Developing as it does with the precision of mathematical thought, the Rear Window is probably Alfred Hitchcock"s most perfectly constructed film. It takes place during four days, from Wednesday to Saturday, and the events are filmed from the window of one apartment and mostly through the eyes of one person - the magazine photographer L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart), confined to a wheelchair with his leg in plaster.
Everything takes place in a block of apartments at 125 West 9th Street, Greenwich Village, at the south end of Manhattan, or more precisely within the buildings surrounding the courtyard. The address is made up as in reality this part of the street has no such number, because it changes into Christopher Street before reaching number 125. The fictional address is due to American law which requires that a film murder shall not take place at a real address. However, No. 125 Christopher Street was the address of the film murderer before the name was changed and in actual fact the model for the apartment block in the film was an actual building located at this address.
Most of the buildings around the courtyard are typical American tenements built in the grim "Federal brick" style. On the extreme right is a multi-storey plastered building, in front a four-storey brick house, directly in front a small, two storey building to the left of which is an alley leading to the street, and on the extreme left another red brick building that is so high that the upper storeys never appear in the film. The partly paved and planted courtyard is at different levels, and at the rear to the right is a part jutting out with a roof terrace joined to a glass fronted studio flat.
L.B. Jeffries"s home is a two-room apartment. The film takes place in the living room which has a kitchenette separated by cupboards. It contains a bay window overlooking the yard, a fireplace, a door to the bedroom, and a front door three steps up from the floor. The bedroom door is opened only once when the protagonist"s girlfriend Lisa goes in to change into her nightgown. This mysterious room, which is never shown to the audience, is a familiar Hitchcockian psychological theme - there is a locked room in the film Rebecca, for instance, the door of which is never opened. During the period of Jeff"s convalescence, a high bed has been moved into the bay, and the other furnishings have been moved to allow for his immobility and treatment.
"In my opinion the most fascinating films are those where everything happens in one single place, such as Hitchcock"s Rope or Rear Window, Marcel Carné"s Le Jour Se Léve and Michael Snow"s Wavelength,"2 said the American film director and researcher Peter Wollen in his lecture at the first Film and Architecture seminar in Helsinki in October 1996.
The extreme spatial restrictions of Rear Window - the film is seen from the perspective of a person bound to one spot and everything takes place within one huge set - was a stimulating challenge for Hitchcock: "It was a possibility of doing a purely cinematic film. You have an immobilised man looking out. That"s one part of the film. The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts. This is actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea."
THE CHARACTERS IN THE FILM
Walter Benjamin"s description of the theatrical character of the townscape of Naples is an exact picture of the combined stage and auditorium in Rear Window: "Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stage and boxes."
The tenants observed through the windows of their apartments are like a collection of butterflies in glass-covered cases - the director even puts this idea into the mouth of the photographer, "they can ... watch me like a bug under glass, if they want to." The tenants form a cross section of New York"s colourful populace: a song writer composer, a young dancer keeping her figure in trim, a sculptress, a middle-aged spinster longing for male company, the passionate newlyweds, a childless couple doting over their little dog, a salesman and his invalid nagging wife, and the film"s protagonist, the magazine photographer L.B. Jeffries, Jeff, and his wealthy, fashion-conscious girlfriend - Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) who lives in the high rent district of Park Avenue and 63rd Street "and never wears the same dress twice". There"s a heat wave going on, everybody keeps their windows open, and to wile away the time the convalescent photographer in his wheelchair begins to observe what"s happening in the courtyard.
"The field of vision has always seemed to me comparable to the ground of archeological excavation," writes Paul Virilio. Despite being so contrived and restricted, the apartment block in the film is a rich excavation of city life in which the layers are only gradually exposed. The tenants form a closed community for whom the outside world appears distant; it is only seen in the film as a painted silhouette and a narrow view of the street. "What you see across the way is a group of little stories that ... mirror a small universe,"6 as Hitchcock said about the world in his movie. Lower middle class life was in any case familiar to him from his own childhood in the suburbs of London.
