Rear Window (1954) - Alfred Hitchcock
Related: film - voyeurism - 1954 - thriller
Rear Window (1954) - Alfred Hitchcock [Amazon.com]
Almost the entire movie is filmed from inside Jeff's bedroom, and most of the POV (point of view) shots are Jeff's. In other words, we generally see and hear only what Jeff sees and hears. However, at key points in the movie this rule is broken (usually as a dual or triple POV shot, but also the single POV shots of Doyle, Stella, and Lisa). Furthermore, there is at least one moment when the viewer sees something while Jeff is asleep, and in two key sequences, characters are seen from angles not possible from Jeff's window. This trend increases throughout the film until the final sequence, when Jeffries' POV is nearly subverted. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rear_Window#Analysis [Feb 2006]
Description
Rear Window (1954) is a motion picture directed by Alfred Hitchcock, based on Cornell Woolrich's short story "It Had to Be Murder" (1942). It is considered by many filmgoers, critics and scholars to be one of Hitchcock's best and most thrilling pictures. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rear_Window#Analysis [Dec 2005]
Analysis
Film theorist Mary Ann Doane has made the argument that Jeff, representing the audience, becomes obsessed with the 'screen', where a collection of storylines are played out. This line of analysis has often followed a feminist approach to interpreting the film. It is Doane who, using Freudian analysis to claim women spectators of a film become 'masculinized', pays close attention to Jeff's rather passive attitude to romance with the elegant Lisa, that is, until she crosses over from the spectator side to the screen, seeking out the wedding ring of Thorwald's murdered wife. It is only then that Jeff shows real passion for Lisa. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rear_Window#Analysis [Dec 2005]
Voyeurism is something of a clichéd plot device in cinematic fiction, for instance in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyeurism#Voyeurism_in_fiction [Dec 2005]
Since its birth, but most explicitly since the 1950s, the cinema has played with surveillance, voyeurism, and the power of the gaze, often in cautionary tales that conjure up the specter of totalitarianism, and also through meta-references to the movie camera's own complicity with institutional voyeurism. --Andrew Hultkrans via Surveillance in the Cinema via http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/7.1/SurvFilms/SurvFilms.html [Dec 2005]
Voyeurism, by definition, is the obsessive observation of sordid or sensational subjects, often sexual in nature. Renowned director Alfred Hitchcock further popularized voyeurism in what is considered by many to be his greatest film, Rear Window (Paramount, 1954). --Joe Winters via http://www.horror-wood.com/peep.htm [Dec 2005]
your Amazon recommendations