A Film About Watching Films

A photographer with a leg in plaster sits at his window through a New York heatwave and watches his neighbours because there is nothing else to do. Hitchcock builds the entire picture out of one gesture repeated: a man looks, we see what he sees, we see him react. That is the complete grammar of cinema reduced to three shots, and the film uses it to implicate the audience in exactly the behaviour it is depicting. The courtyard was a single enormous set on a Paramount stage with thirty one apartments, twelve of them fully furnished, drained and lit as one continuous space. There is no orchestral score. Every piece of music comes from a radio, a piano in one of the flats or a party across the yard, so the sound belongs to the world being watched.