“The film’s structure announces and maps out the interconnection between the conscious and the unconscious mind, between active voyeurism and passive, vaguely articulated, unconscious desire. The film is about looking and desire; it is about the interaction of conscious and unconscious activity; it is about the processes and activities of the cinema as it engages spectators in the attractions that define it as ‘entertainment,’ as a form of mass amusement that holds us in thrall.” (16-17)

spectacle and the “cinema of attractions”

sources
- story by Cornell Woolrich
- Ingrid Bergman and Robert Capa
- David O. Selznick

the two plot lines of classic Hollywood cinema
- voyeurism, sadism, exhibitionism
- murder mystery as working out of tensions in the love story
- drama of catharsis

“a very Freudian film”
“a very Catholic film”
a “testament” film
a self-reflexive work
- cinematic spectatorship & the separation of spaces
- Jeff’s profession, the backstory & the logic connecting looking and consequences
- theatrical spectacle: the curtain

structure: “the film reverses itself”
- death of the dog
- shift in point of view

Scott Curtis, "The Making of Rear Window"

The property
source material & copyright issues
financing and ownership

Preproduction
storyboard & 'pre-cutting'
the set:
- as mirror of Jeff's confinement
- as expression of themes

Principal photography
censorship issues & dealings with Production Code
issues engaged:
- power of the gaze
- comment on film spectatorship
- reflection on craft of film making
production problems: lighting, lenses, special effects
- scene shot but not used

[You are not responsible for the final section pp. 39-56.]

Elise Lemire, “Voyeurism and the Postwar Crisis of Masculinity in Rear Window”

Rear Window thematizes cinematic spectatorship, the dream state, and unconscious wishes

Feminist film theory and Rear Window:

Laura Mulvey on Rear Window:
- Jeff controls the point of view, Lisa never gets pov but is a passive image of visual perfection”, object of male gaze
- scopophilia
- identification and the ideal ego

the phallus: “figurative representation of male power”
- boy child identifies with father, girl with mother
- patriarchy

[male] spectators identify with male protagonist as ideal ego
2 male avenues of escape from psychosexual anxiety:
- sadistic voyeurism: investigating, demystifying, punishing, saving the woman
- fetishistic scopophilia: objectifying the woman as a reassuring object of the gaze

Tania Modleski’s alternative reading to Mulvey:
- Women have avenues of power & identification
- Lisa does share reaction shots with Jeff
- Woman spectator identifies with female figure:
-“Female spectators of RW must endure the murder of a wife but are also empowered in their recognition that Lisa’s seemingly normal desires for a husband endanger her”
- Hitchcock is investigating his own ambivalence about women

1950s culture & masculinity, as reflected in Rear Window
- suburbia: isolated family typically managed by woman
- decreasing opportunity to test manhood in Teddy Roosevelt-John Wayne manner

Injured Jeff is feminized, a version of the stay-at-home wife
Lisa reverses the stereotypical gender role
- reflects increased employment opportunities for women
- Anita Colby as model for Lisa

Notion of latent homosexuality & its connection to voyeurism
- 1950s notion that an adult male uninterested in marriage was gay (Lisa: "something too frightful to utter")
- association of homosexuality with feminization
- Playboy & attempt to give status to single men
- Introduction of Lisa: sexual assertiveness, intimidation, shadow: technique increases the feminization of Jeff
- Voyeurism presented as evidence of sexual perversity

Notion of women's sexuality as aberrant:
- Doyle's reaction to Lisa's night case
- Kinsey Report:1950s

Feminine intuition vs. male logic
In the course of Rear Window Jeff is transformed into “a great proponent of women’s ways”
- champions women’s intuition as way of knowing (vs. Doyle)
- handbag & camera

Shift in point of view from Jeff to Lisa & Stella
- Lisa & Stella gain control of the investigation
- Jeff can no longer look
- Final scene: Lisa is the one looking

First shot from Lisa’s pov: the songwriter, then her comment about creativity
- Lisa's denial of her own creativity reflects H’s ambivalence

Summary:
“Hitchcock created a film in which a male professional photographer confined to the domestic sphere loses the power to motivate the camera’s look on his own, even as he tries to augment that power with longer and longer lenses that humorously caricaturize his phallic quest. Jeff can only achieve his desire to solve a murder through his cooperation with and reliance upon the looks and actions of women. By succumbing to feminization, he actually achieves a certain agency denied to him earlier when he could only see through male eyes. . . . Lisa . . . gets him and he gets an agency born of her feminine intuition that, ironically, remasculinizes him”

Sarah Street, “’The dresses had told me’: Fashion and Femininity in Rear Window”
see illustrations-outline

“Rear Window . . . displays clothing on many occasions, functioning as a complex system. . . . the film’s costumes and accessories perform significant roles: narrative development, the delineation of gender relations, the articulation of the class theme, star images and the development of the ‘masquerading blonde,’ and finally the role of costume in the film’s authorship.”

Narrative development:
- clothes, jewelry, and fashion accessories play roles in the plot
- costume identifies character traits

Gender relations:
costume a central device and symbol in the conflict between Lisa and Jeff, and Jeff's crisis of masculinity.
- fashion a signifier of feminine desire and difference:
- Lisa's "power over her image, the power of performance"
- the "New Look"
- handbag as sexual symbol
- ambivalent closure: Lisa's jeans but fashion magazine

Class theme:
- costume and indicator of class
- Miss Lonelyhearts & Lisa
- Stella's dress

Star image:
Grace Kelly as a star: ambiguities of her image fit the "dual image" of the Hitchcock blonde

Authorship:
Edith Head's contribution to Rear Window

Summary:
"The story told by the dresses in Rear Window privileges Lisa as an active, masquerading, and treatening figure. Hitchcock Edith Head, and Grace Kelly were offering a representation of femininity that was consistent with contemporary discussions about the aggressive nature of female sexuality. . . . Rear Window displays all the inherent tensions of that moment between demystifying femininity and at the same time employing it in the traditional sense as an enigma."

Michel Chion, “Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window: The Fourth Side”

“Jeff’s apartment is obviously constructed and filmed as a theatrical set with four sides. . . .”

the film audience sees from inside (identifying with Jeff) but never sees Jeff from outside (the fourth wall). This makes the film spectator "complicit . . . with the pure voyeurism of the protagonists."

Restricted point of view is enlarged at least four times:
1. at the beginning: Jeff is sleeping with his back to the courtyard (which "appears as a kind of extension of his dreaming head")
2. Thorwald leaving at dawn with a mysterious woman: Jeff is asleep
3. After the dog's death: camera goes into the courtyard and sees the neighbors closeup in normal perspective
4. At the end, when Jeff dangles from the window and falls into the courtyard: at this point we briefly see the fourth wall.

Armond White, "Eternal Vigilance in Rear Window"
[This essay is not included on the March 19 exam]

"Very important political meaning lies beneath the surface of his work."

Place of Rear Window in post-World War, Cold War environment

"In addition to its thematic investigation of sex, violence, and marriage, Rear Window's tale is a social study, relevant to issues of individual survival in the modern world--to how citizens cope with the difficult or dehumanizing structures of social life."

Hitchcock's use of "closed" film form
"artificial realism" of the set: "Hollywood's glossy, detailed stylizations"

"'We've become a race of peeping Toms'"
"a backyard view, secrets revealed through peeking, peeping"

The impotence theme vs. "insistence on social dread."
The "problem of social-sympathy, . . . urban alienation."

[You are not responsible for White's discussion of later filmmakers, pp. 126-139.]