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 Hitchcock's double-voiced contract with the audience is particularly explicit in his cameo appearances, it is also part of the overall stylistic arsenal through which he displays his central concern with artifice as well as external and internal staging, so as to distinguish between characters caught in a theatricalized world and those caught in internal projections. At issue in all cases is the way this cinematic device shapes our response to the world viewed on screen, disrupting the safety of our voyeurism in order to make us aware of our complicity in the obsessions we are also called upon to vicariously enjoy. Finally, given the oblique reference to both World War II and the Cold War in the films under discussion, the essay claims that in Hitchcock rear projection serves both an aesthetic and a political strategy.
Bronfen, Elisabeth