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The equation of menace in Rear Window with the sound of an unseen invader is the culmination of Hitchcock's experiments with a technique that can be called aural intrusion. This use of offscreen noise to threaten an onscreen character is a frequent and distinctive component of Hitchcock's style. The technique provides a realistic metaphor for the penetration of the psyche. Hence, it is particularly useful in the subjective films, in which Hitchcock wants to concentrate on mental events while eliminating expressionistic distractions.

Aural intrusion can range from the penetration of a person's voice from just outside the frame to the noisy assault on a room or building .by one or more invaders. The boundaries, whatever their scope, demarcate an interior space from an exterior one. The spaces may or may not be literalized (a room literally exists for the characters; a frame does not), but ultimately they are psychological; the interior space represents subjective perception, which is threatened by reality from outside. The aural-intrusion technique is prominent in the single-set films (Lifeboat, Rope, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window), which, with their deliberate visual restriction, depend greatly on the tension between inside and outside space.

An early example of aural intrusion can be found in the use of the frame as a private space in Murder. The voice of an offscreen character can seem like an invasion of that space when it is occupied by one person lost in thought. Invasion of the frame occurs when Sir John, while searching Diana Baring's rooms for clues that would indicate her innocence, finds a photograph of himself. The shot of him staring in silence at the picture is a loosely framed close-up. Suddenly, we hear from offscreen the voice of his assistant,

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Markham, saying, "Lot more places to go to. Sir John." Markham's words not only intrude on Sir John's privacy but also characterize Markham as efficient but insensitive. The shot can be compared to a later one in which Sir John stares at a broken basin that may be important evidence. Here again he stares in silence, but Markham's head is allowed to stay in the corner of the frame, so that his saying the same line ("Lot more places to go to. Sir John") is not so startling. Here his words merely indicate that he is blind to the importance of a clue. The shift of emphasis makes sense because the moment is not so personal for Sir John.

Thirty-four years later, in Mamie, Hitchcock again interrupts an intensely private moment with a surprise voice from offscreen. In this case the technique is more crucial because the intrusion helps define the relationship between the film's two central figures. In this scene we watch Mamie trying to steal money from her husband's office safe. She is unable to make her hands grasp the money. After she loses the struggle, she and we are surprised to hear from offscreen the voice of her husband saying, "I'll take you home, Marnie." His intrusion here on a personal psychological struggle supports the growing evidence that his relation to Marnie is one of voyeur as well as authority figure. The audience, having thought it was alone with Marnie, shares her resentment at his intrusion.

Aural intrusion also defines a husband-wife relationship in the television short Back for Christmas. It is the story of a meek man who murders his domineering wife, only to have her ultimately defeat him after her death. (Before dying she orders a wine cellar dug for her husband without his knowledge. As a result her body will be dug up from the cellar where he had interred it, and he will be caught.) The wife's dominance is suggested by her introduction into the film as a disembodied voice. As the movie opens we are watching the husband digging in the cellar, but we hear the wife call him from upstairs. The proprietary and domineering tone of her "Oh, Herbert" instantly makes us side with the meek man. Knowing that this is a Hitchcock film, we can deduce from this first scene that the man is probably digging a grave for his wife. In fact, Hitchcock, assuming our familiarity with his work, expects us to make that deduction. Similarly, he depends on the cliche of the

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nagging wife for instant character description; it provides a useful kind of shorthand for a twenty-three-minute film. Moreover, the wife must be a cliche in order for us to sympathize with the murderous husband. Hitchcock bases our sympathy for him on the inescapable presence of the woman, a presence created more aurally than visually.

In some films the aural intrusion represents not so much an invasion of privacy as of security. Hitchcock uses the technique to destroy audience and character complacency by creating (or maintaining) insecurity through sound during moments of apparent (that is, visual) serenity. In such cases the sound may be mechanical, but it is more often human. Hitchcock's villains are often aural intruders; after all, his villains are tangible evidence that evil is always lurking among us. In The Lady Vanishes, for example, the leader of the spies, Dr. Hartz, is often heard before he appears on screen. This is typified by his first entrance. In that scene the heroine, conversing with the hero in a train corridor, tells him, "There must be some explanation" to the odd events of the past few minutes. Suddenly, she is answered by "There is," followed by the entrance of the "doctor" into the frame. Similarly, he sneaks up on the couple in a train compartment while they are unwrapping the bandages that conceal the missing lady he has kidnapped. Again, Hitchcock reveals the villain's presence aurally before cutting to him. Like the husband in Mamie, his characterization as an aural intruder identifies him as a sneak and a spy as well as an authority figure. More important, it makes us paranoid about eavesdroppers for the rest of the film.

