In watching Rear Window (1954) again after several years, I was surprised to discover that the film could conceivably be regarded as an example of what I have called ‘flâneurial cinema’.

I say that I am ‘surprised’ to have made this retrospective discovery about a film I know so well because Alfred Hitchcock is not a director I naturally class among the colleagues I claim as part of a movement, the name of which I have all but invented to describe a tendency among certain cinéastes to take a more exploratory approach to our art-form.

Despite being one of the most masterful manipulators of the incurious and unreflecting assumptions of commercial cinema, Hitchcock is an experimental filmmaker au cœur—one who continually questions the commercial assumptions of cinematic form; one who continually renovates himself, setting himself new æsthetic experiments with form to explore in each new film; and in that narrow regard he makes a sally into one of the domains I claim as the natural territory of a ‘flâneurial cinema’, the inquisitive conceptual space of the experimental film.

As Evelyn Kreutzer recently showed with her video essay “Footsteps” (2022), there are essays in flâneurism chez Hitchcock—examples of those ‘moments privilégiés’ where his movies briefly respire in the spectacular ‘wonder’ of cinematic mundanity, but rarely is the conceptual architecture of his films constructed on the basis of a thoroughgoing flâneurial investigation of the plastic potentialities of cinematic form.

And curiously, in thinking back on Hitchcock’s œuvre, it stands out to me in retrospect that those films he made with James Stewart—Rope (1948), Rear Window, and Vertigo (1958)—seem to be the movies where he takes the most overtly flâneurial attitude of exploration and experimentation towards film form.

As Richard Corliss said in his Time obituary for the actor back in 1997, James Stewart represented for Alfred Hitchcock a kind of ‘pedestrian everyman’—a voyeur who finds himself lured by an oasis of glittering evil that lies just beyond his reach.

Flânerie is an amoral æsthetic activity which privileges the scopic sense, and thus its relationship with both voyeurism and the cinema is implied. The reason, perhaps, that Rope, Rear Window, and Vertigo elicit from Hitchcock his most thoroughgoing flâneurial inquisitions, investigations, explorations and experimentations into the possibilities and potentialities of cinematic form is that something archetypal in the actor himself evoked a flâneurial response in Hitchcock that critics have not yet noticed.

What I am suggesting is that beneath the veneer of intrinsic ‘goodness’ chez Stewart, there is a free-floating, drifting, dynamically bending, corruptible stance that well represents the ‘un-engagé’ nature of modern man in the morally bankrupt twentieth century.

From the pick-and-mix drawing-room intellectual of Rope who ‘samples’ the philosophy of Nietzsche without committing himself to the absolute moral consequences of it, to Scottie Ferguson, the most overtly flâneurial of Hitchcock’s characters in his most obviously flâneurial film, Stewart, the ‘impotent observer’ who finds himself ‘morally seduced’ by the visions his wandering male gaze meets with, is an actor uniquely aligned to the conceptual and mechanical apparatus of Hitchcock’s cinema—the place where the director’s æsthetic theory of cinema meets the technical practice of it.

In his analysis of the film in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (1976), Donald Spoto argues for Rear Window as Hitchcock’s ‘testament film’: it is a kind of analogy for itself, showing us not only how a Hitchcock movie is made, but, more crucially, how it should be watched.

In Spoto’s view, Stewart’s ‘Jeff’ becomes ‘Hitch’; his apartment is the cinema, his rear window the screen on which the director’s voyeuristic visual pleasures are played out. More vulgarly, Jeffries’ immobilizing broken leg, which renders him impotent to take a more active flâneurial rôle in the drama, might be read as Hitchcock’s girth, of which the director was acutely sensitive, and which condemned him, in his own view, to be an armchair observer of life.

Thus, when Jeff sends Lisa (Grace Kelly) ‘onto the scene’ of this immense dollhouse Hitchcock constructed to avoid all the ennui he felt about going on location, Stewart is, in a sense, ‘directing’ Her Serene Highness on this screen of scopic pleasure which Hitchcock has built as a proscenium to ‘grace’ the most beautiful doll in his dollhouse.