The tenants never encounter each other, except for a brief exchange of words between the sculptress and the salesman at the beginning of the film which he crudely terminates: "Why don"t you shut up." Although the tenants have outside friends, they remain strangers to each other. "You don"t know the meaning of the word neighbour," says the strangled dog"s owner about her neighbours at this most dramatic scene in the film. Not until the scream following the discovery of the strangled dog do they come into the courtyard space and look down upon the centre of attention; the darkened windows reveal the dog strangler and wife murderer withdrawn from the group. He can be seen smoking a glowing cigarette in his darkened apartment. The darkness of this scene is undoubtedly one of the finest of its type in the history of the cinema. In this scene the camera moves temporarily and unnoticed into the courtyard to view the characters from below, as a single wide frame shot, from the perspective of the strangled dog. This deviation brings about one of the most dramatic scenes in the film. "The size of the image is used for dramatic purposes,"7 says Hitchcock about his cinematic dramaturgy.
THE LOGIC OF TERROR
The suspense in the film is based on the irrefutable logic of terror. Hitchcock slowly awakens in the audience a stream of suspense which he dams until the final cataractous release. Hitchcock planned his film so precisely that after it had been edited, only a few dozen metres of film remained on the cutting room floor.
As is usual with an artistic masterpiece, Rear Window weaves innumerable details into a faultless fabric in which allusions and hints criss-cross unendingly in all directions. Every episode or line appears to contain meanings and allusions. Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy), the nickname given to the shapely dancer, intimates mutilation, the central theme of the film. The little dog is killed because "it knew too much", a natural allusion to the film Hitchcock directed twice (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934 and 1956). Hitchcock even wrote an enigmatic article about his wife Alma entitled "The Woman Who Knew Too Much".8 Even the words of the songs heard in the background always relate ambiguously to the scene. Colours, too, contain meanings: for example, Miss Lonelyhearts (Judith Evelyn) is coded in green; her dresses are always different shades of emerald green and there are no other green clothes in the film.
Rear Window is truly a masterpiece of artistic abridgement: its richness and logic are only revealed after seeing it several times. But great works always contain a great number of redundances, depths and levels. The narrative logic of the film, its architectural messages, role characterisations, atmospheres and secret hints, camera angles and shot compositions, space and image details, and words and music constitute a mosaic that builds up the suspense with the infallibility of the geometrist. The film ends like a geometrical exercise at school, q.e.d. - which was to be demonstrated. "Clarity, clarity, clarity, you cannot have blurred thinking in suspense,"9 as Hitchcock says.
THE SITUATIONALITY OF MEANING
Hitchcock stresses the importance of pictorial and material expression, to which he totally subjects the narrative dialogue: "Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms."10 Hitchcock"s interest is not so much in the stories in his films but "in the way they are told."
"The impact of the image is of the first importance in a medium that directs the concentration of the eye so that it cannot stray. In the theatre, the eye wanders, while the word commands. In the cinema, the audience is led wherever the director wishes."11
Hitchcock"s ability to reveal the hidden feelings and moods of the characters by a simple gesture, rhythm or camera angle frees the dialogue for its contrapunctual purpose. On top of an everyday pictorial narrative, lines are spoken that have quite surprising or absurd dimensions, like the insurance nurse-therapist Stella"s (Thelma Ritter) story of how she foresaw the Great Crash of "29 from the number of times her patient, the boss of General Motors, visited the toilet: "When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, soon the whole nation is ready to let go," she remarks.
THE EXTRANEOUS AND THE CONTRADICTORY
The extraneousness of the events, their intermingling and occasional triviality - like the meaningless helicopter flying over the buildings at the beginning of the film, which hovers to gawk at the bathing beauties on the flat roof -increases the credibility and irrevocability of the main story, in much the same way as the mundane and incidental details in the epic works of the great painters of history. Tizian"s monumental painting Presentation of the Virgin brings a touch of ordinary life through irrelevant episodes: the countrywoman selling eggs, the boy playing with a dog and the mother with a child in her lap talking to a monk. A story achieves the aura of real life when it does not proceed too linearly and obviously; the individual will of the narrator and director controlling the events appears to simultaneously submit to the overriding power of destiny.
Fear and love are contradictory and mutually exclusive emotions. In Rear Window suspense and fear often develop alongside the love affairs; the scenes where Lisa and Jeff are kissing, the intimacy of the newlyweds behind the drawn blinds, the men fawning over Miss Torso, and the lovelorn Miss Lonelyhearts. Even the murderer is having an illicit love affair.
