The Space of Rear Window

Abstract

In Book III of the Republic, Plato identifies two distinct and opposed modes of representation-imitation (or mimesis) and simple narration (or diegesis).1 Contemporary literary theory has inherited this distinction in the form of mimetic and diegetic theories of narration, which range in sophistication from the simple opposition of drama, which shows a narrative, and the novel, which it, to the more complex narrative theories of Wayne Booth and Gerard Genette, which view narration as a fusion of mimetic and diegetic techniques.2 Though the has traditionally been regarded as a dramatic form because it presents itself to its viewers as story rather than mediated discourse (to borrow Emile Benveniste's terms),3 it clearly mixes narrative modes. Classical narrative tells as it shows; indeed, it can only tell through showing. Dramatic spectacles are staged for and then read by the camera, and this reading narrativizes them. Cinematic narrative techniques clearly rely upon certain codes of representation that were previously developed in the plastic arts, the theater, and literary narratives. Any notion of cinema-of a mode of expression that unique to the and that has evolved autonomously out of the singular nature of the medium's raw materials-must be qualified by the essential impurity of the cinema's quasi-theatrical, quasi-novelistic mode of narration. The figure frequently identified with the notion of pure cinema within classical Hollywood filmaking Alfred Hitchcock, who often cites Rear Window as his most cinematic work because it is told only in visual terms.4 Yet Rear Window arguably one of Hitchcock's theatrical films. In what