Yes, I know. Another Hitchcock movie. But think of it this way - these would all have gotten in sooner rather than later, so consider this a clearing of the decks so we can get all the most popular Hitch titles out of the way and concentrate on other directors next year. Unless there are other Notorious fans out there, then never mind.
"Alfred Hitchcock's pre-beatnik era West Village, seen through the eyes of the temporarily incapacitated, apartment-bound Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart), is reduced to little more than a few converted tenement apartment buildings, a narrow, busy street (Bleecker?) in the distance, with a sumptuous ambient soundtrack, a mixture of the most distant and near city sounds. Community as tableau has rarely been so crystalized as in Rear Window, accomplished largely by, as many have written about, how the film functions as a metaphor for the role of the less passive moviegoer or media consumer: how we observe, process and conclude.
"Jonathan Rosenbaum's point in his review of Rear Window, that Jeffries channel surfs between his various courtyard neighbors, is an apt one, especially if one follows the trajectory of media since the film's release in 1954. The internet is perhaps the most apt medium to compare the viewing habits of Jeffries' to: the outside world as an aquarium, sometimes interactive, but always open to one's obsessive, investigative tendencies. Most remarkable, however, is that Hitchcock presents all of Jeffries' conclusions as objective facts, allowing the film to function as a supremely disturbing thriller, nearly removing psychology altogether. It that device especially that defines how, suggested as much in the film, interactivity between medias and 'real life' allows one their own truths. One's microcosmic world, a courtyard neighborhood here, is a dollhouse kept at a (mostly) safe distance."
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