There are always milestones in Hitchcock's sequence - debut, first Hollywood film, first film in color, and so on. In these junctures, Blackmail has been neglected and not given the place it deserves, it was hastily produced in the place of the sound film, and as the first sound film for Hitchcock personally and in the UK, it seems Not as dazzling as "Rear Window" and "Psycho", but still has an extremely important weight.
A sound film made in the middle
Before this film, Hitchcock made a number of silent films that did not cause much turbulence. The films also did not interest Hitchcock's comments in conversations with Truffaut. And Blackmail was originally supposed to be a silent movie. The audioization of "Blackmail" wasn't easy, and when the producers saw the success of "Jazz Singer" and wanted to add a sound element, "Blackmail" was already in the works. But Hitchcock still got the job done. The voice of the actress was voiced by British actress Joan Barry, as the heroine Anne Audra's heavy accent did not match her on-screen image. Post-production didn't exist at the time, so Hitchcock had Joan Barry stand off-screen and read dialogue into a microphone while filming scenes. In this case, Hitchcock still finished the production. He even overdid it: the producers only wanted to add sound to the last part of the film, but Hitchcock thought it was ridiculous and quietly recorded it all.
In this kind of half-way production, not all of the film clips are reshot for sound. In fact, for the first few minutes, the audience can only see the actor's lips tremble and not hear the voice. This seems to be a joke by Hitchcock, even if the audience knew in advance that it was going to be a sound film, the audience had to go through the silent film to get to the scene where the actor speaks. However, the decision had an interesting side effect: it suppressed any possible information we might have received about the man's crimes, including uncertainty that persisted until the moment he was incarcerated: when they walked away on their mission. We were finally allowed to hear the detective's voice.
Sound aside, Hitchcock's use of imagery remains impressive, with the most notable Hitchcock technique coming from crime scenes. The film, made in 1929, still needed to be scrutinized by the then-British Film Censorship Board, and it was impossible to show violent attempts and killings on screen. But Hitchcock deftly overcame this obstacle by putting events behind the scenes, depicting the action with shadows. This is an intense scene. After Alice kills, Hitchcock expresses her nervousness through visuals: a sign with an animated cocktail glass becomes a hand holding a knife in both Alice and the audience, and the image can be seen morphing into a hand holding a knife Animated hand with knife. This photo effectively portrays the state of mind of our heroine.
However, Charles Barr's article in Sight and Sound mentions that Hitchcock's subjective shooting/editing style, which had developed and matured in the silent version, was actually hampered by the presence of sound . In Blackmail, imagery is more combined with sound. As Alice wanders the streets after killing her, she focuses her gaze on the arm of a homeless man - when a scream comes through the screen. But this is not Alice's scream. It's the landlord's. Before the screaming ends, the scene cuts to the landlady's discovery of the body. It's an astonishing edit, and this sparkle adds to the impact of the moment. In another scene, the image of the bread knife is combined with the repeated "knife, knife, knife" in the female protagonist's ear to show her fragile state of mind, allowing the audience to bring the plot from two aspects.
The British Museum chase scene at the end is different from the previous shooting method. The previous pictures were mostly horizontal, and the characters occupy a prominent position in the picture. However, in the chase scene at the British Museum, the actors move with the depth of the frame and become insignificant in front of the huge statue. Especially in the chase of the last dome, the characters are almost reduced to a few points. In fact, there was not enough light to photograph the interior of the museum during the shooting process, so Hitchcock used the Schufftan method, placing a mirror at a forty-five-degree angle, reflecting the interior of the museum in the mirror. The photos were exposed for thirty minutes, and Hitchcock had nine shots to show different interiors.
Subversion of the classic realist narrative
Robin Wood in his article "Symmetry, Closure, Disruption: the Ambiguity of Blackmail" mentions two assumptions of two classical realist narratives:
1. In general, the role of the canonical narrative is to reinforce and seem to confirm the patriarchy and its subordination to women.
2. Symmetry is one of the basic principles governing the structure of classical narratives. Symmetrical ending as a kind of conclusion is the resolution of all narrative threads and moral problems, the restoration of order, and the reaffirmation of a set of values.
Symmetry in film is extremely broad: from symmetry in a single frame composition, symmetry within a scene, symmetry within a paragraph, to symmetry within a film as a whole. Symmetry in composition is especially evident in movies, and in the case of Wes Anderson's films, this principle is widely used. This principle is also used in several scenes in Blackmail: the barrier in Crewe's apartment in the murder scene separates Crewe on the piano from Alice changing clothes, symbolizing the Obstacles; Alice, Frank and Blackmailer form a strongly symmetrical triangular composition in the store, with Alice sitting in the center of the picture being forced into silence, while two men fight for her dominance behind the sofa.
