Rear Window – Alfred Hitchcock
Rear Window is a voyeuristic film. As Stella tells Jeff, “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms.” This applies equally to the cinema as well as to real life.
Stella invokes the specifically sexual pleasures of looking that is identified as exemplary of classical Hollywood.
The majority of the film is seen through Jeff’s visual point of view and his mental perspective. Stella’s words sum up Hitchcock’s broader project as film maker, namely, to implicate us as spectators. While Jeff is watching the rear window people, we too are being “peeping toms” as we watch him, and the people he watches as well. As a voyeristic society, we take personal pleasure in watching what is going on around us.
ashleigh inglis 