Spatial World of (Alfred) Hitchcock's Films: The Point-of-View Shot, the Camera and `Intrarealism' (1999)

If the spatial dimension of film is an essential component of point of view in cinema, then this is particularly so in the case of Hitchcock's films, a fundamental preoccupation of which is the exploration and manipulation of the possibilities and plasticity of narrative space. As I hope to demonstrate by an analysis of Paradine Case (1947) later on, the global spatial system of a Hitchcock film--how it organizes, segments and presents its narrative world--is crucial in helping to shape our overall attitudinal outlook upon that world. At the other extreme, how a Hitchcock film utilizes the innermost detail of its fictional universe can be equally vital in determining the various ways in which we relate to its narrative subject matter (as my section on objects will also endeavour to show). Generally, though, such spatial features have tended to be obscured in favour of the more well-trodden territory of the point-of-view shot. This orientation of a highly complex theoretical concept around a single camera technique is indicative of the central weighting traditionally attached to character perspective in point of view and its perceived role in effecting spectator involvement in classical narrative cinema more generally (the latter nowhere more so than in Hitchcock's films where POV shooting is often cited as a key strategy for implicating the spectator in a single character's viewpoint). Yet despite the substantial, somewhat disproportionate critical emphasis placed upon POV shooting, this technique has often suffered from a degree of over-simplification when enlisted in support of various theoretical approaches, its popularity generally stemming from the underlying assumption that, in enabling the spectator to occupy a character's literal viewpoint, it also provides access to that character's subjectivity. POV shot's perceived ability to build the spectator into a character's experience was accordingly construed by structuralist and semiotic film theorists as evidence of the way in which mainstream narrative cinema functions hegemonically to inscribe the spectator into a fixed, dominant ideological position. According to suture theory, for example, this strategy of assigning ownership of the camera's field of view to a character within the fiction was a key device for distracting the spectator from an awareness that such a view is, in fact, controlled and authored by a presence outside of the frame (`the absent one'). POV shot's function was, then, to `suture' its audience into an illusory sense of oneness with the film world, thereby effacing the very operations and mechanisms by which such effects were achieved (see, for example, Daniel Dayan, `The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema', in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods: Vol. 1, University of California Press, London, 1976, pp.438-51). As William Rothman proceeded to point out in `Against The System of Suture' (again in Nichols, ed., 1976, pp.451-59), such an approach took no account of the viewer's ability to read the POV shot quite knowingly as a convention (as opposed to being duped into naively accepting the character as the fallacious author of the shot). possibility that the dominant ideology may, in any case, be subject to critique by the film and/or resistance by the spectator was also ignored, as was the issue of how the POV shot functions within its overall filmic context. tenuousness of suture theory's basic premise is evident when one considers a sequence such as that in Notorious where Alicia snoops outside of her bedroom door in an attempt to overhear Alex's altercation with his mother as he tries to obtain the household keys from her. Having employed a conventional POV sequence, whereby the camera cuts repeatedly from a shot of Alicia listening intently to a view of Madame Sebastian's closed door, Hitchcock then confounds this logic on the third such occasion. Hence, Alex is shown emerging from his mother's room from what still appears to be Alicia's point of view (thereby creating a momentary jab of anxiety at the prospect of him discovering her spying), only for it to be revealed that the shot is no longer a POV shot, Alicia having stolen away in the meantime. …