Grabbing a moment to make a belated response to Alan F's question ...
>In the opening sequence [of REAR WINDOW] we are shown a negative and then its positive as a cover of Harpers magazine. The question, are we supposed to read this image as Grace Kelly, because I, for one, don't think it is her?
My student's argument to a certain degree pivots on this issue.
Alan, as already noted, it's not Grace Kelly, no! But ... nor is that magazine (of which we see multiple copies in two or more stacks) 'Harper's Bazaar', if you please! The title is not shown, perhaps for copyright or related reasons, but it is unmistakably 'Life' magazine. That fact, too, is pivotally important! First, it tells us Jeff's employer ... and that he is an ambiguous participant in 'life', which relates to what I think of as Hitchcock's primary theme across his films. I have often enunciated this, all the way from the play on 'quickening' in THE 39 STEPS via the very title of LIFEBOAT to Thornhill's observation at the climax of NORTH BY NORTHWEST, 'I never felt more alive!' Hitchcock saw his principal responsibility to audiences, whom he typified as 'sluggish and jellified', as being to entertain them and make them feel more 'alive' (a noble-enough intention, which he shared with, for example, Goethe). In turn, I relate this to my 'Schopenhauerian'/Symbolist understanding of the films. Think Will AND Representation! Matthew Bernstein is of course dead right to note that the photo of a model on that magazine cover, which echoes the same but negative image on the photo-viewer alongside, tells us a bit of backstory about how Jeff probably met Lisa. But I daresay that the negative/positive opposition (and apposition) is also pertinent in a film that is constantly moving rhythmically from darkness to light and back again (here anticipating VERTIGO) and questions of life observed and life lived. Pirandellian questions (n.b., Pirandello, the most compassionate of writer/dramatists, whose work I believe Hitchcock knew, was a Schopenhauerian).
'Harper's Bazaar' appears to be LISA's favourite reading, and turns up - ambiguously - at the end of the film, of course.
- KM
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