Like his painter in Blackmail … Alfred Hitchcock employs pointedly nonverbal methods—and not the expositional theatrics so common to most early sound films—as brush-strokes to bring life to his murderess's dilemma…. [In] Blackmail "… sounds are linked to movements, as if they were the natural consummation of gestures which have the same musical quality…. Everything is thus regulated and impersonal; not a movement of the muscles, not the rolling of an eye but seem to belong to a kind of reflective mathematics which controls everything, and by means of which everything happens." The quote belongs to Antonin Artaud: contemporary of the young Hitchcock, and a peripheral member of the French surrealist clique. Its ideal—the fierce, absolute segregation of the visual and the aural from the verbal tradition of the occidental theater—might just as well have been Hitchcock's; for in its exclusively cinematic use of the language of film, Blackmail asserts, as did surrealism, that no such threat from theater need ever have existed. (p. 17)
Hitchcock, sharing the surrealists' interest in nonaction, has always specialized in reflecting his protagonists' inactive sides: the perversely detailed bedroom Norman Bates (Psycho) has shared with his mother, for example; or how Bob Rusk (Frenzy) relaxes after committing a murder. Similarly, the crime itself in Blackmail does not concern Hitchcock so much as the effect of the deed upon its perpetrator….
This is a free excerpt of 225 words. There are 801 words (approx.
3 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our (Sir) Hitchcock, Alfred 1899–1980: Critical Essay by Harry Ringel Access Pass.