Alongside the yearning and problematics of love, there are powerful erotic and sexual suggestions and symbols, such as Lisa"s pining for love and Miss Torso"s erotic teasing, and on the other hand Jeff"s rebuffing of Lisa"s approaches compared to his obvious interest in observing the intimate life of the dancer from a distance. As regards Jeff, he has both phallic symbols (the telephoto camera) and manifestations of frigidity and impotency (a leg in plaster and immobility). Jeff"s rebuffing of Lisa and occasional rudeness is not explained by the difference in class or customs, as he would have it.
The events in the lives of the tenants develop independently of the main story, but occasionally the climaxes of these separate stories are connected, as for example Miss Lonelyhearts" preparations for suicide at the same time as Lisa faces a dangerous situation in the murderer"s apartment. Hitchcock creates a feeling of terror through well chosen scenes just when the mind is most receptive, such as when a bloodcurdling scream from the yard interrupts Lisa displaying her enticing lingerie, the murderer cleaning the butcher"s knife and little saw against the sound of children playing, or when Lisa is kissing Jeff whilst his mind is preoccupied with the significance of the murder weapons. The murderer"s gardening hobby also belongs to this series of contradictions. The occasional background sound of a soprano practicing simultaneously lulls the audience into a benign sense of security as well as a premonition of fear from the higher notes. "Emotion is an essential ingredient of suspense,"12 writes Hitchcock.
SPECTACLE
The lives of the tenants in Rear Window can be observed in the lit rooms behind uncurtained windows like separate films or TV programmes. Peeping into the apartments through the photographer"s long focus lens and binoculars is a bit like channel-swapping with a remote13; Lisa Fremont"s metaphors; "It"s opening night of the last depressing week of L.B. Jeffries in a cast", "I bought the whole house", and "The show"s over for tonight", as she pulls down the shades of the windows facing the courtyard in front of Jeff"s curious eyes, all indicate a show. "Preview of coming attractions," says Lisa as she flashes the overnight bag containing her nightgown, is also a reference to the cinema-like structure of the story. The transfer of the action from one window to another - as if moving from one screen to another - creates a comical effect, but also brings to mind René Magritte"s conceptual painting L"evidence éternelle, 1930, of a woman"s body painted in parts on five separate, superimposed canvases or the landscape variation of the same theme in Les profondeurs de la terre, 1930.
Actually, Jeff appears to create the story of the film in his own mind, as he interprets the meanings of the unrelated events he observes and almost directs how they will develop. The whole story might just be a dream or an illusion brought on by his immobility. He also cuts the film into montages by transferring his view (= camera"s view = spectator"s view) from one window and episode to the next and in selecting the image frames and distances with his own eyes through the alternative optics of the telephoto camera and binoculars. Jeff is thus simultaneously both the film"s director and spectator and Rear Window in its entirety is a metaphor and study in making and viewing a film.
THE REALISM OF THE SET
The apartments are like stages stacked one upon the other, like urn recesses in a columbarium, with no access to the normal anatomy of an apartment block, to staircases and corridors; only the flats of the salesman and Miss Lonelyhearts are connected to a corridor. The young man in the just rented flat on the left reopens the front door in order to carry his bride over the threshold, but where the door leads to remains unclear. The block of apartments in the film is like a tree lifted from its roots without access to the ground water.
Neither are the plans of the apartments "real", as they have been flattened against their facades so everything can be seen through the camera in Jeff"s room. For example, the flats of the Thorwalds and Miss Lonelyhearts are unorthodoxly approached through a kitchen. And where is the murderer"s (Raymond Burr) bathroom located, the walls of which he is shown to be washing?
The apartment block in Hitchcock"s film appears to have been built by man into a mountain, a canyon, the excavated flats of which apparently lack another side, despite the fact that the audience is shown a narrow view of a rear street and a restaurant located at the opening between the buildings. The courtyard and the apartments facing it form a huge stage surrounded by what appears to be a hidden back stage in the darkness of which the occupants move from the street to their flats.
THE PSYCHICAL MAP OF THE FILM
Peter Wollen sees in general the series of places in a film as its structural elements: "Building up the story of a film ... also means drawing a psychical map. In watching a film we form in our minds diagrams of the relationship between the different places on which the film is constructed, and of those routes the characters use in or between these places."
