As we all know, Hitchcock is a mainstream commercial director in Hollywood studios, but at the same time, his films are very artistic, and he was even named one of the world's great film authors by the French New Wave "Cinema Manual" . His director career spanned silent films and audio films, black and white films, and color films. He has surpassed for fifty-five years. He has created a large number of films, TV series and suspense novels, and has made a significant contribution to the expansion of the types of thrillers and suspense films. Contribution. His films inherit the black elements of German expressionism, and at the same time have a strong personal touch and advanced artistic consciousness. He explored and experimented with montage editing, scene scheduling, scene application, sound performance, script structure, photographic composition, etc. In each production link, a large number of film skills have been improved and enriched, and it still affects generations of filmmakers today.
It is generally recognized that Hitchcock's five best works are: "Rear Window" in 1954, "Vertigo" in 1958, "Northwest by Northwest" in 1959, "Mentally Ill" in 1960, and "Flock of Birds" in 1963. The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of Hitchcock's creation, and "Rear Window" was the earliest mature work in this period.
The story of "Rear Window" is very simple: Jeffery, an adventurous photographer, suffered a broken left leg at work and had to stay in an apartment to rest. In boredom, he took observing the life of the opposite neighbor as a pastime, but he might have witnessed it accidentally. There was a wife murder incident, so Jeffery and his girlfriend Lisa investigated the suspicious man and finally revealed the truth, but at the cost of breaking his other leg. As a commercial film director within the Hollywood system, Hitchcock likes to use famous actors to appear in order to increase the appeal and box office performance of the film. James Stewart and Grace Kelly are both queen actors of Hitchcock. The former has collaborated with Hitchcock in "Imperial Soul" (1948), "Rear Window" (1954), and "The Catch of the Murder" (1956). ), "Vertigo" (1958) four high artistic achievements, it is said that if it weren't for the box office failure of "Vertigo", Hitchcock biased the reason to attribute it to Stewart being too old and not attractive enough, "Northwest" The leading actor will also be Stewart instead of Gary Grant; the latter is known as Hitchcock’s Bole and confidant, and has starred in the movies "Telephone Murder" (1954), "Rear Window" (1954), and "Thieves" (1955), it is said that Grace Kelly is the noble person in Hitchcock's life. Isn't Hitchcock the noble person of Grace Kelly? In the Cannes promotion of "Catch a Thief", she met Prince Rainier III of Morocco, and was fortunate enough to marry the royal family and become the princess.
Adhering to the usual Greek movie style, "Rear Window" contains suspense, murder, violent crime, love and mature blonde beauty, although Grace Kelly mentioned in the film: "The murderer will never open the window to show off the crime process. "But the homicide that Jeffrey saw from the window was derived from two reports in British newspapers: "Patrick Mayon Case" and "Creeburn Case". Therefore, the incident itself was what the director said. Wipe away the boring traces of life".
The opening 3 minutes of "Rear Window" is a set of classic long shots: the camera starts from Jeffery's window and looks around the courtyard-like building structure and the windows on the opposite side, and finally returns to Jeffery's room. From this long shot Here, we can see the geographic structure of the housing area, the basic conditions in each window, the protagonist’s broken left leg in a cast and his name. At the same time, the dense sweat on Jeffery’s forehead and the close-up of the thermometer indicate The time of the story is summer, the weather is very sultry, and the broken camera, a series of thrilling photos and the intact camera show that Jeffery’s profession is a photographer, and his personality is thrilling and adventurous, and hints Geoffrey’s fractured left leg had to stay at home. A photo of a woman and a stack of fashion magazines with the photo on the cover suggest the identity and character of Geoffrey’s lover Lisa. This long shot with neither narration nor dialogue uses pure film techniques to convey a large amount of background information to the audience. The technique is crisp and expressive, and the sultry ambient temperature also sets the tense and impatient tone for the film. , Followed by countless later people. When Truffaut mentioned this long shot, Hitchcock said: "I think the biggest fault of a screenwriter is that when people talk about difficulties, he avoids the problem with the following words: "We use a dialogue Isn't it solved? "Dialogue, as the voice of the character's mouth, is just one of many solutions, and the character's actions and eyes can tell a visual story."
However, Hitchcock is a director who never sticks to the form of film. For him, film is just a tool of expression and narrative, and all methods serve the content. He has both the exploration of a long shot in "Imperial Soul" and the skillful use of montage in "Mentally Ill". In "Rear Window", the editing and scene scheduling are equally excellent. Except for the long shots to show the environment and background, most of the middle of the film uses matching clips to show the interaction between Jeffery's voyeurism and the peeped object. At this time, the camera is equivalent to the eye of Jeffery, acting for the audience. Carrying the role of peeping. As a psychologist, Hitchcock is good at expressing the relationship between characters through lens language. Before Lisa appeared, the audience had already learned that Jeffery was a little dissatisfied with her: Although Lisa was beautiful, elegant and fashionable, it was like a vase to him. He was not used to her delicate and boring life. She also couldn't understand his uneasy peace, thrill and adventurous passion. Therefore, when Lisa played, the dialogue between the two often used front and back. Even in the same frame, they were often separated by a certain spatial distance through the panorama. When Lisa was gradually attracted to and participated in the salesman’s wife murdering incident, the scene changed quietly. The two appeared in the same frame. The scenes were basically stable in the middle and close shots, and the subject of the peeping became Jeffrey. Rui and Lisa or three with nurse Stella, which means that these two women have gradually changed from opposing Jeffrey’s voyeurism to standing on the united front with Jeffrey, completing the transition from refusing to peep to Take the initiative and enjoy the psychological transformation and unity of perspective of voyeurism.
