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How Hitchcock plays with the mind in Blackmail (1929)


- Srijoni Mitra

 Alfred Hitchcock being a very visual filmmaker likes to guide the audience with his camera, treat his viewers with ironic gags and use imagery to tell the story more than dialogue. Blackmail (1929), as such, is Hitchcock's as well as Great Britain’s first sound film and thus acts as a bridge between between silent and sound films. 
It is important to note at the outset that Blackmail was first conceived and filmed as a silent movie.  To this extent that visual imagery was the primary mode of communicating to the audience the cinematographic style reflects this.  In the depiction of the murder, the director does away with the ghastly details of the struggle between Alice and her harasser and we are shown only a scuffle behind a curtain and her hand snatching the knife. For my purpose, however, I would like to talk about what I consider the best scene from Blackmail that shows the mental state of the main character, Alice White. We are not told verbally that it is Alice who has committed the murder that took place the night before, but the breakfast scene portrays her to be jumpy and nervous as the customer talks about the details of the murder. This gives us a subtle hint that she may in fact be the murderer (based on this scene alone).  The rest of the scene shows this by subtle hints in camera position, use of dialogue as well as its volume. 
The sequence starts with Alice being called for breakfast where we see a medium close up of Alice’s face as the customer tells Alice’s family how awful the murder that took place the night before was. You assume that is a person is talking to three people, the camera would show all three people sat at the table – but because we know she is guilty, the camera stays long enough for the shot to become awkward, and we start to feel tense for this character. 

The camera then pans to a close up of the customer’s face as she reveals the details of the murder (that the man was stabbed with a knife). She places her opinion forward by saying that, ‘Using a brick is one thing... but a knife!’ 

The camera then pans back to the medium close up of Alice’s face as her eyes dart around the room and we see her fidgeting with her hands as if she is growing increasingly uncomfortable with the customer’s commentary. 

As the customer says “Now mind you, a knife is a difficult thing to handle...” we cut from a medium close up to close up of Alice’s face as her eyebrows raise on hearing the word “knife.”
                                                                              



 It is now that the word “knife” starts to be repeated more and more and the words in between start to become muffled. The word “knife” repeats faster and become louder. This probably is not the reality of the room she is sitting in, we become part of the murderer character and we hear what she can hear. As she becomes more nervous she fixates on the word knife, her eyes dart across the room and she shifts in her seat. We come into a close up of the girls face, and as we get closer we feel as if she may say something as we see her lips begin to move and quiver and this builds up great tension.
The camera pans to her hand holding the knife to cut the bread and nervous as she is, she hears the word knife for the last time and jumps from her seat throwing the knife on the ground. 

We finally are introduced to the entire breakfast table which is a medium shot, when her father gets up to pick the knife up from the ground, exclaiming, “You might’ve cut somebody with that!” This is how Hitchcock meticulously uses dialogue to hint at the obvious. 

This scene is an example of non-realistic sound in a narrative film. The director reproduces the build up of tension with just the use of sound and camera position – not even music! Thus, from this scene alone it is evident that Alice is obsessing over her crime. Hitchcock here has cleverly used sound to hammer home her guilt. He drowns out all the other sound so this is all Alice and the viewer can hear. It pierces the silence as it literally stabbed the artist. This sequence thus goes on to show the mastery with which Alfred Hitchcock plays on the psychology of the audience with remarkable success. 


When Blackmail was made, the issues in synchronization had not yet been completely resolved. In fact, Hitchcock opted to add sound after the completion of the film in order to embrace the new technology, which explains why the film primarily relies on visual elements and objects to move the narrative forward.
In the end, I would like to draw a comparison between Psycho and Blackmail. Raymond Bellour in his work, the Analysis of Film states:

“....Psycho sets into play, frontally, through a reversible effect of the articulation between the two psychic structures, grasped in a doubling relationship carried by sexual difference. The criterion used here to associate and dissociate neurosis and psychosis remains, overwhelmingly, the one used by Freud: both are avatars of desire that bring about an unsettling of the subject’s relationship to reality.... The long segment during which Marion and Norman are face to face in the small reception room of the motel thus places face to face, fictitiously, two psychic structures: man and woman, the latter destined to become the prey of the former."
Such a similar example can be drawn from Blackmail as well, when Mr Crewe invites Alice White to visit his apartment. The sexual innuendo is strong but Crewe does not force himself upon the girl until she has changed costumes. The only marked difference is that here, Alice tries to escape her harasser by stabbing him, thus the prey immediately becomes the predator as she helps herself and flees from the apartment.


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