The routes used by the characters in Rear Window are almost completely in the unknown back stage, neither can the audience form the kind of psychical map Wollen spoke of. The exit from Jeff"s flat to the street is somewhere to the left behind the audience. The murderer creeping up the stairs to Jeff"s flat brings the unfamiliar rear of the building into the audience"s imagination and it is just the unfamiliar rear that maximises the threat: at this stage the threat is not just the rather pathetic Mr Thorwald, but the labyrinthine unfamiliarity of the building itself. The true identities of the tenants, their invisible intimate life and subconsciousness, appear to be concealed in this back stage. The threat is not contained in what is shown, but in what is not shown. The terror is not in the scene projected on the screen, but in the minds of the audience.
The wheelchair-bound photographer has to leave his front door unlatched so his girlfriend, nurse and detective buddy can enter; the three steps leading to the door prevent the wheelchair patient from opening it. The knowledge that the door is unlocked increases the threat of the footsteps creeping up the stairs. An extra dimension of terror is provided by the narrow strip of light under the door with its ominous guillotine-like shape. When the passage lights suddenly go out as the footsteps reach the door, it"s like the blade falling; the startling of the audience when the lights go out further increases the intensity of terror.
Hitchcock says about his special cinematic field, fear: "My special field (which I have split) into two categories - terror and suspense ... terror is induced by surprise, suspense by forewarning." He went on to define the difference between the two: "Suspense is more enjoyable than terror, actually, because it is a continuing experience and attains a peak crescendo fashion; while terror, to be truly effective, must come all at once, like a bolt of lightening, and is more difficult, therefore, to savour."
THE GEOMETRY OF VOYEURISM
The film tells the story of a murder and its exposure, but its central philosophical theme is actually the voyeurist gaze. The complicated relationship between the watcher and the watched in Rear Window brings to mind Velazquez"s painting Las Meninas. The location and role of the watcher have been the subject of philosophical contemplation in both.
"We"re all voyeurs to some extent, if only when we see an intimate film. And James Stewart is exactly in the position of a spectator looking at a movie," François Truffaut notes when interviewing Hitchcock about his intentions in Rear Window. Jeff"s voyeurism is not, however, a sexual perversion in its normal meaning, but more the professional curiosity of a photographer.
Although the concept of private life would appear to be quite self evident, the 2800-page A History of Private Life shows that it has both an interesting history and a multiplicity of dimensions. In a drawing in his collection The Art of Living19 published in 1945, the well-known cartoonist Saul Steinberg shows a set-up similar to that in the film of a dissected apartment block exposing the private lives of its tenants. But even Steinberg had his predecessor; as far back as 1847 Le Magazine pittoresque"s cartoonist depicted in his Tableaux de Paris drawing different life styles and social classes within the framework of a single building.
The voyeuristic stage and private performances of Rear Window are also connected to the private peep shows, the "tableaux vivant", of Parisian brothels in the last century. "That"s a secret, private world you"re looking at out there. People do a lot of things in private that they couldn"t possibly explain in public," says Detective Doyle (Wendell Corey) to Jeff.
By way of introduction to the voyeurist content of the film, the bamboo shades rise slowly underneath the credits, like a view opening through drowsily raised eyelids; this is also a reference to the gradual awakening of the unsuspecting sleeping photographer to the reality of murder. The shades are likewise a metaphor for the stage curtain; as they rise they reveal the courtyard, the scene of the unfolding drama. This introduction to the theme of voyeurism is also present in the hovering helicopter ogling at the scantily dressed girls.
Throughout the film, the camera - the voyeuristic eye - is bound to the wheelchair in the photographer"s room, apart from the climax when the murderer pushes his exposer out of the window - it then moves outside along with the photographer. The camera also pops outside during the scene of the strangled dog, but the spectator hardly realises that it has momentarily strayed into the courtyard.
In analysing Descartes" writings dealing with reading, the philosopher David Michael Levin uses the term "bodiless reader". The protagonist in Rear Window and the spectator are likewise bodiless observers. Jeff"s immobility eliminates the physicality of experience and transforms it into something purely visual; the eye subjects the other senses. Scratching his itchy leg under the plaster with a back scratcher epitomises the loss of Jeff"s sense of movement and touch. His complete reliance on his sense of vision represents the spectator, alone and bound to his chair in the darkness of the cinema. It is just the spectator"s immobility that lulls him into a regressive, dreamlike state.21
THE MORALITY OF VOYEURISM
"The New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the work house ... You know, in the old days, they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker," warns Stella. "If you could only see yourself [with those binoculars] ... it"s diseased," Lisa scolds and comments that we are turning into "a race of peepers". "What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change," says Stella warning Jeff of the dangers of peeping. At the end of the film the murderer literally fulfills the nurse"s idea by pushing Jeff out of the window - to see the inside of his flat from the outside for the first time.