In most cases aural intrusion suggests a power relationship between intruder and victim. In the last shot of Notorious, for example, Alex Sebastian, trying to escape from his home because his colleagues there know that he has inadvertently betrayed them, is abandoned by Alicia and Devlin, who drive off, leaving him at the end of the sidewalk. A close-up of Sebastian's head fills most of the frame, blocking out the doorway where his colleagues stand watching. Ordinarily, the graphic dominance of his head would also suggest a dominance over his colleagues, but Hitchcock subverts that expectation. From the unseen background blocked by Sebastian's head we hear, "Alex, will you come in, please. I wish to talk

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to you," and Alex must walk back up his sidewalk into the arms of his executioners. There is a slight reverberation added to the speaker's voice, just enough to give extra authority to it. This sequence is consistent with the characterization of the Nazis as killers hiding behind a genteel facade. The Nazis are informing a person in very polite phrases that he is about to be done away with. Once Sebastian walks back inside his home our aural sense of doom is confirmed graphically; he is first trapped in two dimensions by the door frame and finally in the third dimension when the door closes between him and us.

The front door of the Sebastian home plays an important role in emphasizing the boundary between the film's interior and exterior spaces. Notorious is one of many films in which a home or room sets off one character from the rest of the world. That interior space is often a metaphor for the essential isolation of the character, an isolation that Robin Wood defines as both protective and imprisoning.[1] Usually, as in Rear Window, a shift occurs; the room that at first seems protective eventually becomes a trap. The invaded room is thus central to the Hitchcockian attempt to penetrate our complacency, particularly within domestic situations. In Rear Window the hero must helplessly wait as the villain enters the apartment from which the hero had safely spied on him. In Shadow of a Doubt a murderous uncle displaces a niece from her own bedroom and eventually tries to kill her. Finally, in the television film Four O'Clock a man planning to murder his wife is tied up next to his own bomb. In each case the outside world that is at first the source of threat then becomes the source of salvation. The victim must communicate with the outside world to save his life. In Rear Window this aural communication involves a scream for help to the policemen and fiancee across a courtyard. In Shadow of a Doubt it involves a telephone call. As the heroine makes frantic phone calls to a detective, Hitchcock photographs her through a banister, to emphasize her feeling of entrapment in her own house. Lastly, in Four O'Clock the protagonist grunts and strains in order to make himself heard despite a gag on his mouth. Hitchcock teases him with telephone rings and door bells that he cannot answer.

Indeed, the telephone call is a major aural intruder, offering either threats or salvation from outside. In The Thirty-nine Steps a

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telephone ring jars the hero just after a strange woman has died on his bed with a knife in her back. The ringing is felt, by hero and viewer alike, as a threat from outside, marking him as a sitting target if he remains in his room. The telephone is the chief link with the outside world in Dial M for Murder. Husband and wife are aurally linked through it during the attempted strangling of the wife (by a killer hired by the husband); the husband is forced to over-hear his wife's painful struggling. After killing her would-be attacker, the wife is relieved to find, and depend on, her husband on the other end of the line. She does not know, of course, that he is the very person who seeks her death. The telephone also rings during a rape/strangling in Frenzy. However, this victim does not save herself; with each unanswered ring her chances for rescue diminish.

Another aural indication of the unlikelihood of rescue is a door. slam. In both The Wrong Man and Frenzy, when the hero is unjustly thrown into jail. Hitchcock emphasizes and finalizes his feelings of incarceration by heightening the effect of the cell door slamming through extra volume and reverberation.' Hitchcock often claimed that his own fear of imprisonment went back to his early childhood when his father sent him to jail for several hours (or several minutes—the story varies) as a deterrent to naughtiness. The story may well be apocryphal, but the way Hitchcock described it is significant: "I always thought it was the clang of the door which was the potent thing—the sound and the solidity of that closing cell door and the bolt."[2] Spoto observes that in Topaz "the closing doors suggest not only the separation between nations . . . but also the estrangement between individuals. At some point in the film, every major character loudly slams a door; everyone is shut out of everyone's life, at least for a time."[3]

Aural intrusion is an essential technique of the single-set films, which are all experiments with unified space. Dial M for Murder and Rope are both adaptations of plays, but the spatial orientation is quite different in each; Dial M for Murder is an experiment with 3-D, and Rope is an exercise in perpetual camera movement. Hitchcock starts Rope by cutting from the exterior to the interior of an apartment just after a victim screams, and thereafter Hitchcock stays within the apartment, cutting only at reel changes. (As V. F.

