Slices of Cake
Gilberto Perez
- Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks: An Authorised and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock by Dan Auiler
Bloomsbury, 567 pp, £20.00, May 1999, ISBN 0 7475 4490 5
Alfred Hitchcock is famous for planning everything beforehand, shooting his films in his head, never looking through the camera because he knew exactly what he would find. But the photographs in Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks show him always sitting by the camera. He may not have looked through the viewfinder but he identified with the camera: the eye that knew exactly what it would find, the gaze for whose benefit everything would perform according to plan. We see him sitting by the camera on the set of Rear Window, looking out of the same rear window through which the immobilised protagonist spies on his neighbours, and using a microphone to direct the actors playing the neighbours in the apartment across the courtyard. This is a god spying on the people whose every move he commands.
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Vol. 21 No. 16 · 19 August 1999 » Gilberto Perez » Slices of Cake (print version)
pages 7-8 | 3385 words