HOLLYWOOD: ALFRED HITCHCOCKS REAR WINDOW - Essay Example

Hollywood: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window An auteur is a film director who overwhelms his or her work with a very personal insight or perspective that the audience may see or treat the filmmaker as the movie’s writer. Rear Window depicts Alfred Hitchcock as a strong auteur through his methods of using identical themes and motifs acknowledged in his former works. Genre is a technique borrowed from literary analysis and founded on similarities in the narrative aspects from which a movie is built.

The genre of Rear Window is thriller. A recognizable element present in Rear Window that help identify its generic identity is meta-information. Meta-information is information that goes past what an audience has seen in a movie (Pons, Bonet, and Iglesias 28). Since viewers know this is a Hitchcock movie, they become inclined to assume that something peculiar is taking place amongst the characters. One principal theme in Rear Window is the social and formal routine of an ordinary American during each day of the week.

This theme unveils a parallel construct wherein all characters go about their lives ordinarily. For example, Hitchcock shows Jeff’s neighbors waking up, shaving, answering their phones, and preparing food or for work (Pons, Bonet, and Iglesias 28). Another principal theme is the challenge of comprehending social action. Hitchcock undertakes a crucial experiment regarding the procedures of deducing visuals and narratives. These principal themes lead to a bigger idea like the interpretation and differentiation of perception from meaning.

Two analytical positions that one can approach the movie are feminism and audience consideration through character stereotyping. A feminist point of view is used often to explain Rear Window since Hitchcock fails to exhibit a singular conception of a “female gaze” or spectatorship (Pons, Bonet, and Iglesias 28). The movie presents the likelihood for female actors to glance and gaze rather than vice versa. Rear Window maintained its ability to create fear, panic, and tension in an audience for almost six decades to the extent of achieving plausibility.

Hitchcock pursues several appealing approaches to make the movie seem highly plausible to the audience. I do not believe Rear Window would be a “better” film if Hitchcock had had access to the kinds of seamless special effects we see in modern movies. Sigmund Freud was a renowned psychology researcher and is related to Hitchcock’s works often because of their passive nature and effect on viewers. Passivity emerges from Hitchcock’s ability to spark vital intellectual and emotional views from the audience (Pons, Bonet, and Iglesias 28).

Works citedPons, Catalina, Eduard Bonet, and Oriol Iglesias. A Study of Hitchcock’s Film The Rear Window On How We Interpret Social Actions. EGOS Conference. 2003. Print. Barcelona. 2014, Nov. 21.