Films › Directing
Rear Window
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1954
The entire film is staged from a single apartment looking onto a courtyard set built at full scale on a Paramount stage. Hitchcock constructs suspense out of point of view: what the protagonist sees, what he cannot see, and what the audience sees before he does. Sound comes almost entirely from the courtyard, so score is replaced by diegetic music and street noise. It is the cleanest demonstration of the Kuleshov principle in a feature. Production designer Hal Pereira built the courtyard set with working plumbing and electricity so every apartment could be lit and lived in independently, letting Hitchcock choreograph background action as a second layer of storytelling. Editor George Tomasini controls the geometry of glances with such precision that the audience's eye is directed without a single line of expository dialogue. Franz Waxman's score is largely absent by design, forcing the sound department to carry tension through ambient courtyard noise instead, a lesson in restraint any director working on a contained location should study closely.
What to watch for
Watch the look, the object, the reaction pattern and how Hitchcock varies its rhythm to build tension.
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