With Rebecca, the "Hitchcock touch," which has previously been merely a distinguishing feature, becomes a vision of the world. Spontaneity submits to a system. This is a critical moment for an artist, for he must not develop tics, a pedagogical fury. Hitchcock was to avoid these traps. From now on, the two poles of his future work—because we can now talk of a body of work—are clear. One is fascination, moral captation—in other words, depersonalization, schism: in psychoanalytic terms, schizophrenia; in philosophic terms, amoralism; in Baudelairean terms, the assumption of evil, damnation. The other pole is its opposite: knowledge—or, more exactly, reknowledge—of self, unity of being, acceptance, confession, absolute communion. (p. 58)

Alfred Hitchcock's stories come from a great variety of sources, but very early on, he began to alter them in his own way, setting to work on the double job of purifying and enriching them. First he trims the basic idea to bring out a pure relation of force between the characters. Once this has been established, he draws from it, like so many consequences of this relationship, each of the events of the plot. Generally speaking, this deduction operates on two parallel levels, the physical and the moral, and establishes a relation of symbol to idea. (pp. 106-07)

The handcuff scene in The Thirty-Nine Steps is a humorous expression of the idea of solidarity, one of the aspects of the "exchange." Little by little the system was to become more coherent, and for each given work the "finds" gushed from the same vein. The films became more homogeneous, and the formulas governing their construction could be more and more easily isolated. It is these formulas that we must return to if we want to study Hitchcock's symbolism; it is these formulas that we must keep our eyes on if we venture to use the dangerous word "metaphysics."… [It] is in the form that we must look for the depth of the work and that form is heavy with a latent metaphysic. It is therefore important to consider Hitchcock's work in the same way we would that of an esoteric painter or poet. The fact that the key to the system is not always in the lock, that the doors themselves are skillfully camouflaged, is no reason to insist that there is nothing inside. (p. 107)

[It] is in form that basic essence resides, just as skin, according to biologists, is the original and therefore essential part of an organism. The weak point in Spellbound was that the character is depicted as a clinical "case." Psychoanalysis was the prima donna of the film, and esthetics followed along as best it could. [In Strangers on a Train], on the contrary, the object that haunts Bruno is not presented to us in its strangeness, but in what it shares with the most ordinary and harmless of our tendencies. And this is done through the intermediary of form.

The attraction of murder, a taste for scheming, sexual perversion, and sick pride are taints presented under the aspects of Figure and Number, depicted in a way that is sufficiently abstract and universal for us to recognize a difference of degree rather than of kind between the obsessions of the protagonist and our own obsessions. Bruno's criminal attitude is only a debased form of an attitude basic to all human beings. In his sickness we can distinguish—corrupted, perverted, but given a kind of esthetic dignity—the very archetype of all our desires. (p. 110)

Hitchcock's art, thrown into particularly sharp relief by this film, is to make us participate—by means of the fascination exercised over each of us by a figure that is almost geometrically refined—in the vertigo of the characters; and beyond this vertigo we discover the essence of the moral idea. The current that goes from the symbol to the idea always passes through the condenser of emotion. (pp. 110, 112)

[Though] Hitchcock is a practicing Catholic he has nothing of the mystic or the ardent proselyte about him. His works are of a profane nature, and though they often deal with questions relating to God, their protagonists are not gripped by an anxiety that is properly speaking religious.

And yet there is not one of Hitchcock's films that is not more or less marked by Christian ideas and symbols….

These signs may justifiably be seen as the workings of chance, but this is in no way irreconcilable—quite the contrary—with Christian dogma. As for the devil, it is not difficult to recognize him….

[A] simultaneous presence of Good and Evil in the same person does not, however, constitute the mainspring of the drama, as it does in classical tragedy. Though Hitchcock's protagonists participate simultaneously in guilt and in innocence, it is impossible to discern the exact point at which these two extreme poles are balanced. Each of these two forces, the positive and the negative, seems to grow not inversely but proportionately; the guilt of the innocent will increase in proportion to his absolute innocence and vice versa. Or at least, if this strange state of equilibrium is never actually reached, we are made to glimpse it as a possibility, an asymptote against which all our good or evil resolutions will come up, and which defines the constitutive—or let us rather say the original—flaw in our natures. (p. 113)

If ever the word metaphysic could fearlessly be used about a Hitchcock film, it would certainly be about [Rear Window]. But this isn't only a reflexive, critical work in the Kantian sense of the word. This theory of spectacle implies a theory of space, and that in turn implies a moral idea which necessarily—apodictically, as is said in philosophy—derives from it. With one masterly stroke, Hitchcock has here designed the key construct of his entire work, and every one of his other blueprints is probably a corollary, an individual example of this "matrix-figure." We are at the intersecting point of all the material and moral dominants of Hitchcockian mythology, at the heart of a problem whose elegant solution has yet to be found. (p. 124)

The thread of deduction, followed to the end, leads the photographer to extremes. The passion to know, or more exactly to see, will end by suffocating all other feelings. The highest pleasure of this "voyeur" will coincide with the apex of his fear. His punishment will be that his own fiancée, a few yards away, but separated by the space of the courtyard, will be surprised in the suspect's apartment. But no matter how profound this motif, it is only one of the fibers of a sheaf. Parallel to this line, which could be called that of indiscretion, run at least two other major themes.