Since the audience’s perspective is consistent with Jeffrey’s, the film’s point of view has to be concentrated in Jeffrey’s small apartment, except when the puppy dies. The lens is no longer Jeffrey’s POV but objective. In addition to the camera, the audience can only be imprisoned by the window frame of the apartment together with Jeffery. The development of the plot in such a limited environment and perspective always involves how to select the size of the scene according to the intent of the drama and the emotional atmosphere. It is no small challenge to the use of film skills, but Hitchcock's processing is undoubtedly a success. of. James Stewart praised the director for this: “Creating rhythm and tension through reaction is one of Hitchcock’s inventions. Because of his ingenious handling, the audience has also become a detective.” Hitchcock also agreed with the layout. Limitations made him have to shoot a purely cinematic film: "A paralyzed person looks at the scenery outside the window from the house. This is the first level of the film. The second level is everything he sees, and the third One level is to express his reaction. We believe that three levels of performance like this are the purest way to express the idea of the movie. "
We peeped through Jeffery’s eyes from the neighbor’s window to their stories, these stories The wide-open windows are presented to the audience layer by layer, just as the film itself is wide-opened on the screen but legally satisfies the conceptual audience's curiosity and prying into the lives of others. Although most of the scenes about life in the window are only what we saw with a glimpse of Jeffery, through the progress of time and the rhythm of the film, several simple and complete stories are gradually presented. Those parts that are not presented are not difficult for the audience to guess-this reflects another layer of Hitchcock's interpretation of voyeurism: the curiosity and obscenity of other parts of other people's lives through the appearance of an iceberg.
Interestingly, in the design of the characters, Jeffrey and Lisa seem to have a chiral symmetrical relationship with the salesman and wife: on one side, men have inconvenient mobility, and women can go back and forth freely; on the other side, women are sick in bed, and men take care of daily life. Emotionally, although Lisa’s legs and feet are convenient, her heart is tightly tied to Geoffrey like a plaster. Geoffrey does not become dependent on Lisa; and because of the serious illness, the salesman’s wife is very ill. The salesman has a strong dependence, but the salesman has to be perfunctory and bored with his wife. The suspenseful elements of "Rear Window" always run through the theme of a family and exploring the relationship between the sexes, involving love and choice. It is not difficult to see that the stories of different people under different windows are an expansion and generalization of this theme.
For genre movies like "Rear Window", its entertainment is the fundamental essence, and it satisfies the audience's "intrinsic desires" and "social desires" catharsis at the same time. Although driving the audience’s psychology to watch movies is a consistent feature of the suspense master Hitchcock, "Rear Window" is a particularly typical work in Hitchcock’s films that plays with the audience’s psychology. It leads the audience from the perspective of the peeper. Consciously become a peeper, not only that, this peeping in the film also has a double meaning: one is that the audience uses Jeffery’s eyes to peep at the neighbor’s situation, and the other is that the audience as a voyeur peeping at Jeffery’s peeping at the neighbor’s behavior. The behavior of voyeurism is hidden in human instinct. It stems from the curiosity that everyone can't escape. Movies have become a way to satisfy the audience's voyeurism in a reasonable and legal way. At the end of "Rear Window", the murderer ran into Jeffrey's room and said to him, "What are you going to do with me? I don't have money!" Jeffrey was speechless at this time because he took photos and steals. The act of seeing is purely out of curiosity, so it cannot be justified. Even Jeffrey himself said: "I doubt whether it is moral to observe others with a telescope, just because we are just trying to prove their innocence, is it justifiable?" Hitchcock raised this question to us, but didn't To answer it, but from the perspective of the audience, this kind of voyeurism is reasonable. It should be noted that the protagonist is a voyeur, and are we all voyeurs?
The paradox of morality makes the film text of "Rear Window" more multi-interpreted. Through this window, we can see human curiosity and peeping desire instinct, see the helplessness of morality in front of desire, and see the human nature. Escape from assuming responsibility and see the plight of human beings in chasing and choosing... "Rear Window" talks about a story about family and love, the narrative of atypical linear structure and the displacement of spatial perspectives. The audience watched the whole movie. During the process, they maintain a sense of moral identity with the protagonist, and the murderer's confession to Jeffery in the ending also makes people empathize with him like Jeffery. According to Truffaut, "Rear Window" can be said to be Hitchcock's best play. It has a rigorous structure, strong passion and rich details. Perhaps it is slightly inferior to "Mentally Ill" in terms of emotional mobilization. The plot’s ups and downs are not as deep and pathological as in "Northwest by North", and the psychological anatomy of the characters is not as profound and pathological as "Dizziness", but this work is rigorous and exquisite enough, with profound and multi-level readability, although the layout is Small, with a particularly large structure, it is still fascinating after more than sixty years of its existence.
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