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Journal of Popular Film & Television (2001) - The Sounds of Blackmail: Hitchcock and Sound Aesthetic

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Abstract

Prior to its full integration, sound technology did challenge a certain attitude implicit in early film narrative. In "Blackmail," his first effort at sound, Alfred Hitchcock recognized some of the consequences of combining aural and visual tracks and realized the sort of narrative tensions that attended mixing these two technologies.

Article

Hitchcock and Sound Aesthetic

Technology itself becomes the message; it doesn't push things forward or transform the world, it becomes the world. And this substitution of one thing for another might be considered perilous, because it is no longer a question of restoring balance or order.
 — Jean Baudrillard (44)
Cinema is form.
 — Alfred Hitchcock (Samuels 233)

Much of the discussion about the introduction of sound technology into the movies has centered on the disruption of standard narrative practices that it represented and the film industry's gradual efforts to conform this technological innovation to what David Bordwell terms "classical norms" (298). Certainly, on a technical level sound's coming posed a number of problems — both industrial ones due to the competition between two effective systems, the Warner Bros.-Western Electric Vitaphone system and the Fox-Case Movietone system, and narrative ones arising from the limitations and requirements of this new technology. However, the film industry in the United States rather quickly moved to correct those problems, especially through the sponsorship of the Motion Picture Academy, which set about creating "standardization in recording" and "reproduction" practices (Bordwell 301). The result, as Bordwell asserts, is that in the American cinema sound was never really "a radical alternative to silent filmmaking"; rather, it was fairly rapidly "inserted into the already-constituted system of the classical Hollywood style" (301).

And yet many felt that sound did pose a challenge — hence the stances of various theorists, filmmakers, and critics( n1) against the new technology and against what they feared it might do to their careers and to what was already a highly developed and successful narrative practice. Even as major a star as Lon Chaney complained, "I have a thousand faces, but only one voice" (qtd. in Walker 130). Today, those reactions may seem a bit silly, the fears misplaced, largely driven by a natural sense of insecurity in the face of radical industrial change. Yet in the work of Alfred Hitchcock, especially his groundbreaking film Blackmail, we might better gauge what was truly so "perilous" about this "substitution," as Baudrillard puts it, and begin to contextualize the sort of alternative sound offered to that "already constituted system."

Regardless of the technology employed, early sound recording initially posed a number of narrative problems. For a time sound recording inhibited screen movement, thanks largely to the bulk of the soundproofed camera booth; as historian David Cook simply puts it, "the movies ceased to move when they began to talk" (261). To cope with the demand for conversation and with the sound-induced constraints upon the editing process, longer takes became the order of the day, with the average shot length approximately doubling.( n2) Even lighting was affected, as a result of early difficulties in silencing the then-standard arc lamps.( n3)...

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Notes

  1. ↑ For a sampling of this reaction, we can turn to Geduld's appendix on the "Spectrum of Opinion, 1928-1929" in his The Birth of the Talkies. This collection of contemporary accounts includes an interview commentary from Thomas Edison in which he expresses his skepticism about the future of the talkies, as well as the critic Ernest Betts's assertion that "there is something monstrous about a speaking film" (271).
  2. ↑ See Barry Salt's Film Style and Technology wherein he calculates average shot lengths (ASLs) for various periods and countries. In a sampling of American films from the early to mid-1920s, for example, he arrives at an average shot length of approximately 5.5 seconds, while his survey of 70 American sound films from the early sound era, from the years 1928 to 1933, yields an average shot length of 11 seconds. That ASL, as Salt explains, would drop to approximately 9 seconds in the later 1930s as filmmakers learned to accommodate sound practices and as the rapidly developing technology facilitated that accommodation.
  3. ↑ For a detailed discussion of the various technical problems involved in the coming of sound, particularly those involved in lighting sets, see David Bordwell's "The Introduction of Sound" in The Classical Hollywood Cinema.
  4. ↑ As examples of how present scholarship has begun to turn in this direction and explore the impact of nineteenth-century technology and technological attitudes on film's formation, see the two special numbers of the journal Wide Angle edited by Scott MacDonald and devoted to "Movies Before Cinema" (18.2, 18.1 [1996]).
  5. ↑ Chaplin was only one of many actors and filmmakers who were outspoken in their opposition to sound. For the most part that opposition seems to have been grounded in the simple fear that talking pictures might spell the end of their careers, either because they felt their voices might not record well, as in the often-cited case of John Gilbert, or they suspected that, as was most probably the case with Chaplin, their voices might not fit with the character types they customarily played. Arnheim's opposition arose from a more theoretical view. Drawing on his analysis of what he saw as the basic properties of the cinema and its similarities to other arts that involve a "combination of artistic media" (207), he argued that "there should be a dominant medium" and that this medium should be the moving image (224).
  6. ↑ Of course, most of Hitchcock's films have a decidedly reflexive dimension, so Blackmail's thrusting of its sound technology to the fore is hardly surprising. In what would quickly become a tradition, it offers one of the director's many self-insertions in the mise-en-scene, here as a subway passenger being annoyed by a mischievous child. But perhaps more intriguing are the various "directorial surrogates," as Sterritt terms them (13), figures and images that evoke the director-as-artist. Foremost among these is the murdered artist Crewe, whose painting of a laughing, finger-pointing clown hovers over the entire narrative, mocking his killer Alice's efforts to cover up her act and rendering murder — much as Hitchcock himself so often did, especially in films like The Trouble with Harry (1955) and Family Plot (1974) — a macabre joke. And we might think as well of the various painted faces, masks, and the great Egyptian stone head that dominates the British Museum sequence as mocking onlookers, surrogates for Hitchcock's own typically ironic point of view, as well as emblems of the film's level of self-consciousness. Through these and other reflexive elements, the film manages variously to draw its mechanism into the story, in effect, to blur the boundaries between the nature of the film and its narrative.

(n7.) Hitchcock has described his original idea for ending the film in a number of places, particularly the lengthy interviews with Samuels and Truffaut. Drawing on these accounts, Sterritt describes the original conception of the film as a kind of "circular construction" in which elements of the first and last scenes would mirror each other" (33), with Alice becoming the criminal being routinely processed.

Works Cited

  • Arnheim. Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.
  • Baudrillard, Jean. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Interviews. Ed. Mike Gane. London: Routledge, 1993
  • Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
  • Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1996.
  • Friedberg, Anne. "Cinema and the Postmodern Condition." Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. Ed. Linda Williams. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995.59-86.
  • Geduld, Harry M. The Birth of the Talkies: From Edison to Jolson. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1975.
  • Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Methuen, 1988.
  • Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.
  • Romanyshyn, Robert. Technology as Symptom and Dream. London: Routledge, 1989.
  • Salt, Barry. Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. London: Starword, 1983.
  • Samuels, Charles Thomas. Encountering Directors. New York: Capricorn, 1972.
  • Sterritt, David. The Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
  • Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.
  • Walker, Alexander. The Shattered Silents: How the Talkies Came to Stay. New York: Morrow, 1979.
  • Weis, Elisabeth. "The Sound of One Wing Flapping." Film Comment 14.5 (1978): 42-48.

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