Jeff ponders whether it is ethically acceptable to spy on people through his long-focus lens. "I"m not much on rear-window ethics," replies Lisa to his semi-rhetorical question. At first both Lisa and Stella disapprove of Jeff"s snooping ("window shopper," accuses Stella), but later become keen peepers themselves. The murderer only realises he is being watched when, following Lisa"s worried hand movements, he notices the position of his observer. At this dramatic moment Jeff changes from being the surveillant to being the surveilled, and all of a sudden his former victim gains the upper hand. In trying to delay the approach of the murderer, Jeff blinds him with flashbulbs. In the eyes of the murderer, his field of vision is toned red - showing his temporary blindness and increasing rage. In this scene the contrast between darkness and light assumes an obvious symbolic meaning.
On two occasions Jeff"s suspicions about the crime appear to be unfounded. The main characters in the film, as well as the audience, are temporarily disappointed that no murder had been committed after all. This feeling of disappointment induces a sense of guilt which gets the audience even more closely involved in the course of the story. Whether in fact a murder has been committed is of importance also from the point of view of the moral acceptance of peeping. "I wonder if it"s ethical [to watch a man], even if you prove that he didn"t commit a crime?" muses Jeff.
In his book Downcast Eyes, the philosopher Martin Jay brings out Freud"s views on the relationship between the desire to know, sexuality and voyeurism: "Freud came to believe that the very desire to know (Wisstrieb), rather than being innocent, was itself ultimately derived from an infantile desire to see, which had sexual origins. Sexuality, mastery and vision were thus intricately intertwined in ways that could produce problematic as well as "healthy" effects. Infantile scopophilia (Schaulust) could result in adult voyeurism or other perverse disorders much as exhibitionism and scopophobia (the fear of being seen).".
SURVEILLANCE AND THE SURVEILLED: THE PANOPTICON
But Rear Window also philosophises about the distance between the surveillant and surveilled. In the film, the latter are always distanced by the courtyard or some technical gadget. Distance gives to the experience a sense of helplessness and loneliness, as well as a subconscious feeling of guilt associated with watching. The spectator also sees himself as a Peeping Tom. The voyeuristic effect is created just in the one-sidedness of surveilling and because the object is unaware of being observed. The fact that the objects of Jeff's = the spectator's interest never look back, creates a voyeuristic experience and turns the spectator into a Peeping Tom whose feeling of guilt also makes him feel he is being scrutinised.
There is an important psychological difference between the events in Jeff's room and those in the apartments opposite: the former are by nature theatre, whereas the latter distant episodes are cinema. Walter Benjamin discussed the psychological difference between these two art forms in one of his best known works: "The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. ... The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole." The audience experience the events in Jeff's room as a continuum, but those in the apartments opposite as unrelated fragments.
Another element in the film is the duality of the voyeuristic gaze; simultaneous spectacle and surveillance. "Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance ... We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine," concluded Foucault. In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as the main theoretical means for explaining how man became the object of surveillance in the institutional control, scientific research and behavioral experiments of modern society. Bentham's Panopticon had its predecessor in Louis Le Vau's menagerie at Versailles. At the centre of the building was an octagonal pavilion containing the king's salon, on every side of which large windows looked out onto seven cages containing different species of animals - the eighth side was reserved for the entrance. Similarly, in the film's menagerie there are seven flats being scrutinised and an alley from the street to the courtyard! But Foucault perhaps dismissed the possibility of simultaneous spectacle and surveillance, which is just what Hitchcock's film is all about. Vincenzo Scamozzi's design for the stage of Andrea Palladio's Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza (1584), a vista of seven different streets, is likewise reminiscent of the panopticon as well as the set in Rear Window where seven different flats can be observed from Jeff's room.
