Read My Lips: Onscreen Visual Acoustics in Alfred Hitchcock’s Early Movies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5944/epos.37.2021.32480Keywords:
Alfred Hitchcock, Modernism, early cinema, silent movies, acoustics, visual literacyAbstract
This essay will cover some of Alfred Hitchcock’s early silent movies up to and including Blackmail (1929), of which he filmed both a silent and a sound version simultaneously. Hitchcock’s success with sound was directly linked to his training in silent technique. Silent movies actually allowed him to explore how they were capable of sound. This essay will consider how silent movies were able to induce an acoustic experience without the aid of extra-diegetic practices that added live – and sometimes gramophonic – soundtrack to films. What I am interested in is the aural effect of the visual experience of the screen alone. In the early days of cinema, the frame was silently read for all kind of sounds heard in the head of the spectator.
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Copyright (c) 2021 Fabio L. Vericat
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