Then too, the three-shot structure that governs the film’s sensemaking apparatus—close-up of Stewart looking at something; insert of what he’s looking at from a position aligned to his point of view; close-up of his reaction—is the fundamental syntagm of HItchcock’s cinema.

As elegantly simple as this visual syntax is, in Rear Window it shows itself to be supremely flexible at conveying a wide range of emotionally intoned meanings. The three-shot syntagm shows us not only how Hitchcock constructs his emotional effects, but tells us how we should watch his movies so as to inferentially derive meaning from them.

And as a visual dialect, an æsthetic theory of sensemaking that Hitchcock consistently applies practically in his cinema, this syntagmatic structure in Rear Window perhaps tells us better in than any other film how Hitchcock himself typically viewed the world.

Given that I propose flâneurial cinema as a reel investigation du réel, the experimental nature of the flâneurial cinematic inquiry in Rear Window, where the overtly artificial studio becomes a kind of ‘lab’ for research into the plastic potentialities of cinematic form, would appear problematic because in this film Hitchcock eschews location shooting with far more than his usual violence.

But, paradoxically, the film is flâneurial in its domesticity, and in Rear Window, the camera, as the fundamental tool of cinematic recherche, takes an extended ‘voyage autour de ma chambre’:—for the private domestic space of L.B. Jeffries’ Greenwich Village apartment exerts a ‘sphere of influence’, arrogating the courtyard behind the eponymous ‘rear window’ to itself.

For the private individual, the place of dwelling is for the first time opposed to the place of work. The former constitutes itself as the interior. Its complement is the office. The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions…. From [the exclusion of commercial and social considerations] arise the phantasmagorias of the interior—which, for the private man, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far way and the long ago. His living room is a box in the theatre of the world.

—Walter Benjamin, “Exposé of 1935”, The Arcades Project (1999, pp. 8-9)

The courtyard becomes ‘interiorized’ so as to become ‘domesticated’ by the flâneurial regard of Jeffries in the same way that the Parisian flâneur annexes the local park to his private chambre as a Le Nôtrean ‘salle’—a communal, outdoor ‘living room’ where one feels strangely closeted to carry on in public some of the activities—reading, drinking beer, watching the folks ‘across the way’—that might typically be regarded as private or ‘indoor’ activities.

It’s worth noting how little of Jeffries‘ apartment Hitchcock actually shows us: we see only the central living space clearly. We get oblique glimpses of the kitchen area and bathroom, but the angle of regard is principally turned outward: as the credits demonstrate with their bookended raising and lowering of the shades over the rear window, we are in a private loge at the theatre, and as in the theatre, public spectacle is private entertainment for the flâneur.

Thus Hitchcock achieves a remarkable sense of ‘intimacy’ through the truncated set design of the apartment in Rear Window: just as the flâneur finds his home in the crowd, the real ‘inside’ of Jeffries’ domestic life is ‘out there’ in the ‘secret, private world’ of the public courtyard.

In this restriction of regard, of scopic access to Jeffries’ actual living space, the film produces a similar effect to the one that Ozu later achieves in An Autumn Afternoon (1962): the more restricted our visual access to the Hirayamas’ living spaces, the more intimately we feel ourselves to be ‘within’ these spaces we must, as in the theatre, regard from a singular point of perspective that actually keeps us ‘out’ of them.

Thus, in its ‘domesticity’, Rear Window is flâneurial in a distinctly ‘Japanese’ sense I associate with the literature of Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikabu: Jeff, with his retinue of nurses and servants (both man- and maid-), is the Heian lady behind screens.

Something essential to remember while reading The Tale of Genji is that no one in it is ever alone. A lord or lady lived surrounded by a more or less large staff of women and, just outside, men. The notions of solitude and privacy did not exist. …

Still, a lord or lady with no one but attendants or household staff nearby was alone in a way, because in an important sense such people did not count. Relations between people of standing were what mattered, and these were not necessarily conducted face-to-face. Good manners maintained proper distance, which amounted to upholding the accepted social order. … Domestic space, divided by screens, curtains, blinds and so on—objects hardly more substantial than ways of speaking—similarly upheld distance and inviolate dignity.

