English: Rear Window

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is one of the icons of American filmmaking. A perfect example of Hollywood cinema at its best, it is an engaging piece of entertainment as well as a fascinating meditation on the nature of the film itself. A suspense thriller about a chair-bound observer who suspects his neighbour of murdering his wife, the narrative becomes the vehicle for Hitchcock's exploration of the basic ingredients of cinema, from voyeurism and dreamlike fantasy to the process of narration itself. This volume provides a fresh analysis of Rear Window, which is examined from a variety of perspectives in a series of essays published here for the first time. Providing an account of the actual production of the film, as well as feminist and cultural readings of it, it also demonstrates the influence of Rear Window on a wide range of filmmakers, including Antonioni, De Palma, and Coppola.

Seminar paper: Alfred Hitchcock used non-verbal communication extensively in his filmmaking to convey meaning and to create suspension for the audience. The possibilities of the camera for conveying meaning was paramount to his storytelling. A well-known example of his use of camera movement is Rear Window (1954), a film that evokes a viewing experience for the spectator in the form of "a mental process, done by the use of the visual", manipulating points of view to the viewer's gaze with narrative frames. In Rear Window, most of the female's protagonist's dresses are mirrored in the dresses worn by other women. By coding dresses in such a way and juxtaposing them in different frames, they signify different states of mind and intentions; they act as emotional referents that connect the women through their visual appearance.

Bachelor Thesis: Alfred Hitchcock is known for being one of cinema's most productive auteurs and a pioneer in the field of visual manipulation. Through his way of directing the camera – and with the camera also the gaze of the spectator – his audience not only appreciates the narrative itself but also, and especially, Hitchcock's technique of storytelling. By means of simultaneously zooming in and tracking out, combined with point-of-view shots and extreme close-ups, the audience assumes the protagonist's perspective along with a sense of vertigo, guilt and pleasure. Thus, as a director, Hitchcock is like a criminal who makes the audience his accomplice in a crime that is about to unfold in front of their eyes.

Alfred Hitchcock (UK, 1899–1980) is undeniably the world’s most famous film director. His name has become synonymous with the cinema, and each new generation takes the same pleasure in rediscovering his films, which are now treasures of our artistic heritage. Hitchcock started out in the British silent cinema of the 1920s, which reached its peak with successful thrillers such as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Sabotage (1936) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). Recognized as a ‘young genius’, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood and set about reinventing cinematic tradition, combining the modern with the classic in films such as Vertigo (1957), North by Northwest (1959) and The Birds (1963). Hitchcock gave talented actors such as James Stewart and Cary Grant the chance to play enduring antiheroes and imprinted the public imagination with the myth of the ‘blonde’, as embodied by Grace Kelly, Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren.