Classical Hollywood style and its aesthetic conventions

Alfred Hitchcock is known as a true genius of the film, especially in the special techniques he uses to draw the viewers into the characters' thoughts and actions. One of these well-known methods is called the subjective approach, where the audience actually sees into the mind of the people involved. This use of subjective storytelling, where the camera shows the viewpoint of a character along with selective revelations so viewers know important things the protagonist has not yet realized, serves to significantly increase the suspense. Three movies, "Rear View Window," "Notorious," and "Vertigo" exemplify this technique. As noted by director Peter Bogdonovich "Subjective treatment, putting the audience in the mind of the character, is, to me, the purest form of the cinema.

Hitchcock distinguished between two types of action: Objective action takes place when the audience observes an interesting yet unresolved happening in the outside world. The subjective action occurs when the audience knows what is taking place in a person's mind by hearing thoughts.

Putting an idea into the mind of the character without explaining it in dialogue is done by using a point-of-view shot sequence. This is called subjective cinema -- that is, taking the characters' eyes and adding something for them to look at. The cinematographer starts with a close-up of the actor and then cuts to a shot of what is being seen. The camera then cuts back to see the actor's reaction.

The sequence is repeated as many times as desired to build tension. With Hitchcock, this is the most powerful form of cinema, much more important than the acting itself. The next step is to have the actor walk toward the subject and then switch to a tracking shot to show changing perspective while walking. The audience members will think they are actually sharing something personal and real with the character. This is what Hitchcock calls "pure cinema" (Truffaut).

Rear Window" was entirely filmed in the one set of an apartment courtyard, with 31 separate units and each tenant offering something different to watch, including the main character's apartment. Jeff (James Stewart), a professional photographer who broke his leg while taking a picture of a race car accident, is confined to a wheelchair in his apartment for six weeks. He has nothing to do but watch his neighbors from the courtyard through his apartment rear windows.

Not even his daily visits from his nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter) and semi-girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly) keep Jeff away from spying on his neighbors' activities. One evening as Jeff watches outside his window, he believes he sees his neighbor, Thorwald, (Raymond Burr) across the courtyard murdering his sick wife. With the able help of Lisa and Stella, Jeff proves his suspicions to the police.

Viewers spend most of the movie watching through Jeff's eyes as he spies on the actions of his neighbors as seen through their individual windows. Thus, the world outside Jeff's apartment is presented as a series of quiet activities. Dialogue primarily occurs as Jeff comments on what he sees or for conversations with visitors. With the exception of those scenes that are filmed within Jeff's apartment, then, there is a split between the world "in here," which is heard but not seen, and the world "out there," which is seen but not heard. The thrust of the film's structure will be to reverse this situation (Weis).

The camera takes on the subjective viewpoint of the convalescing photographer who, bored and frustrated by his lack of mobility, watches the scenes from his apartment and also assumes the questionable role of a voyeur. In this film, Hitchcock makes sure that the audience understands that Jeff is not an oddity. Many people in the viewing audience, in fact, are voyeurs. As Stella argues strongly at one point, this is a camera civilization. "We've become a race of peeping-toms," she stresses. "People ought to get outside and look in at themselves."

However, "Rear Window," typical of Hitchcock's work, does not offer such a look. Instead, its opening credits are shown over rising bamboo curtains until everyone witnesses the apartments opposite Jeff's own and realizing that the film will look from the inside out. As Spoto acutely notes (240), in the normal Hitchcock paradigm the camera at the beginning moves from outside to inside. In "Rear Window," Hitchcock leads the viewer from inside to outside, and thus reverses the psychological search that his narratives customarily portray. Instead of "the typically downward journey of the Hitchcock hero," is seen "an outer-directed, subjective view."

Boddonovich explains: "You see a shot of Jimmy Stewart, he looks, you see what he sees, he reacts. That is the heart of Hitchcock's film making -- he has an incredible ability to put you in the point-of-view of the leading character... And it's particularly noticeable in "Rear Window" where the entire picture plays in one apartment."

