at an earlier point in their lives. The stylized way in which he frames the moment she comes out of her home to meet Clift’s character helps to convey an idealized image of womanhood that “sells” the moment to the viewer. However, it is this act of “selling” the image that the Feminists of the later decades would oppose as they felt it projected a culture of servitude that women no longer wanted to promote. Hitchcock’s scene thus serves as an example of a point at which everything was about to change.
Works Cited
Goffman, Erving. Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Harvard
University Press, 1974. In: “The Role of Images in Framing News Stories” PPT.
Maher, Jennifer. "The post-feminist mystique." (2007): 193-201.
Meyerowitz, Joanne. "Beyond the feminine mystique: A reassessment of postwar mass
culture, 1946-1958." The Journal of American History 79.4 (1993): 1455-1482.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema." Feminisms: An anthology of
literary theory and criticism(1997): 438-48.
Visual Communication. Power Point Presentation. Slide 7.