Precursor to "Dekalog 6" and "Cache"

Rating: 7/10 (17 April 2006)

After my third viewing of the film over a span of 20 odd years, I went beyond appreciating the cinematic challenges that Hitchcock sets for himself to overcome. For instance, I was not appreciating that this film is one of the rare instances in cinema where all the sounds are "diegetic" recorded on the soundtrack.are sounds from within the visual world captured by the camera. After the earlier viewings, I was no longer intrigued by the amoral perspective of the voyeur, represented by L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart), the good, average American bachelor with a robust, modest, creative career and a rich doting girl friend, Lisa, trying to rope him into marriage. No longer was blending of the viewer's perspective and that of Jefferies' perspective a major feat of Hitchcock.
My third viewing threw up new perspectives of the film because I had now got to see over 20 Hitchcock films.
First, "Rear window" is one of the rare films of Hitchcock where women emerge smarter and stronger than menthe last scene has the hero with two legs in a cast and his lady love switching reading material to what she prefers to read over what the hero would prefer her to read, even though for the first time she has switched to trousers to humor her future husband's vision of his kind of wife. Similar ends were obvious in "Family Plot," "Spellbound," "Rebecca" and, by inference of the final choice, in "Marnie." The final shot in "Rear window" is a sexual reversal of the final shot of "Mr and Mrs Smith."
Second, "Rear window" is yet another film on marriagea recurring theme in Hitchcock's films. Jefferies and Lisa do not tie the knot but the end inferred this would eventually happen. But the switching of the reading material gives the viewer a clue who among the duo would rule the marriage. In another perspective on marriage, within the film a husband kills his wife. A wedding ring is stolen of all objects. Other perspectives in the film reflect on the sex in marriage and another looks at a woman dreaming of a virtual husband, a dream to which Jefferies involuntarily raises his own glass!
Third, this is a film on photographers, photography and voyeurs. Only the photographer looks out of the window, when all have windows open, except when a dog or housebreak is involved. Many years after Hitchcock made the film, the Polish director Krystof Kiesolwski in his "Dekalog no. 6" explored the same theme with astonishing results. Recently, Austrian filmmaker Michael Hanneke's "Cache" presented videos of an anonymous voyeur as the pivotal essay on racial interaction. All the three films infer that the crime is in watching other people commit crime. The watcher and the watched emerge as flip sides of an individual or alter egos.