Throughout the film, the camera sees only what Jeff can, making the audience involved in his spying, while sharing in his doubts, frustrations and anticipation. By the end of the movie and the finale, as Thorwald pushes Jeff out the window, the audience has become Jeff, himself, feeling his fear and anxieties.

Thorwald struggles with Jeff, trying to strangle him and then dumps him out of the wheelchair and through the open window. Jeff, as well as all the viewers, hangs and dangles from the window ledge three floors above the courtyard as Thorwald tries to push him to his death. Onlookers from the apartments around the courtyard hear the suspenseful fight: They have now joined the spectators looking over at Jeff's window. Jeff lets go and falls backward to the ground below.

Spoto (224) notes that Hitchcock stated that "Rear Window" "was structurally satisfactory because it is the epitome of the subjective treatment." A man looks; he sees; he reacts. The camera thus constructs a mental process. "Rear Window" is entirely a mental process, done by the use of the visual." In this movie, then, Hitchcock has shown the deepest truth of Stella's remark, "What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change."

All these ingredients of the subjective camera work make the viewers feel that what is happening to the characters could actually happen to them. Hitchcock makes it clear that both the good -- and the bad -- can happen to anyone when least expected. People realize as the saying goes, "There but by the grace of God go I." It is this feeling of being attached to the character that makes Hitchcock's films so interesting, time and time again.

The movie "Vertigo" clearly shows this good -- and bad. Here is a character with whom the audience identifies -- who among them does not have some fears be it height or another and who recalls the delight and agony of falling in love? In "Vertigo" Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) retires from the police force after realizing his fear of heights and vertigo. His old college friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) convinces him to do some detective work and follow his suicidal wife, Madeline (Kim Novak). Scottie is reluctant at first to follow Madeline. However, when seeing her for the first time, he is caught up in her dream world. Scottie falls in love with Madeline and has a nervous breakdown when he is unable to save her from dying because of his fear of heights. When recovering, he sees a woman named Judy, who looks a great deal like Madeline. Because of Scottie's obsession and love for Madeline, he has Judy change herself to become his Madeline. Madeleine and Judy are the same woman and not Gavin's real wife. It was all a plot for wealth. Madeline dies in the end as the conspiracy is revealed.

The subjective camera angles make "Vertigo" one of the best films ever. This is not only because people can identify with Scottie, but also because the cinematography actually makes it look like being dizzy and falling. And Vertigo also made use of the subjective camera -- subtly and sporadically to be sure, but without it Vertigo would have none of its impact. In "Rear Window," the character gets stronger as time passes. Here, in "Vertigo," the audience sees the protagonist "falling" apart. The viewers actually watch his mind go astray through his fears and sadness and guilt. The point-of-view shots are so close to Scottie, that the audience actually becomes obsessed as he is. When he sees Madeline fall and wants to die, himself, so do the people watching. They can feel his severe pain from not helping and surviving in his weakness.

The dolly in/zoom out technique used to convey Scottie's fear of heights conveys some of this feeling. However, it is Hitchcock's subjective or point-of-view (POV) shots that make the audience feel part of his obsession with Madeleine: When she stares at the painting at the Legion of Honor or thinks of suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge or in her green neon hotel room. Hitchcock even placed the camera behind the wheel of Scottie's car as he followed Madeleine around the city. In addition, Hitchcock uses the first-person technique to put the audience in the right mind frame of a suspense thriller. "Vertigo" ends in one of Hitchcock's most shocking, abrupt, and negative scenes.

From Scottie's viewpoint: Madeleine!

INT. CHURCH, SAN JUAN BAUTISTA -- DAY

Scottie runs in, stops at the foot of the steps, hears the running footsteps, and looks up. From his viewpoint, we see Madeline running up the open stairway that spirals up along the walls of the high tower. She is already well on her way. Scottie is immediately stricken by the vertigo, and the tall tower seems to slide away from him.

He makes an attempt to start up the stairs, flattens himself against the wall and struggles up. He claws his way up, crosses over the hand-railing and uses it to pull his body up the steps, one by one struggling for breath, unable to call, though he tries. And Madeline keeps running.