The film set lifts peeping to the third potential; 1) the movie camera watches 2) the photographer watching through his telephoto camera, and 3) the audience in turn watches the events through the illusion projected on the screen. Rear Window is a heightened central perspective film, which brings to mind the perspective drawing device used by the Renaissance artist in one engraving by Dürer. The point of projection of the central perspective, Jeff, is simultaneously a member of the cinema audience and the first person narrator of the story. In using a perspective device an artist normally requires an assistant, just like Lisa, Stella and Doyle function as Jeff's legs in his investigations.
CAMERA OBSCURA AND THE STAGE AS A MACHINE
The photographer tied to his room becomes both camera and projector, as well as a camera obscura representing his own room.25 "Can I borrow your portable keyhole," asks Stella taking Jeff's binoculars. The Peeping Tom is basically the photographer's room, the spatial location of which in the apartment block complex enables the ensuing situation. The set, made under the supervision of Joseph MacMillan Johnson and Hal Pereira - the Rear Window's panopticon - is perfect as the logical architectonic projection of the story.
The location of the film's action, with its courtyard, gardens, streets, cars and thunder showers, was made in Paramount's largest studio, Stage 18, which measured 55 x 30 metres and was 12 metres high.26 It was the largest set ever built for Paramount, and included 31 flats of which 12 were fully furnished. Hitchcock himself supervised the construction which took six weeks. The structures contained 70 windows and doors, and the walls in Jeff's flat were removable to allow for all possible camera angles. The lowest level of the courtyard was built below the studio floor. Filming the events in the individual flats and all the small objects (the ring, pearl necklace, the name Eagle Road Laundry on the murderer's laundry parcel - the word laundry alludes to the French mass-murderer Henri Désiré Landru, upon whom Chaplin had based his film Monsieur Verdoux eight years earlier in 194727) would not have been possible in natural light. The day and night lighting for this colossal set required all of Paramount's equipment.
As much as the narrative itself, the structure of the film is composed of the spatial relationships and geometry of the tenants' flats, the courtyard, the alley to the street, the street itself with the restaurant on the opposite side and the view above of the south town silhouette. The apartment block is a stage machine which produces the narrative according to the script. The set is thus a kind of variation on the theme of the promenade architectural - architecture subordinated to a linearly advancing story. It is also the architecture of surveillance and domination according to Michel Foucault's well-known analysis; his picture of the cells in the ideal panopticon-prison corresponds exactly to Hitchcock's cinematic panopticon: "They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible. ... Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from where he can be seen from the front by the supervisor, but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but be does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication."28 The scene in which the naked dancer is in the bathroom and the murderer in the corridor leading to his apartment, separated by only the thickness of the wall, are the solitary cells in Rear Window's panopticon.
PAINTING THEMES IN REAR WINDOW
Edward Hopper's painting Night Windows (1928), the theme of which is an illuminated room in the house opposite, is like something out of the voyeurist world of Rear Window. Miss Lonelyhearts, waiting for her imaginary companion or contemplating suicide, is also like one of Hopper's paintings - for example, Automat (1927) - lonely women sitting in a café; even the green colour of her dress appears in Hopper's paintings. It is evident that Hitchcock was fully acquainted with the works of Hopper for he had Bates' house in Psycho (1960) built according to the artist's painting House by the Railway (1923).
Many of Hopper's other paintings are also related to the voyeurist theme of the film. In Night Hawks (1942) and New York Office (1962) the subjects of external scrutiny are a night bar and an office; in Apartment Houses (1923) and Room in New York (1932) the intimate interiors of private homes. Girlie Show (1941) draws directly on the sexual content of voyeurism, whereas in Eleven A.M. (1926) a naked woman is staring fixedly at the courtyard from an open window. Finally, in Office in a Small Town (1953), a lonely man in an office appears to be surveilling and commanding his immediate surroundings in much the same way as L.B. Jeffries in the film.
A figure looking out of a window is a familiar motif in painting since the Renaissance. However, the spectator, the artist, is always in the same space as his model and with his or her approval. On the other hand, looking through a window into a room from the outside only became popular in our century. By its very nature a window is meant for looking out of, not the reverse. A view of the inside from the outside confuses the ontology of the window and makes it a voyeuristic instrument, and the object is no longer conscious of being under external scrutiny.
