Cinema as window and frame

A man, immobilized in a wheelchair, observes, as a way to pass the time and entertain himself, through a rectangular frame the human dramas that unfold before his eyes. He is capable of alternating his visual field between a wide panorama and a closer view for detail. His position is elevated and privileged, while the events seem to unfold independently of his gaze, yet without making him feel excluded. This is one way to summarize the basic tenets of Alfred Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (US, 1954), which has become an exemplary case study in film theory precisely because the film’s point of departure is often held to figuratively re-enact the specific viewing situation of classical cinema:1 Having suffered an accident, photographer L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) is confined to a wheelchair with his leg in a cast. A pair of binoculars, as well as the telephoto lenses of his camera, allow him to switch between long shots of the back yard onto which his window opens and close shots of individual apartments and their residents. Two basic principles, according to the school of theory that considers the cinema as window/frame, can be derived from this situation: Jefferies’ seemingly privileged perspective as onlooker and (to a lesser degree) as listener, and second, his distance from the events. The film even provides an answer to the question formulated in the introduction – whether the film is outside or inside in relation to the spectator: as long as Jefferies keeps his distanced role of observer, the events cannot harm him. Not until he – or, rather, his girlfriend Lisa Carol Fremont (Grace Kelly), instigated by him – transgresses this threshold does the world “outside” pose a threat to the one “inside”. However, REAR WINDOW does not resonate in film-theoretical space solely through its emphasis on visibility and distance:

The title REAR WINDOW, apart from the literalness of its denotation, evokes the diverse “windows” of the cinema: the cinema/lens of camera and projector, the window in the projection booth, the eye as window, and film as “window on the world.”2