"Hitchcock ... is so emotional that he pretends to be thinking only of the money."

François Truffaut

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."3

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,"5 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.