Two Alfred Hitchcock Films

Alfred Hitchcock made Blackmail as his first sound feature in 1929, and Vertigo in 1958 during his most creative period. The two films share certain characteristics in terms of the way the filmmaker presents women and in the relationships the female characters have with the male characters in the two works, and indeed these same elements and approaches can be found in many Hitchcock films made between the two. Tania Modleski links Hitchcock's works specifically to sexual violence in her feminist analysis of his works, and she cites other critics on the subject when she writes:

In film studies, Hitchcock is often viewed as the archetypal misogynist, who invites his audience to indulge their most sadistic fantasies against the female (Modleski 17).

Modleski finds in her analysis, however, that the seemingly misogynist structure of Hitchcock's films involves a duality, with the second arm allowing for a critique of the structure it exploits and for a sympathetic view of the heroine who finds herself trapped within that structure (Modleski 25). This element of a trap is most evident in Vertigo, where the heroine is trapped in a cage she has created for herself, but it is also evident in the objectification of the heroine in Blackmail.

Indeed, this objectification takes place in both films, and what is wrong with the feminist criticism that sees Hitchcock as simply misogynist is that to come to that conclusion, one must ignore the way the films hold the males up to critic

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tist, a murder for which the blackmailer is suspected but of which he is innocent, and Frank knows. Blackmail is a crime, but it is not a crime punishable by death. In the end, the fact that Frank stops Alice from confessing means that the dead blackmailer will be thought of forever as the murderer. The image of the man shaping the woman as an artist shapes stone or clay is repeated in a number of Hitchcock films, and often Hitchcock presents this image as a perversion of the Pygmalion-Galatea story where the artist falls in love with his creation. In Notorious (1946), the American government agent forces a woman to become a spy and to marry a suspected spy and falls in love with his creation even as he hates himself for it. This image is repeated in Vertigo in a particularly perverse way as Scottie responds to an image that has been created for him and forces it on the woman who duped him with the image in the first place. This act is made even more perverse by the fact that the creation is herself in love with the artist and ultimately gives in to what he is doing, leading to her downfall. Yet it is wrong to assume that Hitchcock only makes use of this structure of creating an image with reference to women, for he has do

Category: Film - T