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.33
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."36
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.
*
"Man does not live by murder alone - he needs affection, encouragement and - every now and then - a drink."
(Sir Alfred Hitchcock"s toast)
Juhani Pallasmaa, valedictory lecture at the Helsinki University of Technology, 20.1.1997.
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