As an important part of film art, perspective plays a very special role in Rear Window as well as in Blow up. Whether it's photographer Jeff in "Rear Window" peeping at others or Thomas in "Blow up" using photos to restore the real world, they all use their own unique perspective to bring the audience into what the film tells The incident—and coincidentally, was a murder case. This article will focus on the difference between the two perspectives, and explore the impact of this difference on the theme of the film.
one. Differences in perspective between Jeff and Thomas
The difference in perspective between Jeff and Thomas is mainly reflected in two aspects. First of all, when "Rear Window" narrates the murder-related activities, it uses Jeff's eyes as an agent for the audience's perspective, that is, the audience can only observe Thorward's activities through Jeff's eyes, and Jeff is the audience's agent; and "Blow" In "up", the audience's understanding of the murder case is obtained by observing Thomas' behavior from the outside and the photos he edited. Here, the audience and Thomas are more like a partner relationship. It should be noted that, according to the usual understanding, the agent's perspective of Jeff is more inclined to the first person, so the picture presented may have more subjective factors, while the partner's perspective of Thomas gives us the opportunity to examine the whole event from the outside. Rights, are more inclined to a third-person perspective, and therefore may be relatively objective. But this is not the case at all: Thomas, as a partner, is not willing to share his views with others, but always immerses himself in taking pictures, sifting through pictures, and forcing all the audience to follow his will (in fact, the audience is often head-to-head). fog), and Jeff, as a reliable agent, faithfully restores basically all the truth he sees. Therefore, Thomas's perspective magnifies his self infinitely, which also leads to the distortion of later cognition.
Secondly, Jeff's gaze on Thorward is real-time, realistic, and it is a presentational way; while Thomas's speculation and editing of the photo is a non-instant but recorded, a representational way To present the process of murder to the audience. The biggest difference between these two narrative styles is how the audience interprets the narrative text: for presentation, everything the audience needs to understand the event is "presented" in detail, so the audience needs to feel it carefully; for representation, the audience only Was told about Scalepaw - and it wasn't necessarily accurate, so the rest of the story had to be constructed with the help of imagination. In "Blow up," imagination and illusion are almost indistinguishable, which leads to the fact that in "Blow up," the murders the audience learns about through Thomas are always hallucinatory— - The audience can't tell the difference between the real and the fake.
two. Perspective and Cognition: The Influence of Horizon on the Theme of "Blow up"
Through the above analysis, we can understand the difference in the perspectives of Thomas and Jeff, so why are the two movies so different when they describe a murder case from the same side? That's because "Blow up" and "Rear Window" are about completely different themes. According to the theory of Gadmore's hermeneutics, the existence of the reader is always confined to the tradition, and there is always an inevitable "misreading" in the interpretation of narrative text, and the real textual understanding is always in the past and the present. Under the action, the author's horizon and the reader's horizon are formed. "Rear Window" is undoubtedly a successful commercial suspense film that follows a very typical narrative tradition in its structure. This kind of structure that conforms to the audience's "expectation of interpretation" can easily shorten the distance between the author's horizon and the reader's horizon through presentational methods, so as to achieve the interpretation of the former structure in Heidegger's so-called "interpretation cycle". Therefore, the director wants to present the content, the structure of the film and the understanding of the audience is almost highly unified, that is, to achieve the cognition of the film. "Blow up" is completely different - its own issue is the rationality of cognition and the existence of reality. There are three layers of inquiry in "Blow up": starting from Thomas' enthusiasm for taking pictures with the camera and his distrust of his own memory, the first layer of inquiry is constructed invisibly: Is human memory reliable enough? Can a person recognize what has happened through memory? And when Thomas gets murder clues from repeatedly edited photos, only to find the body disappeared early the next morning, this kind of absurdity constructs a second layer of inquiry: what people think of "recording" photos really can Does it make people aware of the past? (Notice that Thomas never raised the camera to take a photo after this, but used one hand to hold the strap of the camera and let it hang down naturally); and finally the air tennis played by the mistress, the sound of hitting the ball gradually ringing in the ear , then the last layer of inquiry is constructed: Can people carry out cognitive activities through their own senses? This layer of inquiries can be continuously pursued, and the cycle will eventually lead to the inquiries about the cognition of the world and the existence of reality (in a sense, these two questions are equivalent) . This inquiry of the film itself also deconstructs the logic of hermeneutics: if the narrative text itself is not cognizable, what is there to explain? Here, Antonioni's purpose is not to guide the audience in the "interpretation loop" to approach the cognition of the former structure, but on the contrary, to guide the audience to ask questions by hindering the cognition of the audience. Therefore, "Blow
So, why not be more subjective, as in "Rear Window", to tell the hallucinations he experienced directly from Thomas's point of view, but to reconstruct events through photos from an external third-person perspective? If a movie were likened to a glass of red wine, the illusion of describing the world directly through Thomas' eyes would certainly make the glass more mellow, but the taste was a little too strong: it lacked the top red wines of the three-tier inquiry in the film. the sense of hierarchy it has. Doing so will cause the gap between the "reader's horizon" and the "author's horizon" to be too large at the beginning, resulting in the whole work being inexplicable from the beginning, and the audience may completely lose the opportunity to spy on it.
three. Epilogue
Whether or not the audience needs to be given enough information so that they can approach the so-called "front structure" in the "interpretation loop" is the key to the difference in the choice of perspective between "Blow up" and "Rear Window". However, it has to be mentioned that, whether Hitchcock intended or not, there are also potential doubts about the reliability of Jeff's cognition in "Rear Window" (the suspense of the whole film depends on whether Jeff's cognition is correct or not). If you imagine that at the end of the film, Jeff is lying in a wheelchair and looking through the huge rear window to see Mrs. Thorward emerge from the stairs, slowly take out the key to open the house, and finally the camera focuses on Jeff's eyes gradually widening. This deconstruction The intensity is probably no less than the batting sound that gradually sounded in "Blow up".
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