7. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1954)

Alfred Hitchcok was a great master. Nobody else could create such entertaining, exciting and thrilling movies. But once he managed to create a piece of real art within the limits of his genre. It was Rear Window where Hitchcock achieved the highest point of his career and penetrated into the secrets of cinema. 

Obeying classicist "unity of time, place and action" (main hero photographer L. B. Jefferies due to injury can't move and being bored observes opposite windows through the binoculars) and using minimum of tools Hitchcock masterfully create suspense and - furthermore - allows us to reflect on one of the ontological entities of cinema. Camera, likening to the eye of the main hero who becomes a casual observer of a murder of a woman by a man, turned out to be an unintentional voyeur of the reality, it occasionally notices something that is hidden from the others. And a viewer who has to identify himself with the hero turns into a peeper of action. At that a viewer being without motion in cinema hall or at the TV set can't interfere in the action in the screen too. So, the viewer's situation is absolutely similar to the hero's one.

Consequently cinema itself is in a way a "rear window" which allows to see the wrong side of the life, background of the reality which usually remains beyond the common sight. By the way, there is a concept "back projection" in cinema corresponded with the use of specially shooted background images behind the figures of heroes in the foreground. Hitchcock changes "focusing" of the shot and pay more attention to the things which happen behind the foreground. Secondary things acquires importance though not fully guessed by the observer. After all, we can interpret events happened in that apartment in a different ways. Actually Hitchcock anticipated philosophical question "Is everything visible is true?", one of the fundamental cinematic questions. This question will be considered later by Michelangelo Antonioni in his great film Blow Up.