But the reaffirmation of values is often found in symmetry on a larger scale. In a conversation with Truffaut, Hitchcock mentions his originally planned ending, where the symmetry would be tighter:
After chasing the blackmailer, the girl is about to be arrested, and the boy has to tell her to repeat all the processes in the first scene: handcuffs, judicial identification, etc. He would see a colleague who was older than him in the bathroom. The colleague didn't know the reason and said to him, "Tonight, are you going out with your girlfriend?" He would reply, "No, no, I'll go home. ."
Yet even without this ending, the similarity between the beginning and the end remains strong from a cinematic point of view: (1) the hunt for male criminals twice at the beginning and end (2) Alice's attack on Scotland twice at the beginning and end field visits, and the tripartite dialogue and laughter that occurred both times. In the movie, we can think of Alice as the conscience of the movie, a conscience that has been silenced by the men around her. In both the opening and closing Scotland Yard scenes, the framing places Alice between the two men. In the Whites' living room, this composition already exists for Alice, Frank, and Tracy the blackmailer, and it seems to imply that the woman's voice is denied by both men. This symmetry is also reflected in the two hilarious opening and closing jokes, which are presumably trivial; and the ending, which expresses an unconscious contempt for women. When Alice once again faced the only audible laughter in the film, her attempted smile was frozen by Crewe's drawing of the clown. What does the Joker's mockery and Alice's inability to smile at the end of the movie mean? From Hitchcock's point of view, the Joker is mocking the entire social order, deconstructing gender and those who remain trapped in contradiction (all the characters in the film).
I think someone might describe Hitchcock's description of the police as ambiguous. Their pursuit of criminals has not been positive. Narrative conventions often require symbolic validation in film. Judging from the conventions of classical narrative, Frank is, after all, the protagonist of this film and should be the representative of goodness. Yet Hitchcock makes Frank the least sympathetic character in the film. It's worth noting that they, along with their strong class prejudices, are thoroughly attenuated at the same time in a film made primarily for a bourgeois audience. Before Frank was established as a personal character, the activities and nature of the police had been described as a brutal hostility. They are aggressive, dominant, intrusive, penetrating from the start. The arrest of the criminal at the beginning is a powerful presentation of these qualities and the first time the audience is aware of the intrusion of the police detective: the shot of their face in the mirror, becomes an image on a glass surface of the most unobjective and unforgiving , which highlights the dehumanization. Hitchcock's negative attitude toward institutionalized authority runs through Hitchcock's work, from unease to resentment to outright condemnation.
This ridicule also seems to be reflected in Hitchcock's brief appearance in the film, and the attitude to authority and rebellion it contains is instructive. Hitchcock appeared as a passenger on the train where Alice and Frank were going on a date, and a young boy leaned over from the seat behind him and pushed Hitchcock's hat off repeatedly, while Hitchcock sighed in a weak voice. Angrily responds. Even the great director Hitchcock liked this kind of self-mockery: so the teasing in his films is incredibly charming. In this clip, Hitchcock isn't just a fat commuter: he's also a little boy in spirit, a rebellious kid. This brief shot predicts the events that follow, and Frank, the main figure of authority, defies the authority of the restaurant boy waiter: even an authority figure resists the system on which his authority rests. It also covers the main thrust of the entire film and the biggest subversion of traditional narrative: a negative attitude towards authority.
Epilogue
When the film was released in 1929, the silent version did much better at the box office than the talkies, because few movie theaters outside the big cities had sound equipment. However, after its release, the original copyright holder failed to keep the copyright and it fell into the public domain, meaning that almost anyone could make a VHS or DVD copy of the film and sell it. As a result, many versions of the film on the market are either heavily or poorly edited, or copied from second-generation or more films.
"Blackmail" ultimately failed because it had no suspense. For a film that has almost all of Hitchcock's essentials—beautiful composition, a blond protagonist, a location in a well-known landmark, a symbol of authority—but it has no suspense or drama. The silent-to-voice transition may have played a part in easing the thriller's tension, and aside from some fantastic cinematography, Blackmail is an overall bland experience. Yet despite these flaws, Blackmail's innately gifted storytelling and subversion of conventional narratives by Hitchcock still makes the film worth watching.
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