Paris Day 5

Today we watched Blackmail, directed by Hitchcock. It was super cool to see a film where they had to change the reels in the middle. It was also interesting to see the differences in pacing in an older film like that. It hit every beat that it needed to in order to set up a successful narrative by modern standards, but it spend an awful lot of time on the set up to clue the audience in to the fact that her boyfriend is a detective. It was a rather long sequence of him solving a case that had nothing to do with the plot, but it might’ve had to do with the need for an action sequence at the beginning to hook audiences. Another moment that was more drawn out than modern film was the chase sequence, but that might be because in modern film chase scenes have been so escalated to keep audience attention that I’ve been Flowers For Algernoned into finding older ones slow. It was also cool to see the attention paid to shadows that a lot of old films have. It had a few noir shots of bars of light from blinds falling on the characters, or half of someone’s face cast in shadow. The most notable was when the protagonist decided to turn herself in and she stood up, a shadow cast around her neck like a noose.