Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2009) - Light, Looks, and The Lodger

Details

• article: Light, Looks, and The Lodger
• author(s): Murray Pomerance
• journal: Quarterly Review of Film and Video (01/Oct/2009)
• issue: volume 26, issue 5, pages 425-433
• DOI: 10.1080/10509200902914895
• journal ISSN: 1050-9208
• publisher: Routledge
• keywords: Film studies, Motion picture criticism, Motion picture directors & producers

ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info%3Aofi%2Fenc%3AUTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/summon.serialssolutions.com&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Light%2C+Looks%2C+and+The+Lodger&rft.jtitle=Quarterly+Review+of+Film+and+Video&rft.au=Pomerance%2C+Murray&rft.date=2009-10-01&rft.pub=Routledge&rft.issn=1050-9208&rft.volume=26&rft.issue=5&rft.spage=425&rft.epage=433&rft_id=info:doi/10.1080%2F10509200902914895&rft.externalDBID=n%2Fa&rft.externalDocID=10.1080%2F10509200902914895

Links

• Google Scholar
• informaworld.com
• DOI.org

Abstract

Pomerance discusses Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Given the jumps that could be bridged through editing, film was able to present an apparently seamless record of causality between the look and its object, to supercede both painting and photography by showing not only gazers gazing, or the field of a gaze, but gazing adjoined to its field, gazing made active and motive. In this way, a film like The Lodger, spelling out the social panic over a Ripper-style mass murderer operating on the streets of London operates as a manual for surveillance under conditions of public threat. Visible at once in The Lodger are elements of modern culture as rational embodiments: the duties of observation, as well as the moral panic appropriate for a population threatened by a Jack the Ripper, seen under the illumination provided by newly exciting electricity, and bolstered by the license for surveilling nosiness and prying investigation appropriate to the modern interior as exterior.