(Sir) Alfred Hitchcock

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'Blackmail': The Opening of Hitchcock's Surrealist Eye

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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….

In what proves to be Blackmail's most absorbing section, Hitchcock focuses upon the face of a woman just turned killer. His actress, without speaking, becomes Artaud's athlete of the heart: her purpose, the communication of "… a mental alchemy which makes a gesture a state of mind … a state prior to language which can choose its own: music, gestures, movements, words."…

Like the surrealists, the Hitchcock of Blackmail inverts this reality, equating a fevered state of perception with actuality. The murderess's reaction to what she has done is not depicted mimetically; instead, after the murder Blackmail ceases to be a suspense story and becomes a dream. (p. 18)

Like the most artfully placed brushstrokes, then, Blackmail's most effective details apparently have little to do with what is actually occurring on the screen. Yet the greater their apparent distance from the subject, the greater is the sense of reality they convey. Like surrealism, the Hitchcock technique in Blackmail does more than approximate mere mood. Linked figuratively to the action, these superficially incongruous sights and sounds reproduce the flow of a life temporarily bogged down in the compulsive repetitions of obsession.

For Hitchcock and the surrealists, the logical extension of such obsession was the personalization of one's immediate environment….

Blackmail's murderess is isolated by her guilt. Simple objects, displayed at ostensibly insignficant moments, establish haunting objective correlatives when reseen. The dead man's portrait of a Pagliacci clown becomes a ridiculing Puck, sneering disdainfully at her predicament. (p. 19)

One can choose to view Blackmail, like a Jarry play or Chirico painting, as an abstract comment on the morals of its middle-class audience; but from The Lodger to Frenzy, Hitchcock has touched upon politics and religion solely as extensions of the most intimate conflicts within the self. Only on these terms will he approach problems of public morality, much less collective involvement….

Hitchcock's use of surrealist techniques in Blackmail presages its later employment in some of his most memorable sequences…. Time has modified the fervor of Blackmail's experimentation; what remains is Hitchcock's notion of the subjective itself as phenomenon, even more visible now through a surrealist backdrop which Hitchcock has been molding to his own purpose since the beginning of his career. (p. 20)

[The] Hitchcock technique, at its best, does more than simply match moods: it approximates the very look and feel of the thought process itself. In Frenzy, we need not be told that, Bob Rusk has come to rape Mrs. Blaney; the camera, tracking in a slow arc around her, does the stalking for us…. Similarly, the very meaning of such an improbable film as The Birds lies not only in the directorial challenge inherent in creating the necessary illusion, but in conveying this illusion as it would logically be perceived. Hitchcock's perpetual concern with matters of form in his interviews is no mere camouflage: one cannot portray the subjective more accurately than to show what it literally looks like.

Hitchcock's interest in such formal challenges has sustained him over a half century of filmmaking. He has lasted by pausing for wind. Indeed, moods maintained from beginning to end in any one Hitchcock film are rare. Thus, Blackmail, drawing heavily upon surrealist themes and techniques, may represent Hitchcock's first important step in his journey toward the subjective; but it drags, nonetheless. (p. 22)

Harry Ringel, "'Blackmail': The Opening of Hitchcock's Surrealist Eye," in Film Heritage (copyright 1974 by F. A. Macklin), Vol. 9, No. 2, February 4, 1974, pp. 17-23.

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