Looking from today into the future, I hope to make a 7-8 minute short film (with Dom) for my final assessment. Without knowing too much about what a ‘bottle film’ is, it had an instant appeal to me based on the practicality of the genre (single setting, dialogue focused). Before I begin to write on Rear Window, here are some of the notes of taken in class about Bottle Film as a genre.

• Occurs when the production team runs out of money, often after a big run of expensive episodes.
• It often comes after a plot line is resolved and the production team needs to blow off steam and create something different.
• It’s often dialogue heavy.
• Every character has tense emotional moments that reveal something, everyone learns something about the characters on and off the screen.
• Minimal Cast.
• A Clash of Ideas, A Clash of Personalities that creates the conflict, as opposed to an external event.
• A small space that is defined by editing and cinematography.
• Often it ends with characters going into the real world, looking into the future- they escape the bottle.
• In the screening of Community we saw the characters react to a singular event in there own entertaining, idiosyncratic and ultimately comical way. Community is a very meta show, Ahmed referenced the episode within the episode saying something long the lines of ‘oh no its going to be a bottle episode’. This gave the writers free reigns to take all the elements of a conventional bottle episode and channel it into there own parody episode. In that episode we saw quick paced dialogue (and lots of it), a great deal of hyper emotional moments that were warped into comedy (that amount of emotion is rarely displayed in traditional comedy), the emphasis on performance (if the actors didn’t nail it, it would have been a cringe worthy episode) and a singular setting that created a claustrophobic feel- to the comedy/mock drama of the episode.

Rear Window is Hitchcock’s most cinematic work. Its one of the few films I’ve seen that can exclusively be told through the medium of film. Rear Window switches perspectives from a love story that centres around Jeff and Lisa to Jeff’s perceptions of fellow people who live in the apartment complex. Half the story (the half that focuses on Lisa and Jeff’s relationship) is sensibly directed and comes across like a rather conventional piece of film and/or theatre. The audience is put in a privileged position where a story is delivered in front of them from an omniscient camera. However, the other half of Rear Window is told entirely from a point of view shot coming from Jeff’s perspective-everything he sees the audience sees, everything this he doesn’t see, the audience doesn’t see. In theatre you can’t replicate a characters perceptions like in film, you can’t technically do a point of view shot, you can’t literally show what they’re seeing-the brilliance of Rear Window is that you see half the film in this exclusively filmic manner. This is why Alfred Hitchcock continually cited Rear Window as his most cinematic film.

Lisa either has all the agency in the story or none of the agency in the story. She is the person that turns Jeff’s ideas into reality, she actualises his theory and through her courage she uncovered/shone a light on the crime. Its quite liberating as having a woman as the hero, however one could argue that the only reason she got involved in the first place was to get Jeff’s attention back (he became infatuated by looking out the window). Another argument would be that She got involved with the story in order to show her adventurous spirit to prove to Jeff that she was good fit to be his wife. Lastly, is the only reason a woman was the hero because the leading man was temporarily wheel chair bound? This on top of other throwaway lines such as “She’ll get her happiness and one man will lose his” and (when referring to food his carer made) “No wonder your husband still loves you” makes Rear Window comes across as dated and at times sexist, leading me to think that the agency Lisa had in the story derived from her want to win Jeff’s affection. Another thing I took issue with was in one of the final shots of the film where the film shows Gene Kelly putting away an adventure magazine in order to read a copy of Bazaar. This came across as if Hitchcock was contending that Women innately find comfort and fashion more  appealing than action and adventure-irregardless of how much they wish to please there husband.

I really appreciated the strong sense of place that came from the film, I often feel as though in Bottle Films that place-though it stays the same becomes more significant and has a greater effect on the tone/mood of the story than a story that takes place in several locations. I remember last semester I did a documentary class (for this course) and my initial plan was to film in a few places and create a story that would take the audience places, however later on (the night before the filming) I decided to keep the whole documentary just set in one place and in turn it became not only more focused but the sense of place that developed because of it gave it an intimate feel that worked really well for the project. The two most recent Hitchcock films I’ve seen has been North By Northwest and Rear Window and Rear Window came across to me as being more memorable and somewhat warmer than NBNW because of it taking place in a single location.

Most of my ideas are original however I did read Josh Beltons ‘The Space in Rear Window’ in order to get the ball rolling, I thoroughly enjoyed his comparisons of Rear Window to that of theatre.