Sabotage

 

As a self-professed cinephile and ‘master of suspense’, Alfred Hitchcock may be known for the series of psychologically driven thrillers that he released in the 1950s and '60s, but actually, the director’s professional trajectory can be traced way back to the 1930s. His 1936 work, Sabotage, in particular, not only points forward to the gut wrenching mystery that would characterise many of his later films, including Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960), but also points backwards, to Kuleshov’s experiments with shots of faces, objects, and editing, conducted in the 1910s and 1920s.

As Mary Ann Doane has persuasively illustrated (2003: 101), Kuleshov’s influence on Sabotage is, perhaps, most present, during a famous scene in which Mrs Verloc (Sylvia Sidney), murders her husband (Oscar Homolka) with a kitchen knife, after learning of his complicity in a terrorist incident. It is during this scene that Hitchcock deploys the face/object pattern that we saw in Kuleshov’s footage, however here in the service of a moment of extreme tension. Perhaps most importantly, however, are the emotions that seem to emerge in the expressions of the two protagonists as they stare at each other: ‘guilt and murderous desire’ (Doane 2003: 103). Once again, through the simple magic of editing, protagonists appeared to feel; and, no longer a ‘mindless object’, faces appeared to think.

Want to know more?

Read about Sabotage here.

Watch a clip from the film here.

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