Auteur In Rear Window

Rear Window effectively demonstrates Hitchcock’s strong qualities as an auteur. The writer for Rear Window is not Hitchcock, and yet there are clearly many motifs and themes present which are well known for being used by Hitchcock. He is not merely following instructions of how to make the movie he is providing his own creative adjustments.

Now we will address a few of these from the film. First, Drawing parallels between characters with a difference, usually a negative one, is a repeated concept in Hitchcock films. Such as in the film “Strangers On a Train”, where Bruno ends up killing Guys’ wife while Guy had himself been desiring to be rid of her somehow. Here in “Rear Window” early in the film we can see this between Lisa and Jeff to Thorwald

Though this does not necessarily apply to the entirety of the film it did seem to be the case for most of it. Lisa is introduced by Jeff as being too perfect, and it seems Hitchcock made an attempt to give this more visibility in the film. Lisa is always clean, prepped and perfect looking, not a hair out of place. She seems to behave with more overall grace than the rest of the cast and was potentially even given special lighting in certain scenes to give her a more radiant appearance than the others. This gives Lisa her own individualized look. In addition side characters not centrally involved are represented as very distinctly different personalities and situations for possibly the same reason.

In conclusion in “Rear Window” Hitchcock is shown off as an auteur and realist though his modification and implementation of his own creative mind and as a realist by conveying reality and occurrences of everyday life respectively. He also used methods such as eye line matching, cinema as window and frame, and potentially character specific lighting to connect the audience with the characters and to give the main characters more individualized