—Royall Tyler, The Tale of Genji (2002), “Introduction”, pp. xix-xx

If the flâneur is inescapably masculine, a rarefication of the hunter under conditions of modernity, the chasseur/chercheur who seeks to ‘collect beauty’, there is a sense in which women too, despite their domestic concealment from the male gaze of the public sphere, have traditionally participated in a circumscribed form of flânerie.

It’s one that we see represented by Sei in The Pillow Book (1002) and by Murasaki in The Tale of Genji (ca. 1010). In the Heian period, a respectable gentlewoman kept herself modestly veiled from the male gaze behind an elaborate array of curtains, veils and screens, and in some very significant sense, as Royall Tyler writes in his introduction to Genji, in the ancient Japanese of Sei’s and Murasaki’s texts, for a woman to have been ‘seen’ by a man meant that she had been ‘known’—in the biblical sense—by him.

Likewise, in the most chilling moment of Rear Window, when Raymond Burr’s Thorwald turns his gaze directly on the camera, what a fuss of modesty Jeff suddenly kicks up: ‘Turn out the light, he’s seen us!’ he cries out in a hoarse whisper to Stella (Thelma Ritter). Suddenly the camera draws back from Stewart’s close-up reaction shot through the rear window of the apartment, and for the first and only time in the picture we see Jeff ‘like a bug under a glass’, from the perspective of one of his neighbours.

He doesn’t like to be ‘seen’, and with that variation on the syntagmatic formula, Hitchcock tells us eloquently that Thorwald suddenly ‘knows’ Jeffries; knows that this despicable jerk in his pyjamas spying on his neighbours with a telescopic lens is the muffled voice that has been blackmailing him on the telephone and the source of threatening notes slipped under his door.

Thus, like Sei and the heroines of Murasaki, there is a feminine privilege in Jeff’s seeing while not being seen, in allowing his gaze a flâneurial parcours over the other windows of the courtyard.

And equally, there is something fundamentally ‘compromising’ in the immodesty of ‘being seen’—for that shot reveals Jeff to us in all his moral squalor.

As a feminine form of flânerie, the domestic constraints of the Heian lady’s physical restrictions and limited visual access produces a heightened observational tendency. As Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski observed with respect to Marcel Proust, who led a similarly cloistered, bed-bound life as these ancient ladies, debility and illness encourages certain sensitive souls to compensate by developing their capacities for deep observation.

And for Jeffries, whose scopic faculties as a photographer capable of getting shots that are ‘dramatically different’ are well in evidence about his apartment, his confinement and debility encourages the compensatory development of a more subtle observational skill—what Franz Hessel, in Walking in Berlin (1929), calls the flâneur’s skill at ‘reading the street’.

Instead of seeing what is ‘dramatically different’, Jeff must now develop that inferential regard that ‘reads into’ the flattened, limited spectacle presented to his view—just as we must do with the two-dimensional image presented us in the cinema. It is this type of inferential flâneurial regard that allows Lisa, with her deprecated ‘feminine intuition’, to instantly apprehend that Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy) isn’t into any of her hungry suitors.

‘How can you tell that from here?’ Jeff asks her, craning his neck a little to get a clue as to how she makes that intuitive leap.

‘You said that it resembled my apartment, didn’t you?’ Lisa tartly replies with all the je-ne-sais-quoi Grace Kelly is capable of.

The second major technique of flâneurial cinema in evidence in Rear Window lies in its sound design. We note that Hitchcock directed that the sound should be entirely recorded from the perspective of Jeffries’ apartment. That choice also works to limit the perspective, anchoring sound as well as vision to that of a flâneurial observer.

It’s impossible to overstate the important rôle that sound plays in flâneurial cinema. The musique concrète of Rear Window’s soundscape is its accompaniment—just as it is in Rope, and in The Birds (1963).

The camera’s retreat down the staircase and out into the noise of the street in Frenzy (1972) is also an example of a flâneurial moment privilégié in Hitchcock’s cinema, the musique concrète of the growing ambient street sounds washing, like the accretion of so many sedimentary layers of quotidian banality, over the moment of ‘marvellous wonder’ when the rape and murder of Babs (Anna Massey) will transfigure this unprepossessing coin de la ville into a ‘scène de crime’.

