Abstract

This article deals with Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail from the point of view of suspense and its exploration of cinematic sound and image. Blackmail has been regarded just as an experimental work of sound. Yet, we should rethink the use of suspense in Blackmail because the association between sound and image brings pressure more directly on the audience to experience uncertainty and anxiety. In a suspense plot, the audience identifies him/herself with characters, who are anxious about their fate and are bearing their misfortunes. In addition, we can find another pattern of suspense, in which the audience no longer empathizes with the characters per se. This suspense's real target of attack is the audience. Although in Blackmail we empathize with the heroine and her boyfriend, it nevertheless evokes our own anxiety rather than our empathy with characters. For example, the voice "knife, knifec" enormously compresses the heroine's anxiety and tears into the visual/aural representation of her ordinary life. This "knife" scene strongly intensifies our own anxiety rather than our empathy with her. In addition, the similar example of suspense is the use of the inaudible voice and invisible face of her boyfriend in a phone booth. This scene allows us to project our own expectations of what will be going on in the future scenario. We do not think that Hitchcock's narrative explanation is a limit of his film's abilities. Rather, his use of suspense expands the possibilities of cinematic representation and significantly changes the audience's alliance to the world of film