The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 30-April 5
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Consider Blackmail‘s most widely circulated still frame: a blonde—Anny Ondra, to be exact—in her skivvies, knife firmly in hand. An early summation of Hitch’s most visible preoccupations? Perhaps, but too convenient. Once contextualized, the image indulges his male gaze while condemning it outright. Ondra’s in shock, nearly catatonic; she’s just killed her rapist. The moment passes so quickly and horrifically, we forget it’s executed in almost total silence. Blackmail astounds in how The Master of Suspense was never hobbled by technical innovations; rather, they would continue to help him make a noise visually. Here, in his first talkie, he formally allows a conversation between sight and sound with a predicament demanding of such: caught in an affair, Ondra faces worse fate when she’s found out for her self-defense. The audible terms of the blackmail direct a darting and suspicious camera, and a commentary on the worth of words transpires, made more ironic by the knowledge that Ondra’s own dialogue was dubbed. Inside and out, Blackmail remains a monument for manipulation. Max Kyburz (April 3, 4:30pm at the Museum of the Moving Image; introduced by Guy Maddin)