I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953) for the first time in years today, and was struck by the shot above, in which a priest who is about to be arrested for a murder committed by another man walks through the streets of Quebec City.
The priest, played by Montgomery Clift, knows who the real killer is, because the killer told him this bit of info in the confessional — but the priest cannot reveal this information, because it would violate the sacrament. And so, in a very real sense, the priest is bearing the burden of another man’s sin — just as Christ took the sins of the world upon himself when he went to Golgotha.
I was reminded of a sequence in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), which used similar imagery to a somewhat different effect — less religious, more humanistic. I don’t have a photo or DVD handy, but to quote an essay that I wrote several years ago:
Chaplin was touched by Christ’s “tolerant understanding of the woman who had sinned and was to be stoned by the mob”; when a despondent Edna carries her illegitimate child out of the hospital in The Kid, the image dissolves to a statue of Christ carrying his own burden, the cross, perhaps empathetically.
I wonder, can anyone else think of any other examples of this sort of explicitly referential imagery? Note, I am referring specifically to movies which explicitly depict statues or paintings of Christ carrying his cross, and which connect these images to the protagonists of the movies somehow. This rules out films like The Son (2002) which, unless I’m forgetting something, make more allusive or merely implicit references to cross-bearing.
Hmmm, if we count live-action flashbacks, then I guess the scene in A Clockwork Orange (1971; my comments) where Alex identifies with the soldier who whips Jesus sort of counts, too, albeit in a somewhat perverse and subversive sort of way — since the point of identification here is not Jesus, but the Romans.
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