Like water rushing to fill the lowest point, sound rushes in to fill the horror vacui of the empty image as its ‘accomplice’, covering over, ‘hushing up’ the sobs and choking screams we cannot hear.

My point is this: It is really in the world of sound that cinematic image lies in flâneurial cinema. The restricted regard of a personified camera means that the ears become the true scopic senses;—for a deliberately restricted, subjectified regard ‘blinds’ the camera and opens the viewer’s ears to supply the elided parts of the image.

A comparison of Hitchcock’s technique in conveying the horror of Babs’ violation in Frenzy with how he chooses to convey the mysterious fate of Anna Thorwald (Irene Winston) in Rear Window is instructive here: In the later film, the camera literally turns aside from a vision it cannot bear to record and beats a retreat, stopping its ears to Babs’ screams and sobs with the sounds of Covent Garden’s banal commercial spectacle.

Similarly, in Rear Window, Jeff’s—and our—only clue that something other than the train-train quotidian life of a ‘secret, private world’ is going on behind the blank façades of brick and glass across the way is a woman’s scream—abruptly cut off, more like a startled cry—and the brief sound of shattering glass.

Not a lot to reasonably base the supposition of a murder on.

Hitchcock, who was capable of imagining some of the most violent images in cinema, makes the choice to replace what is easily the most spectacularly kinetic image it is possible to film—the destruction of a human being—one which, under the ‘sex and violence’ assumptions of commercial cinema, is easily the most æsthetically pleasing image to mainstream audiences, with sounds that hardly suggest the true horror of a soul violently leaving its body.

The sounds are ambiguous, which, quite apart from being necessary to the film’s narrative conceit, supplying a ‘plausible deniability’ to the images of Thorwald’s banal yet unaccountably puzzling behaviour, puts us in the sensemaking position of being forced to ‘fill in the blanks’ by engaging a cinematic sense other than our eyes—for the camera literally cannot see what happened to Mrs. Thorwald, and there’s no reason to suppose that these two sounds—a woman’s cry, breaking glass—even imply a murder.

We enter, in some sense, a ‘threat posture’ in flâneurial cinema: Given the noirish ambiguity of modernity, it is no longer enough merely to look at the banal spectacle, one must vigilantly listen for clues—audio cues that provide further context which will ‘amplify’ the inferential meaning of what one is seeing in the salience landscape.

In flâneurial cinema, we are seeking to bring the camera tightly to heel, to rein in its affordance to be an ‘objective’, God’s-eye observer—everywhere all at once—and bring its range of vision back within the personal limits of human sight.

The musique concrète of Rear Window supplies a ‘live score’ accompanying its action, the classical ‘movement-images’ which hearken back to Hitchcock’s origins in the silent cinema, and sometimes, as when Thelma Ritter or Grace Kelly mug directly to the camera in its personified rôle as Jeff, the acting in Rear Window is as broad as in a silent melodrama.

When Thorwald attacks Lisa in his apartment, for example , the diegetic ‘romantic’ music issuing from the studio apartment of the composer (Ross Bagdasarian) makes an ironic comment on their tussle, foreshadowing Truffaut’s remark that Hitchcock shot of scenes of murder as if they were actually scenes of love.

Which brings me to the final way in which Rear Window, despite its slick commerciality, may be regarded as an experimental essay in flâneurial cinema.

The conventional reading of Rear Window advanced by critics such as Donald Spoto and Robin Wood is that the spectacle of Jeff’s flâneuristic regard flitting around the courtyard represents an analogical externalization of his internal psychological drama with respect to the prospect of marrying Lisa, with his dilemma being analogically externalized in various scenarios framed in the rear windows of his neighbours.

But in fact, I would argue that the forcibly constrained flânerie around the courtyard undertaken by both his and Lisa’s regards makes them jointly aware of ‘the wonder’ hidden in the banal quotidian in such a way as to revivify their relationship just when it is faltering.

