The MacGuffin: News and Comment (12/Jan/2004)
(c) Ken Mogg (2004)
January 12
Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) may be even more about the nature of cinema than some of us had realised. In a fascinating article which has just appeared on the Web (The New York Review of Books: In the River of Consciousness), Oliver Sacks quotes the famous opening of Christopher Isherwood's 'Berlin Diary' (which Jay Presson Allen scripted as Cabaret [1972]). It could easily be the start of Rear Window: 'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.' Suddenly, it makes sense to me why Hitchcock gives us a view at the start of his film in which we're shown things that photographer Jeff (James Stewart), asleep, does not see (though he is conceivably aware of them, in his pre-waking consciousness, for being routine they are thoroughly familiar to him by now ...). This is the world - Jeff's world, that is - before his subjective consciousness goes to work shaping and interpreting it. For as Sacks reminds us: '... we deceive ourselves if we imagine that we can ever be passive, impartial observers. Every perception, every scene, is shaped by us, whether we intend it, know it, or not. We are the directors of the film we are making - but we are, equally, its subjects too: every frame, every movement, is us, is ours ...' Sacks isn't talking idly here but reporting the fruits of new research into how the brain assembles discrete impressions to give a sense of unbroken continuity and coherence, pretty much exactly as William James and Henri Bergson had speculated a century ago using analogies from the zoetrope and early cinema respectively. (Did you know, by the way, that apparently a frog doesn't have such a capacity to assemble discrete images? It shows no active attention, and no visual following of events. It has only a purely automatic ability to recognise an insect-like object if this enters its visual field, and to dart out its tongue in response.) Writing his article in a café on Seventh Avenue, and looking around him, Sacks, a Schopenhauerian from way back (see his 'Awakenings' [1973]), notes that 'it is not just Seventh Avenue that I see, but my Seventh Avenue, marked by my own selfhood and identity'. Of course, in making Rear Window, Hitchcock had to give a universal significance to what he shows us - or, rather, bring out (develop, print, fix?) the universal significance that is already inherent in this particular archetypal plot and situation. That's undoubtedly a reason why, as he told François Truffaut, he considered it essential that the apartments across the way from Jeff's give a representative cross-section of humanity. Perhaps, too, it's why the film contains a sequence in which Jeff studies single frames, taken with his still camera, for a clue to the murder he believes has occurred over the way. (Significantly, the single frames yield only the barest of clues.) To me, both Rear Window and Hitchcock's last film Family Plot (1976) finally succeed in achieving what artist Paul Klee spoke of: they 'embrace the life force itself [to] emerge [into] that Romanticism which is one with the universe'. There's more about this in the new hardcopy 'MacGuffin', by the way. (This "Editor's Day" item is for Adrian Martin and his 82-year-old Dad.)
This material is copyright of Ken Mogg and the Hitchcock Scholars/'MacGuffin' website (home page) and is archived with the permission of the copyright holder. |