The first is that of solitude. This idea is made concrete on the one hand by the photographer's inability to move from his wheelchair, and on the other by the group of well-separated rabbit hutches that are the apartments he can see from his window. Realistic, indeed caricatural, this latter motif provides an opportunity to paint several of the types of fauna flourishing in Greenwich Village in particular and a big city in general…. As is true of Edgar Allan Poe's stories, this work is constructed on the implicit base of a philosophy of Ideas. Here, the idea—even if it be only the pure idea of Space, Time, or Desire—precedes existence and substance.

But this allegory of knowledge is enriched by the intrusion of a third anecdotal element, the love story of the photographer and his fiancée…. It is enriched by a moral symbol—one might even say a theological symbol. As will be true in The Wrong Man—and much more than was true in I Confess—this is a Hitchcock work whose significance cannot be grasped without precise reference to Christian dogma. (pp. 125-26)

Neither the reporter nor his fiancée want to see that paradise which they insist on believing lost and which is nevertheless very close to them, as is indicated—among other signs—by the bouquet that transforms the invalid's room into a flower garden: there are fugitive moments in life when poetry can blossom even in a sewer…. Hitchcock is not a censor of the flesh but of the desire whose constitutive vice is to feed on itself and forget the love which must serve as its base. The world he denounces is, on the contrary, the hypocritical world of Victorian society. (pp. 126-27)

All these themes mutually serve as counterpoints, and as is only right in a work so rigorously elaborated, there comes a moment in which they crystalize in a single perfect accord: the death of the little dog…. [In] this world of appearances, of inauthenticity, the most atrocious tragedy takes on the mask of the ridiculous. The dog is the gimcrack repetition of that "innocent" who, as in Sabotage or the merry-go-round scene in Strangers on a Train, might have been a child: as it happens, the dog-owning couple is childless.

The important thing is that because of the woman's words, once the reaction gets underway, each of these people will drink the cup of his egoism down to the lees. (p. 127)

This film is one of those that best illustrates the cardinal virtue of Hitchcockian morality: exigence. We can never be hard enough on ourselves—such is its lesson. Evil hides not only under the appearance of Good, but in our most casual and innocent acts, those we think have no ethical significance, those which in principle involve no responsibility. The criminals in this universe are attractively portrayed only so that they can better denounce the Pilates, which in one way or another we all are….

Hitchcock may be a moralist, but there is nothing of the moralizer about him. As we have said, this is not his concern. His role is only to illuminate the situation and let everybody draw his own conclusions. And then too, this guilt which he is so skillful in bringing to the surface is perhaps less of a moral than of a metaphysical order. (p. 128)

Even if The Wrong Man were only a faithful account of an item on the police blotter, it would be enough to justify our admiration. A man is arrested in another's place and because he is innocent has a certain distance on what he is undergoing, even if he is therefore undergoing it more intensely. Hitchcock, who enjoys dragging his characters through the mud of contempt, finds the most efficacious form for the expression of this contempt. (p. 146)

This is a documentary without embellishments, even though the camera that shows it to us is never impassive but always descriptive, narrative, as Hitchcock's camera always is. And this veristic detail only helps to buttress the strength of the symbol. We not only clearly discover the Idea, but—if it can be put that way—we feel it. The idea is an extremely complex one, the components of which we can successively identify as: that of the fundamental abjectness of a human being, who once deprived of his freedom is no more than an object among other objects; that of misfortune, which is simultaneously unjust and merited, like that of Job (everything seems to conspire against our musician); and that of guilt, as fundamental as the guilt that serves as the theme of Kafka's The Trial. (pp. 146-48)

Therefore, in this film the extraordinary is not, as in the previous works, merely a motor force, a pretext for dazzling developments. It is shown for what it is, and becomes the very object of the study. (p. 148)

Was there really a miracle? We are given no reason to deny it; but unlike what happens in Carl Dreyer's Ordet, and despite the clear prejudices of the narrator, a certain freedom of judgment is left us. Certainly Hitchcock has no intention of ridiculing this idea of Providence, which we have encountered elsewhere along the way. On the contrary, what the auteur denounces is the weak surrender to change (significantly enough, our wrong man plays the horses in his spare time). What he excoriates more severely still are those two theological sins of presumption and despair. (pp. 148-49)

The conclusion is obviously ambiguous, but this is no hedge: the ambiguity is in things themselves. It is characteristic of Hitchcock to show us both sides of the coin. His work moves between two poles which, like extremes, can meet….

As for the form, its basic postulate is perhaps more difficult to isolate in this case, but it is no less rigorous than in the works of so-called pure virtuosity. The "matrix-figure," as is only right, will be that of the wall. (p. 149)

Hitchcock is one of the greatest inventors of form in the entire history of cinema. Perhaps only Murnau and Eisenstein can sustain comparison with him when it comes to form. Our effort will not have been in vain if we have been able to demonstrate how an entire moral universe has been elaborated on the basis of this form and by its very rigor. In Hitchcock's work form does not embellish content, it creates it. All of Hitchcock can be summed up in this formula. This is what we wanted to demonstrate. (p. 152)

Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, in their Hitchcock, the First Forty-four Films, translated by Stanley Hochman (copyright © 1979 by Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc.; originally published as Hitchcock, S.A. Editions Universitaires, 1957), Ungar, 1979, 178 p.