HITCHCOCK AND DUCHAMP
The voyeurism of Rear Window and the boundary between the private and public domains create a link to some of the central themes of modern art. The best known work dealing with the nature of voyeurism is undoubtedly Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés: 1. La chute d'eau, 2. Le gaz d'éclairage (1944-66), which the artist was making at the same time as Hitchcock was making his film. Duchamp made his final work in complete secrecy as it was believed he had given up art altogether. Both the film and Duchamp's enigmatic work are studies in fixed eye central perspective, the interaction of intimate privacy and voyeurist gaze, and the intertwining of eroticism and violence. An intimate event becomes public once a district attorney becomes involved, in other words when a crime has been committed under the veil of privacy.
In Duchamp's three-dimensional composition, a woman lying with her legs apart upon a reedy shore, a gas lamp raised in her left hand, is observed through two holes in an ancient Spanish timber door. In the background sparkles an electrically-operated illusionary waterfall. The young, fair-haired female figure's hairless pubes are indecently exposed directly in front of the viewer's eye in the dazzling light of a diorama. The perspective diorama composition suggests a narrative of sexual perversions or violence, but the event remains unexplained.29 The way in which the spectator's mind seeks a causal logic from the hints in Duchamp's construction, is reminiscent of the way Jeff perceives the logic of the series of episodes he sees from his window. Duchamp's work arouses a simultaneous feeling of scopophilic excitement and voyeuristic shame. The incident in Hitchcock's film is exposed as a crime, but that in Duchamp's work remains for ever enigmatic; is this Duchamp's perfect crime? But as Octavio Paz notes in his essay on Duchamp: "We pass from voyeurism to clairvoyance."30 Likewise in Rear Window the voyeurist gaze ultimately leads to clairvoyance and the purification that characterises a work of art.
THE ROLES OF OBJECTS
The language of objects plays a central role in this as in all Hitchcock's films. "I make it a rule to exploit elements that are connected with a character or a location; I would feel that I"d been remiss if I hadn't made maximum use of those elements,"38 says Hitchcock about the importance of location and objects in his films.
The photographer's camera naturally plays a fetishistic leading role. The objects in Jeff's room offer clues to why he is in a wheelchair with his leg in plaster; the photographs indicate his profession, the close-ups of racing cars the dangers he loves, and the shattered camera the accident on his last assignment. The camera is Jeff's tool and livelihood, but during the film it changes into a means for observing, warning and investigating, and - ultimately - a weapon of self-defence. The slide photographs of the garden - which the murderer has used for burying something - are another dimension of the camera.
In the murderer's apartment the murder weapons (the knife and saw), the aluminium jewellery sample case used to convey the dismembered body, the rope-bound trunk containing the wife's belongings (Jeff and his assistants, as well as the audience, are actually temporarily led to believe that the trunk contains bits of the body; "He better get that trunk out of there before it starts to leak," says Stella) represent violence. The rope conjures up an unpleasant association with hanging in the spectator's mind. The murdered woman's ring and handbag also play a role in the story. Lisa slipping the ring onto her own finger has a double meaning in its reference to her ardent desire to marry Jeff. Lisa's fashionable clothes - particularly her overtly provocative diaphanous nightgown - and her fetishism for expensive objects related to her value world creates a powerful symbolic tension compared to the mundane lower middle class existence of Jeff and his fellow tenants.
The apparent contradiction between the wealth reflected by Lisa's family and profession and the photographer's impoverishment ("I have never more than a week"s salary in the bank.") is continuously emphasised by Jeff. But in his book Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary connects photography and money in a way that eliminates any superficial class differences. "Photography and money become homologous forms of social power in the nineteenth century. They are equally totalizing systems for binding and unifying all subjects within a single global network of valuation and desire. ... Both are magical forms that establish a new set of abstract relations between individuals and things and impose those relations as the real. It is through the distinct but interpenetrating economies of money and photography that a whole social world is represented and constituted exclusively as signs."32 There is thus no real contradiction between the worlds of Lisa and Jeff - from the beginning they both belong to the same power elite.
The characters in the film are also treated as objects. The dancer and the ideal of perfection that Lisa represents are personifications of magazine femininity and erotic desire. In his immobility and helplessness Jeff is also transformed into an object, which the others have to move and care for. In the end even the figure of the murderer loses his vileness and repugnance when revealed as the pitiful product of a cruel fate he has only tried to conceal. Due to their prototypicality all the characters in the film are representatives of their own genre - models and concepts.