Perkins notes, whereas Hitchcock disguises the ten-minute camera changeovers, he cuts to a new setup every twenty minutes for the projector changeovers.[4] After an initial moment of traffic noise inserted when the murderers first open their curtains, there is no more sound from the street until the end of the film, when an approaching police siren foretells the doom of the two murderers who have been hiding a corpse in their apartment.[5] With the final intrusion of outside noise the apartment that has shielded their crime suddenly becomes their trap. The shift to outside noise signals a shift from subjectivity to external reality: the restriction during most of the film to sounds within the apartment matches the murderers' sense of insularity, the occasional door bells and telephone rings signal the major threats to their security, and the final wail of a siren brings them into the larger world of retribution.

At the end of the film the man who discovers the corpse repudiates his indirect role in the murder by opening an apartment window and firing three shots. Rising voices from passersby on the street below indicate that the police will be called, and soon we hear the wail of a siren, which eventually crescendoes to a deafening intensity. The importance of these sounds to Hitchcock's meaning is indicated by the painstaking efforts he made to obtain the effects. He insisted that the comments of the passersby be recorded from a microphone six stories above them, and he refused to use the standard police siren available from the studio's sound library. He told Truffaut:

I asked them, "How are you going to give the impression of distance?" and they answered, "We'll make it soft at first, and then we'll bring it up loud." But I didn't want it done that way. I made them get an ambulance with a siren. We placed a micro-phone at the studio gate and sent the ambulance two miles away and that's the way we made the soundtrack.[6]

In Dial M for Murder outside noises are essential throughout much of the film. Just beyond the upstage door is a rarely seen foyer where several crucial actions take place.[7] From it we hear the sound of footsteps, which alternately bring rescuers or murderers. To obtain final proof of guilt several characters must listen to

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[IMAGE: Rope. James Stewart and John Dall. The final wail of a siren will bring the larger world of retribution.]

discover which suspect knows that an apartment key is hidden in the foyer. The unseen foyer also figures prominently in the play, but a stage production could not have been so selective about the relative loudness of footfall as various characters approach. Phone calls, are, as I have suggested, another medium of salvation or threat in this film. These were inherited from the stage play as well, but Hitchcock characteristically shoots the film in such a way as to emphasize the significance of the phone as a link to the outside world. The difference is that in a play it is nearly impossible to establish point of view if there is more than one character onstage, whereas on film Hitchcock can, and does, connect sounds with the perceptions of a given character at a given time.[8]

Although Dial M for Murder was filmed in 3-D, exaggerated thrustings toward or away from the audience are kept to a minimum

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(two shots), and the added depth is used only in very subtle ways. (The film was released in a flat print version in most of the country and not seen as photographed until spring 1980.) Indeed, the film was shot on a set that more or less preserved the missing wall and proscenium arch feeling of the stage. In 3-D, however, actions downstage protrude into the audience and actions upstage recede, and this exaggerates the distance of the foyer, which lies behind an upstage door. The most conspicuous three-dimensional effect is the heroine's grasping toward the audience for help while she is being strangled (her outstretched arm finds a pair of scissors). The other extreme on this axis would be the foyer and what lies beyond. It would seem that when Hitchcock is using techniques that make us most identify with his victim, he uses the depth axis—reaching into the audience or forcing us to listen with a character to what is happening beyond the door. For more neutral effects he sticks to the less-threatening, lessinvolving cross-screen axis. In effect, what he has done is to use one axis in the film for point-of-view identification techniques and the other for less-involving moments. The mise-en-scene is more of a psychological space in the former case, more of a theatrical one in the latter.

At the climax of the film Hitchcock moves out visually into the foyer while the detective who has solved the murder narrates the telltale actions of the husband. Tony, as he hunts for a key. (The second exaggerated 3-D effect is saved for the moment when that key is produced.) At this point we are far from point-of-view shooting. Indeed, the effect of having Tony go through his actions as the detective narrates them is to make Tony somewhat puppetlike; his behavior seems controlled by the omniscient detective. The film's ending places it outside the dominant Hitchcock tradition in which we share a character's point of view. Instead, the last sequence operates within the conventions of the detective-thriller genre to which the play and most detective novels belong, in which the solutions are all explained by a mastermind detective. In this genre there is less emphasis on character identification and sympathy than on the deductive brilliance of the sleuth.

