Optical Instruments in the Service of Cinematic Découpage - Text 1
The spectatorial apparatus on which Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) turns, the topic of numerous commentaries, has nevertheless not prompted interpreters to remark a simple thing: at no time does the professional photographer Jefferies think of recording on film what he sees through his telephoto lens, particularly the actions of the resident across the way whom he suspects of uxoricide. His camera serves only as an eyepiece with a long focal length, which he quickly substitutes for his binoculars in order to follow as closely as possible the comings and goings of his neighbour, a suspect in his eyes. And yet he never takes advantage of the camera to retain evidence in order to prove his claims to those around him or the police. While his investigation occasionally has recourse to a fixed image when he compares what he sees with his naked eye to a slide taken from the same point of view, what he sees in the present is never preserved in photographic form. The fact that what is seen could, as an image, be combined afterwards with other images to make a demonstration – as one shot among others in an assembled sequence – appears to be less important than the way in which the image perceived by an optical system immediately brings about a (re)action, meaning to call upon a shot which completes according to a logical découpage. In this way, Rear Window’s seminal configuration underscores the immediate, albeit mediatised, role of long-distance monocular or binocular observation devices in establishing the specifically filmic dramaturgy, as found in particular in post-Hitchcock thrillers.
The film’s observation sequences illustrate this perfectly, to the detriment of a realist treatment of the devices shown: whereas the medium-full-shot framing logically shifts to a medium-shot when Jefferies is spying on his neighbour, first with binoculars and then with a telephoto lens, a similar tightening of the framing occurs twenty minutes later when Jefferies continues his spying with the same long focal length lens. The man he is observing is at that moment going through the jewellery in his wife’s handbag, out of which he takes a wedding ring, which will later serve as evidence. The small size of this crucial object for the rest of the story justifies a subterfuge: without showing Jefferies picking up another instrument or manipulating his lens, his point of view moves in even closer.
