Screening and disclosing fantasy: rear projection in Hitchcock

Abstract

Taking Hitchcock's consistent use of rear projection as its subject, the essay explores the manner in which this device serves to re-establish the contract between Hitchcock and his audience. I argue that rear projection allows him to produce a distance to the very obsessions the audience is also drawn into by virtue of the hallucinatory power his camerawork unfolds on the screen. We are meant to empathize with a character's fantasies, even while the rear projection exposes the technique deployed to bring about this effect. While Hitc Show more