Unlike Rope, Rear Window, and parts of Dial M for Murder, Lifeboat is not a subjective film. Its single setting—passengers adrift in a dinghy—is just as metaphorical but has more to do with

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the concept of social microcosm than with subjective perception. There is, of course, a pervasive tension between the interior and exterior space, because the basic question is whether the passengers will cross paths with another vessel. When the passengers finally do hear a noise from a distant source, its potential as either threat or salvation is rendered with an ambiguity on the sound track. The passengers hear a rumbling, which they at first take to be thunder (a positive sound because they are dying of thirst and would welcome rain), but which turns out to be the guns of an enemy ship.

Although the boat as a whole is not a subjective space, aural intrusion nevertheless is a major aesthetic resource of the film and is essential to its thematic development. In this case the interior and exterior spaces are not constant but are redefined throughout the film, along with point of view. The challenge is to suggest feelings of privacy. Hitchcock creates that sense of private conversations or private thoughts by photographing a person or couple against the sky or water rather than from across the boat and simultaneously eliminating any other conversations in the boat. To bring the couple back psychologically into the milieu of the boat he simply reverses the camera angle. This reversal is usually motivated by the intrusion of sounds from other passengers. When Hitchcock wants simply to bring his passengers back into the action, he keeps these intrusions subtle; when he wants to emphasize the loss of privacy, he makes the intrusions noticeable. The alternation between moments of relative intimacy and moments of shared experience is central to Hitchcock's concern in Lifeboat with the tension between the formation of love relationships and the interdependency of a small group of people—and, by extension, of a group of nations.

The subjective space in Lifeboat has no literal setting; it is only a cinematic idea temporarily defined through a combination of framing, cutting, and the aural intrusion that ends it. This aural intrusion into subjective space that is temporary and nonliteral is typical of films shot in the classical style; most often that space is defined by the frame. In the expressionistic films the spatial territory invaded by sounds is usually the mind itself; hence the knife sequence in Blackmail and the delirium sequence in Secret Agent.

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In the subjective films, interior and exterior spaces are defined by the setting; the area susceptible of intrusion is usually a room, a building, or a vehicle. The clearest example of the car as subjective territory is the sequence in Psycho showing Marion driving from Phoenix toward California. Leo Braudy has discussed the subjectivity of the sequence in terms of audience identification. We remain inside the car with Marion, hearing the voices she imagines and seeing a policeman through her guilty eyes. Braudy observes that when an offscreen voice yells "Hey!" as she drives away from a car lot, we assume incorrectly along with her that it must be the policeman calling after her because "Hitchcock has given us that guilty, almost paranoid state of mind that converts all outside itself into images of potential evil."[9] Later in Psycho and in much of The Birds, however, there is no longer anyone to identify with. Our paranoia goes far beyond our fears for a given character. By the time of The Birds the whole world is a target for aural intruders.

Notes ( p 134 - 135)

1. Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films (London: A. Zwemmer; Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Bames, 1965, rev. 1969), p. 68.

2. Richard Schickel, The Men Who Made the Movies (New York: Atheneum, 1975), p. 275.

3. Donald M. Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1976), p. 432.

4. "Rope," Movie, no. 7 (February 1963), p. 11.

5. Spoto, in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 215, observes that in the four James Stewart films (Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rear Window, and Vertigo) "outside noises . . . are constantly heard in the background" and that they represent "the outside world . . . trying to break through his increasingly sealed life of fancy."

6. Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967; originally published as Le Cinema selon Hitchcock [Paris: Robert Laffont, 1966]) p. 135.

7. In his perceptive comparison of the stage and screen versions of Dial M for Murder, Peter Bordonaro says that the "entry fover" of the stage play is eliminated in the film, so that the front door opens directly into the living room. See his Dial M for Murder: A Play by Frederick Knott/A Film by Alfred Hitchcock," Sight and Sound 45 (Summer 1976):176. The foyer to which I am referring here is common to the entire building but serves the same purpose.

8. Bordonaro, ibid., argues persuasively that Hitchcock has altered the play's simplistic designation of evil husband and innocent wife by making the husband more sympathetic (he acts more out of sexual jealousy than greed) and the wife more guilty (of sexual infidelity). Our sympathies vary along with the points of view.

9. Leo Braudy, "Hitchcock, Truffaut, and the Irresponsible Audience," Film Quarterly 21 (Summer 1968):25.

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