Rear Window Intro By Pamela Robertson Wojcik, University of Notre Dame

Tonight’s film is Alfred Hitchcock’sRear Window – likely the best known and most critically acclaimed Woolrich adaptation. As I suggested earlier today, its status as adaptation is complex. At a certain level, the film takes Woolrich’s basic premise and turns it into a narrative about not only window witnessing and murder, but also masculinity in crisis – or, put simply, a film in which a seemingly heterosexual man does not want to kiss Grace Kelly.

Despite its inclusion here, the film is generally not viewed as noir. It is a thriller certainly, but the Hitchcockian elements seem more important than any genre designation – and that is true of Hitchcock films generally. James Naremore describes features of the Hitchcock canon that “make his films appear slightly alien to the noir universe” and ultimately argues that Hitchcock transcends the genre of noir even as he can be seen as “central to the larger, more broadly cultural history of noir.” Robin Wood describes it as a light comedy. It is a thriller, certainly, but lacks the existential despair, sense of doomed fate, and expressionistic style that characterizes noir.

Usually discussed as an auteurist film,Rear Window stands as an exemplar of Hitchcock’s manipulation of point-of-view and sound; it contains numerous Hitchcock motifs, including his famous cameos, his use of handbags and jewelry, and a fall from a high place; it is one of his single set films, along withRope , Lifeboat, and Dial M for Murder; it is one of the Jimmy Stewart films, along withRope , Vertigo and The Man Who Knew Too Much; and one of the Grace Kelly films, sandwiched betweenDial M for Murder and To Catch a Thief.

Most notably, Rear Window has been dissected and debated as a film about voyeurism, in discussions which link the film to stylistic and thematic voyeurism in other Hitchcock films, but which also claim the film as the consummate example of voyeurism. For many critics, the voyeurism represents a kind of mirroring, and the views in the courtyard are Jeff’s dreams, his projection onto the world. A more dominant set of readings claims the film as “concerned with cinema itself, with its unique way of looking and perceiving.” In this light, the film “evokes the diverse ‘windows’ of the cinema: the cinema/lens of the camera and projector, the window in the projection booth, the eye as window, and film as ‘window on the world,’” and Jeff stands in as a substitute director who “not only looks, but uses binoculars and telephoto lens to facilitate different set-ups and perspectives. In line with these arguments about voyeurism, and critiquing the film’s voyeurism from a feminist perspective, Laura Mulvey famously positions the film as a paradigmatic instance of the “male gaze.” In Rear Window, according to Mulvey, Hitchcock “takes scopophilic eroticism as the subject of the film [...] the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination.” Without denying any of these readings, I suggest that we consider Rear Window as a film about urban living, as part of the genre I have called the apartment plot, in which narratives are motivated by the apartment, not merely set in apartments. In this sense, Rear Window can be seen as taking seriously the everyday voyeurism of urban living. What the film gains from Woolrich is an understanding of what it feels like to inhabit urban space, and the anonymity of urban life. He opens the story: “I didn’t know their names. I’d never heard their voices. I didn’t even know them by sight, strictly speaking, for their faces were too small to fill in with identifiable features at that distance. Yet I could have constructed a timetable of their comings and goings, their daily habits and activities. They were the rear window dwellers around me.”

Woolrich details a form of passive spying. As an apartment dweller, his narrator gains intimate but not specific knowledge of his neighbors, neighbors whose identities are partial, or bifurcated, visual but not audible, and who retain their anonymity even while disclosing their secrets. Rear Window will alternate consistently throughout the film between the interior of Jeff’s apartment and the courtyard view, without leaving the premises or allowing the camera to enter inside the other individual apartments. We will never learn the names of the characters outside Jeff’s window, who are usually referred to as Miss Torso, the Composer, the Sculptress, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Newlyweds, or the Couple with the Dog – only Thorwald, the murderer, gets a name and breaks through the anonymity by being seen and trying not to be seen. The film explores what it means to be a neighbor, what counts as privacy, how shared public space works, and the ethics of urban living. The film’s urban space is not alienating or isolating, but porous, dense and permeable; and the film navigates the tension between privacy and community, loneliness and density, contact and entanglement that are key to urban experience.

In the courtyard, Rear Window produces a version of what Jane Jacobs describes as the ballet of the good city sidewalk that brings together strangers in “an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.”

Enjoy the film.