Alfred Hitchcock's Use of Sound in Blackmail

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Blackmail demonstrates ongoing tactics, such as: withholding sound from the viewer to pique curiosity, exaggerating sound as a form of narrative emphasis, and creating tension through both ambient noises and silence. Further, in a world where music was the dominant form of narrative accompaniment, he stripped music score away from his scenes and instead used the act of singing (and whistling) as a suspense device. Lastly, Hitchcock’s manipulation of human speech ranged from technical malfunctions of telephone calls to dizzied audio abstraction of the characters’ subjective thoughts. At the time of Blackmail’s release, most theatres still didn’t have speakers, only 22% having sound. Nonetheless, Hitchcock was keen to consider the 22% of theatres worldwide which did have sound, and predicted that more would follow. Alfred Hitchcock was known for his manipulation of viewer expectations, and sometimes did this by intentionally withholding sound information to heighten curiosity. In Blackmail, he uses dramatic iron by allowing the characters to keep secrets from us, and each other. The viewer is cued early in the film – when Alice laughs as the doorman whispers into her ear – that some information is going to be kept from us. This is the opposite of dramatic irony, where the character knows something the audience doesn’t. (As a narrative tool, this is often used in literature and is usually the result of an unreliable narrator and is used in novels such as ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘The Catcher in the Rye’.) After laughing at the doorman’s secret, the main protagonist, Alice White walks down the street with her boyfriend, Detective Frank Webber who is also unaware of the secret, playfully shunning him. This tactic came around again in his 1955, The Trouble With Harry, in which a whisper into the ear is used as a running gag, leaving the viewer curious what
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