Madeline reaches the top, goes through a small wooden door. We see it slam, hear it locked. Scottie, struggling up, reaches a landing next to a small open arch that looks out on the back garden, and has to stop to tight his nausea. There is a scream from above. Through the arch, he sees a body fall. He calls "Madeline!" And looks down through the arch.

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However, although Scottie shows such weakness, the viewers do not lose their support of him. They do not blame him for his fear, but Madeline for leading him on. At the end, Hitchcock gets the last laugh for everyone when it is revealed that not everything works out for the best. The confession leaves Scottie as helpless and alone as before. The scene is once again repeated.

Notorious with Cary (Devlin) Grant and Ingrid (Alicia) Bergman contains romance, spying and Nazis, death and the typical Hitchcock subjective suspense. One of Alicia is the "notorious" woman sought out by the United States government to uncover secret Nazi happenings in Brazil. She and her contact agent, Devlin must hide their love for one other in order to successfully complete the undercover work and gather information from Nazi Alex Sabastian (Claude Rains).

Paced perfectly as only Hitchcock could do, "Notorious" begins by establishing the characters and the theme of the movie that revolves the nation's future and a woman's life. The story then brings in the viewers into a series of events from high suspense to an elicit long kiss. In fact, this kiss has long been recognized for its timing. Because kisses could only be so long, the kiss between the couple stops and starts and stops and starts. This, in itself, drew the audience into the plot. The audience continues to see the film through the three main characters, as each transition alters their situation. Again, in typical Hitchcock fashion, by the end of the film the audience is so into the mindset of the characters that just the simple climbing of the flight of stairs is nerve wracking.

In the film, the subjective camera shows us how the characters actually feel. "We get a point-of-view shot of Alicia driving while drunk, and she mistakes her hair for 'fog.' Later in the film other point-of-view shots show the blurring of her vision when she is nearly poisoned to death (Modleski 136). Hitchcock uses the subjective camera view to show the lack of self-esteem and problems that Alicia has. For example, she has no place to actually call home. He gives her several homes, none that are really her own. There is the house in Miami, and the hotel in Rio De Janiero, Sebastians' house-none of these that are truly hers.

The audience goes from one location to another with Alicia and never feels at ease: The courthouse when her father is sentenced to prison, the airplane when she hears of his death, the racetrack where she meets Devlin while being watched through field glasses, the park bench where she meets with Devlin secretly. She is never alone. Her party is crashed by a government agent, who shows that her house has been bugged. A hoped-for intimate dinner with Devlin is destroyed by Devlin's call to Prescott and then by hearing that the Americans want her to go to bed with another man. The kiss down in the wine cellar is watched. and, all these scenes are viewed by the audience as well, so everyone realizes she is never alone and feel her pain at wanting some time to call her own.

By use of the subjective camera, Hitchcock, says Wood (306) creates sympathy for characters. The audience are made to identify with the characters to a large degree and encouraged to sympathize or, even better, empathize with them. "This is of course quite 'unscientific,' hence beyond the limited grasp of semiotics, but is of central importance to our experience of any fictional narrative." To a certain degree it is personal and subjective. But even if it eludes rigorously "scientific" demonstration, it is not beyond rational discussion and analysis: an examination of the construction of the scenario, the dialogue, and use of cinematic tools become pointers to feeling the sympathy that Hitchcock wishes.

In "Notorious," it is clear that Alicia is from the very start the movie's emotional point that draws the audience's greatest sympathy. The eye at the beginning is hers. Sebastian is a secondary sympathy figure only because he is the victim. However, the viewers feel for Alicia in a positive sense, not negatively as with Sebastian. The majority of subjective or point-of-view shots in "Notorious" belong to Alicia, not to the men. She is the one with whom Hitchcock wants the viewers to identify. In the party scene, for example, with its elaborate camera angles of three individuals, the number of shots from her point-of-view is much, much greater than for Devlin or Sebastian.