Frenzy (1972)Frenzy (1972)

Abstract

Abstract “Frenzy (1972): Pulling focus between a woman’s face and a face of death” turns its attention to one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most disconcerting shots—a facial close-up of “Babs” (Anna Massey) as the diegetic sounds of the Covent Garden market becomes mute, and the shot becomes soundless. Through a discussion of Gilles Deleuze and Béla Balázs’s theory of the close-up, this chapter argues this shot from Frenzy pulls focus between foregrounding an image of Babs’s thoughts and foregrounding a sonorous “face” of death that shadows her from behind. Indebted to Tania Modleski’s scholarship on Hitchcock, the face of death is identified with the violence of patriarchy that silences and erases women. The chapter concludes that Babs is an example of one of the many thinking women that populate Hitchcock’s films and that despite the threat of death and erasure that faces her, it is Babs’s story that dominates the screen.