FICTION AND REALITY
In Hitchcock's film the audience is so gripped by suspense that the obvious theatrical unreality or architectonic incredibility of the buildings can no longer release or moderate the reality of terror. Architecture has lost its normal meaning and has submitted to terror.
On the other hand, the incredulous staged background can also be seen as a striving for absolute truthfulness. At the end of the film the police arrive in Jeff's room only a few seconds after being alerted, but in fact the Sixth Precinct of the Manhattan police is actually in Tenth Street, just opposite the entrance to Jeff's flat. The Hotel Albert, where Jeff lures the murderer, was on the corner of Tenth Street and University Place when the film was being made - nowadays it has been refurbished as an apartment block.
The script of Rear Window was based on Cornell Woolrich's short story of the same name, to which Hitchcock added some authentic material about two macabre crimes - thus the film's fictional crime acquires a realism from two real-life cases. In the case of Patrick Mahon, he murdered a woman, dismembered her body and threw the bits one by one from a train window, except the head which he burnt. In the case of Dr Crippen, he murdered his wife and also dismembered her body. For a long time he managed to delude friends curious about his wife's disappearance by telling them she had gone to California. He was recognised whilst making his escape by steamer, in the company of his mistress disguised as a boy, on the basis of his wig and lower set of false teeth.
HUMOUR AND FANTASIES
It is characteristic of Hitchcock to raise the threshold of an audience's suspense by creating a smoke screen of macabre humour: "And for me, "suspense" doesn't have any value if it's not balanced by humour."34 Innocent macabre comments by Jeff and Stella inveigle the audience into imagining that a woman's body has been dismembered in one of the flats and the bits carried away in the sample case: "That would be a terrible job to tackle, just how would you start to cut up a human body?", "Just where do you suppose he cut her up? "Course, the bathtub! That's the only place where he could have washed away the blood", "In a job like that it must have splattered a lot," and "The only way anybody could get my wedding ring would be to chop off my finger".
The film does not show the murder or the dismemberment, not even a drop of blood, but they appear even more realistically in the minds of the audience. The nocturnal moment when the murder takes place is marked by the woman's muffled shriek and the sound of a glass breaking, but at this stage the audience is not ready to appreciate the meaning of these almost imperceptible sounds; this they acquire later on when the audience returns in its mind to the chronology and logic of the drama. The night thunder that accompanies these sounds probably gives the audience a feeling that something tragic has occurred.
The events which the audience imagines and its feelings about them are more impressionable. "I have always felt that you should do the minimum on the screen to get the maximum audience effect,"35 as Hitchcock says expressing his principle of cinematic minimalism.
At the end of the film the audience is forced to imagine that part of the woman's body was buried in the flowerbed, after hearing that Thorwald had dug it up and put it in the victim"s hat box; this episode brings to mind the Mahon case where the murderer also had trouble disposing of the victim's head.
During the film the spectators and actors of the spectacle change places on two occasions: Lisa moves from the auditorium to the stage, ie, the murderer's flat, and the murderer to Jeff's flat, ie, the auditorium. But the murderer also steps into the domain of the audience: Thorwald's arrival takes place quite clearly behind the vulnerable and unprotected back of the audience. The traditional theatre convention is that the spectator is inviolable, but when at the end of the film he is violently attacked, the psychological security created by the theatre illusion is shattered.
THE REALISM OF DREAMS
In his films Hitchcock reveals that behind everyday reality there is another reality. As he says: "Things are not as they would appear to be."
Any object or place becomes horrifying and unreal when we are capable of seeing through normal realism; beyond realism there is always surrealism. Subconscious, forgotten and rejected images seep through the ordinary consciousness dominated by the superego; without noticing it, our brains and nervous systems chart the dangers lurking in the unfamiliar. Even the faces of our mothers are transformed into frightening eroded landscapes if we stare so long that their familiar and loved features lose their ordinary meanings. In Hitchcock's films it is just the wavering between ordinary consciousness and dreams that predominates, the unreality of reality and the reality of unreality.
"For a director who bothers to really open his eyes, all the elements in our lives contain something make-believe,"37 wrote Jean Renoir in his autobiography. This becomes particularly clear when we watch Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window.
The film is a kind of conscious dream. But even the artistic stages of architecture are always something other than the total of their material structures. Even these are primarily mental spaces, architectural representations, and images of the perfect life. Architecture, too, leads our imagination to another reality.
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