Aside from being the subject of one of the most hilariously absurd academic lectures I’ve ever attended (Lee Edelman’s “Rear Window’s Glasshole,” later published in Out-Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson, Duke University Press), this is also a fine little treatise on love, marriage, and perspective. It’s characteristically framed (even by the director himself) as Hitchcock’s movie about the movies, but specifically it’s a movie about the movies versus the theater — Jimmy Stewart’s Jeff starts out at the theater (physical presence, a fixed, wide perspective, and the suggestion of activity behind and beyond the “stage”), but when that’s not good enough, he moves beyond the proscenium arch and into close-up with his trusty zoom lens.
In addition to the cinema vs. theater comparison, we also have fantasy vs. real-life, the former always being more appealing and exotic, as evident in the scenes in which Grace Kelly tosses all kinds of sex at a crippled, disengaged Stewart. Here, the two stars are cast perfectly: the ever-ingenuous Jimmy Stewart turning in another invisible performance as “the audience,” and Grace Kelly lending teeth (and some other parts) to a role that elsewhere (in To Catch a Thief, for example) is far more superficial.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: The Masterpiece Collection: Universal Pictures DVD
19 Jan 2006 2:51 PM | Comments (2)
I was undewr the impressionn that the fiilm was about the dialectic of still photopgraphy (freezing to death) and beyond) an dtheather (even though its captured on reliable camera equipment—still a staged operation)
p.s. I mean every one casn see the importanc eof the dstill photogrpahy in the context of the films beginning middle and end.
Conor Pasteur Dunphy
20 January 2006
8:15 AM