In a sense, the discovery of a hidden mystery, an exotic, outré occurrence couched in the banal vernacular of the visible, ‘marries up’ this couple who are coming apart at the seams.

They become partners in a flâneurial adventure which, in its feminine constraints, its forced sedentariness and immobility, is better suited to Lisa’s pampered, cosmopolitan life than to Jeff’s rugged traipsings around the third world as a photo-journalist. The great mechanized, modern city of New York becomes an amusement park of spectacular wonder they can both enjoy from a tantalizing distance, and Hitchcock doesn’t fail to tell us, with a pointed close-up of Stewart’s admiring face when Kelly rushes back to the apartment to discover Thorwald’s reaction to the cruel ‘prank’ of slipping the note under his door, that Jeffries has discovered an unsuspected vein of pluck in his patrician girlfriend which makes her instantly more ‘wifeable’ to him.

In the urban wonderland of Greenwich Village, in this utterly artificial Luna Park Hitchcock has constructed for these two characters, the mystery of Mrs. Thorwald’s disappearance is a ‘wonderful’—by which I mean, a ‘marvellous’—event: As James Ellroy demonstrates in his appropriation of Walker Percy’s notion of ‘the wonder’ in Clandestine (1982), there is very little to distinguish between those moments of banal beauty in the life of the city which are invisible because they are overlooked and the aberrant criminal events which are hidden from plain view.

When I became more comfortable with solitary patrol, I would ditch out on Norsworthy completely and hit the numbered side streets off Central—tawdry rows of small, white-framed houses, tar-paper shacks, and overcrowded tenement buildings. I bought three pairs of expensive binoculars and secreted them on the rooftops of buildings on my beat. Late at night, I would scan lighted windows with them, looking for crime and wonder. I found it. The whole gamut, from homosexuality—which I didn’t bother with—to wild jazz sessions, to heated lovemaking, to tears. I also found dope addiction—which I did act on, always relaying my information on reefer smoking and worse to the dicks, never trying to grandstand and make the collar myself.

—James Ellroy, Clandestine (1982, p. 71)

And one can take this further and say that in its aberrant disruption of the orderly running of the ‘machine à vivre’ which is New York City, the revelation of the clandestine crime which provokes ‘wonder’ in the flâneurial observer is on a similar—if not the same—order of spectacular æsthetic pleasure as the ‘marvellous’ poetic events beloved by the surrealists—those violent irruptions of irrational disjuncture.

For both Jeff and Lisa, the flâneurial adventure of inferentially reading into the flat, banal, quotidian spectacle of the courtyard—literally the clandestine ‘backstage’ or ‘behind the scenes’ of urban life—and discovering a ‘marvellous’ truth hidden in the plain view of that unprepossessing actuality, one that miraculously beggars all the probabilizing of Jeffries’ policeman friend Doyle (Wendell Corey), joins this couple more firmly together in dyadic union just when they in danger of coming permanently apart.

When Thorwald eventually enters Jeffries’s apartment, this is the surreal ‘marvellous’ invading the banalité ennuyeuse of Jeff’s existence—his ‘six weeks sitting in a two-room apartment with nothing to do but look out of the window at the neighbours.’

Moreover, this miraculous irruption of crime into hermetic order, proving the correctness of Jeff’s intuitive reading of the improbable reality across the way, justifies Godard’s claim for Hitchcock as a ‘poète maudit’—the only one to gain popular success in his own lifetime.

For Hitchcock—particularly in Rear Window—the modern banal is a source of surreal marvel and flâneuristic wonder.

But the shot in Frenzy I alluded to above is another example, a poetic strophe in itself that all but condenses the entire flâneurial message of Rear Window: The further back the personified camera moves from the alienating spectacle, the more the quotidian covers the horrific wonder of murder, and the more difficult it becomes to inferentially read that ‘wonderful’ aberration into the flat – flattening—ultimately flattened image of banal actuality that conceals the miraculously improbable moment when peaceful order is fatally disrupted in the secret life of the City—a ‘marvellous’ moment that is invisible to us for being deliberately overlooked.