Many thanks to Alan (with his student working on REAR WINDOW and Schopenhauer) and to Dirk, for their responses.
Alan's student might look at Oliver Sacks's 'Awakenings' (1973) and Sacks's passage there on Schopenhauer, for the helpful observation that Will and Representation are inseparable, and must be so regarded (for otherwise, beware the chaos-world).
Let me slightly amplify my previous post and the point about RW's darkness-light-darkness visual rhythm and texture.
The picture of the model on the magazine cover is introduced after we have just seen her negative (therefore dark) image. This is proleptic as well as, I suggest, emblematic (in ways I can only suggest here, but which Dirk has picked up on).
Lisa is introduced when in Jeff's darkened apartment she lowers her lips to his - some awakening for Jeff! - and then successively turns on lamps illuminating her glowing presence.
Thorwald, a doppelganger of Jeff (again a matter noted by Dirk) is finally fought off with flashbulbs that temporarily blind both him and the viewer (a remarkable subjective effect by Hitchcock - n.b., Jeff is careful to keep his eyes averted). Apart from the Oedipal connotations of this scene (and throughout, in the Jeff-Thorwald opposition), I am reminded of Edmund Burke's thoughts on light and a 'false sublime' (his example being the French Revolution).
Go back to that opening sequence with its panning camera. The RW screenplay pays attention to 'another framed picture, this one a beautiful and awesome shot of an atomic explosion at Frenchman's Flat, Nevada. It is the cul-de-sac of violence. The picture taken at a distant observation point, shows some spectators in the foreground WATCHING THE EXPLOSION THROUGH BINOCULARS' (my emphasis). Apart from how well this photo fits the whole texture and thematics of RW, I would note that we are being introduced here to what Francis Ferguson has called the 'nuclear sublime' (something which my friend Freda Freiberg has analysed re the 1988 Japanese anime film, AKIRA).
Not incidentally, I would say that RW as a whole works with Plato's cave in mind - and of course the analogy to cinema - but that the soundtrack repeatedly emphasises 'dreaming', including at the end. So let's not suppose that RW finally shows a general 'awakening'.
Back, finally, to the 'false sublime'. I recently concluded a six-part 'blog' (April 17-May 22) about Hitchcock's TOPAZ and a comparable attention there to beauty, violence, and, yes, the 'false sublime'. My Hitchcock study group has found the blog 'important', so let me note for those interested the URL: http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/news-home_c.html
(And if a reader or two here would like to join that 'advanced' study group - we seek practising teachers, authors, critics - its URL is: http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/hitchen2)
Metta to all - KM
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