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“You’re Tellin’ Me You Didn’t See” Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Antonioni’s Blow-Up Frank P. Tomasulo A lfred Hitchcock’s influence on international culture and especially on other film directors has been enormous. Whether the filmmaker perceived trends ahead of his time or the contemporary zeitgeist just happened to catch up with his feverish fantasies (perhaps because of the popularity of his paranoid movies) is somewhat irrelevant. What is important is that the “Age of Anxiety” proclaimed by poet W. H. Auden and composer Leonard Bernstein found its cinematic “Artist of Anxiety” in Alfred Hitchcock . Critic Richard Schickel summed it up in the title of an article in the New York Times: “We’re Living in a Hitchcock World, All Right.” If Schickel meant that over the past century mankind has become as anxious, paranoid, and obsessed as the characters in (and the director of ) Hitchcock’s films, there is probably no denying that world wars, massacres, nuclear weapons, and the Holocaust have become part and parcel of the cruelty of life on our planet in the twentieth century and beyond (the director was born in 1899). Whether Hitchcock’s morbid vision actually changed the course of human events and made the world a scarier place is open to debate. What is less debatable is that Hitchcock’s oeuvre has had a profound impact on the world of international cinema. Some of the diverse films and film directors influenced by Hitchcock include: Francis Ford Coppola (The Conversation), Alain Resnais (Muriel, Last Year at Marienbad1 ), Roman Polanski (Repulsion ), Stanley Donen (Arabesque, Charade), François Truffaut (The Bride Wore Black, Fahrenheit 451, Mississippi Mermaid, Finally Sunday!), Orson Welles (The Stranger), Henri Clouzot (Diabolique), Akira Kurosawa (High and Low), Mel Brooks (High Anxiety), Colin Higgins (Foul Play), Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct), Martin Scorsese (Cape Fear), Goran Markovič (Déjà Vu), 146 found in translation Adrian Lyne (Unfaithful), Slobodan Šijan (Strangler vs. Strangler), Richard Marquand (Jagged Edge), Jerzy Skolimowski (The Lightship), Anthony Perkins (Psycho III), Claude Miller (Alias Betty), and, of course, the James Bond series, Claude Chabrol (Leda, Les Cousins, The Third Lover, Le Boucher, La Femme infidèle, La Cérémonie, L’Enfer), and Brian De Palma (Sisters, Obsession , Dressed to Kill, Body Double, Blow Out). The list could go on and on. The plots, characters, and cinematic style of Hitchcock’s films have been borrowed , plagiarized, spoofed, incorporated into, and used as intertext in many of the world’s best (and some of its worst) movies. * * * Consider the following scenario, for instance: An isolated and alienated male protagonist, a professional photographer, comes to believe that he has witnessed or uncovered a murder in a major metropolis. Despite conflicting evidence , he investigates the alleged crime using the tools of his trade, only to discover that the corpus delicti has been removed from the scene. The hero’s relationship with fashion models is an important part of the plot, as is his identity crisis. Indeed, his personal problems exhibit themselves primarily in his contemptuous and sexist treatment of women. In the end, the murder is revealed to have taken place, but many other issues remain unresolved. In style, the color film is strikingly visual and frequently uses the gazeobject -gaze editing regime and a fairly rigid (albeit complex) point-of-view camera perspective to establish identification with the protagonist, whose chief preoccupation is looking intently at the world for clues to its significance. We are stuck, for the most part, in the consciousness of the main character for most of the film’s 112-minute running time. A meticulous, yet minimalist, soundtrack emphasizes natural and urban sounds to comment on the action and create suspense. The music track, which consists of both instrumental and vocal renditions, comments subtly on the action, theme, and characters. In theme, the movie provides a subtle and self-reflexive metacommentary on the art and process of cinema itself by foregrounding the voyeuristic viewing of the photographer-protagonist (a surrogate filmmaker), his attempts to impose a narrative on the events he witnesses through his camera lens (the usual province of a film director), and the activity of the spectator in the theater watching the film. The anomie, alienation, and ambiguity of modern life are important subjects. Despite these abstruse and serious themes, there are light, humorous moments in the film, which provide enjoyment and entertainment value to a mass audience. The movie goes on to become the...

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