by Ron Wilson
In Rear Window, Hitchcock seems to consider the view from LB Jeffries’ window
as a metaphor for the cinema; Jeffries, the proverbial captive audience, is as gleefully
voyeuristic as Hitchcock’s audience. Not only is Jeffries a voyeur, he is a provocateur.
This can also be seen as a reflection of the audience + artist = art theorem. That is, an
artist creates, the audience reacts with varying degrees of interest to the creation, and the
artist subsequently recreates to evoke the most orgasmic of the audience’s voyeuristic
responses to that creation.
Viscerally, the film succeeds on so many levels; Hitchcock structured and framed the film brilliantly on a single set (I understand the soundstage was too short to accommodate the apartment complex, so the basement was dug out to build the set). Every shot that James Stewart isn’t in is framed from his character’s point of view. The soundtrack is layered with bits of muffled dialog, traffic noise, and somewhat off-kilter musical accompaniment provided by Ross Bagdassarian and his jazz ensemble, or a distant radio program. The sum effect of this narrative is that the audience becomes a sensual
extension of LB Jeffries. Consequently, the suspense created has an extra-dimensional
effect on the viewer; we are reacting not only to the two-dimension exposition on the
screen, we are in the story, in the person of the protagonist.
The audience-as-voyeur motif is taken to a different sort of extreme in Lars Von Trier’s Dogville. The inherent rot of Dogville is palpable from the beginning of the
film. Von Trier eviscerates the carcass of human depravity and lays it out on a Spartan
set in which there are no walls on the hovels of the townspeople. The audience witnesses
Grace’s rape as the town goes about its empty “business” in the foreground. Von Trier
seems to make us complicit in the town’s crimes as we become more intimate with the
characters. Somehow, we feel purged of our sins as James Caan’s men (including the
great Udo Kier) slaughters the entire (human) population of Dogville.