Hitchcock Paper #1

Hitchcockian Spatial layouts The two architectural spaces in the respective films are telling the same story, or the same horror experience on the narrative level? Tells the parallel story of an outside guest coming into the private space and left damage and threats to the family. (Even though they are different in): Architecture type intruder type different forms of "architecture" disturbance? The boundary and enclosure gives the home as a trap

The two domestic spaces in two films share a similar theme of “home as a trap” but was represented and experienced by different modes architectural narratives, one through thresholds, and one through atmospherical enclosure. -- I think this is fine to have two different modes: one distinction I'd add to give it complexity and also specify that difference more acutely is that the thresholds are linked to architectural structure, while atmospherical enclosure seems more linked to lighting, so one is about material thresholds internal to the house/structure, and the other (think the back staircase!) is about the threshold between inside and outside the home itself. Fair? At the same time, what is also common between the two is the strong boundary separating the inside and outside of the domestic space.

Define the Private

The first question that needs to be addressed is to ask what is the private and public in each film. In Blackmail, the private sphere to be focused on is the first floor of the family house operated and inhabited by Alice’s family. The entire townhouse is presumed to be owned by Alice’s family, where the family sleeps on the second and the third floor of the townhouse, and operates the family-owned shop on the first floor. However, the shop only occupies the front half of the first floor, while the back of the first floor is similar to a living / dining room and a kitchen, hosting the family’s day to day routines. As the first floor hosts both the characters’ private life and their economic activities in the society, the architectural space’s hybrid functions becomes really interesting with an intrusion from guests. On the other hand, Newton’s family house in Shadow of a Doubt is categorized to be in the private sphere easily, as opposed to the rest of Santa Rosa as the public sphere. Like most of the average domestic spaces, the first floor contains the living and dining room, while the second floor is taken up by the bedrooms. At the exterior of the house, there is also a front porch, a back exterior stairs, and a garage separated from the main house.

Threshold

The private and public spheres are never described directly in the film, but rather experienced through trespassing the thresholds in between. the concept of “blackmail” with its architectural elements, including thresholds, visibility (or vision), acoustics, and circulation. We can see four thresholds that the three main characters (Alice, Frank and Tracy) move through (or try to), and each of the thresholds marks the clear spatial, symbolistic, and narrative boundary. I have attempted to recreate the plan of the first floor as shown above, in order to locate the four important thresholds in the scene and to relate them in the spatial layout and narrative structure. The one to start with is the main entrance of the store, which marks the boundary between the urban public space, and the “semi-private” family-owned store.

At 52:19, we see that Tracy is the only character outside of the store, who has been following Frank (implied by the film) and now lurking through the glass on the door. Soon enough, as he walks through that door, he is no longer a stranger in the city who only had shown his shadow. He now becomes another main character on the stage, entangled in the more “private” matter between Frank and Alice. This very threshold later showed its symbolism on separating the public and the semi-private: whenever a random stranger enters the store from the street, the three characters are interrupted and have to pretend to be normal. The moment when the intrusion of the public happens after every doorbell ring, we can also hear the sounds from the real world outside come in, breaking the silent tension in the room. The second threshold is not a conventional door, but rather an enclosure — a transparent, but sound-proof phone booth. In sequential order, Alice first enters it alone and comes out; later Frank enters and calls upon Alice to join him; Tracy comes to open the booth door; Frank receives a call in the booth (01:07:10). All of these moments of being inside and outside of the booth created suspense and uncertainty not only between the three characters in the narrative, but also between the film and us. And this particular threshold brings in the themes of vision and visibility into the scene. The glass box in the first two scenarios suggests an attempt for creating a most private and intimate space for knowledge exchange in the store. Once the door is closed, we can no longer hear any sound from outside, giving the illusion of being safe and isolated. But as Tracy opens the door and intrudes, we see that the efforts are in vain. Tracy later even made an explicit comment on the visibility of the glass box: “Don't wave the important clues inside of phone boxes: they've got glass doors.” Noticeably, the only time a character actually receives a call is when the other two main characters are stuck in the inner room. At 01:07:10, the audience follows Frank to the phone booth to listen (or eavesdrop) to his knowledge exchange with his colleague. Hitchcock has been playing with the tension between visibility and sound. Following the camera position, the audience is standing outside of the booth. What is different from Frank and Alice’s isolated conversation before is that: with the open door, we can now hear Frank’s voice, but we still cannot hear the other side of the telephone. Instead, we could only guess from Frank’s reaction. The third door marks the connection between the store and the most private part of the space. As Tracy invites himself to stay for breakfast in the family’s dining room, he is now introduced as a “friend” of Frank. This layer of fake identity makes the triangular relationship more fragile than before. At the most intimate space in the set, this is where we really get to see the three characters’ inner thought process, and also for the first time Tracy’s background story. Later as Frank orders Alice to lock this third door, and thus firmly cutting the boundary between private and public, we see the reversal of the power relationship between Frank and Tracy. I am not including Alice in this power reversal because she is still stuck in the middle of Frank and Tracy’s conflict. At last, with no other way out, Tracy has to break through the fourth threshold — the window that connects the room to the backyard and then the city again. The only escape from an enclosed private space is to illegally break the glass, and from this very moment, Tracy becomes guilty. The transition from private to public is later emphasized by the last chasing sequence in British Museum. And as Tracy ended up on the open roof (by running through the small enclosed gallery rooms), he soon dies from the symmetrical action — falling through the glass. And he remains guilty.

Earlier in the film (starting from 42:00), when Alice returns from the artist’s studio to sneak back into her room on the second floor of the house, she enters the house through threshold #1, which is shown in figure 3 as the wooden door on the right of the glass storefront.

the domestic in shadow is defined by the whole setup, the homely atmosphere and then breaking it; home as a trap; enclosed

Make over the house; the house owns us House made of the newspaper, external stairway stairs are the central spine of the domestic space

Intruder Type

The intrusion of the guest and the discomfort of danger that comes with them is a recurring The talking lady The detectives

the rest of the characters dont know what was going on

Contrast with the Public?

These three scenes all have their respective counterpart architecture typology in the two films.

Ref:

Leitch, P 14 Wrong house, p92