The intermediality inherent to the indiscreet window of cinema.

Abstract

Voyeuristic themes are common as stylistic devices in Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography. His 1954 movie Rear Window is the most prominent example of this theme, due to its main character, who, immobilized by an accident, turns his daily observations of his neighbors the narrative’s main plot. The script may arouse the idea of a character watching a movie inside another one, in a metalinguistic production created by the renowned director. Therefore, this paper aims to compare the intermedialities that composed the history of the cinematographic art with the actions developed during the movie in analysis, regarding the relationship established between the spectator and what is being watched. In this comparison, the history of the media composition of cinema will be recovered by means of analogies between Rear Window’s narrative and elements that constituted this history, for instance: the relationship between image and sound in the transition from the silent film to the talking film, as it was named by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (2005); the modern film’s disjunction between image and sound (DELEUZE, op. cit.); the different artifacts (FLUSSER, 2007) that enabled the advent of 3D films; and the new remediations (BOLTER; GRUSIN, 2000) of the media in the formats of games called interactive films and in interactive movies themselves.