The Cine Technician (1953-1956)

lis THE CINE-TECHNICIAN June 1954 REAR WINDOW by Arthur E. Gavin THE photography of Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock's latest production, tops anything ever attempted in his previous pictures, every one of which involved some new or unusual photographic innovation. For director of photography Robert Burks, ASC, Rear Window was perhaps the toughest assignment of his career, although he wouldn't exactly put it that way. He'd say it was " the most challenging." Rear Window was shot in its entirety on one sound stage and in one set — but a set of which Hollywood has never before seen the like. The story, which stars James Stewart, Grace Kelly and Wendell Corey, is one of the tightest suspense stories ever written. It has Stewart cast as a photographer for a national picture magazine who is confined to a wheel-chair with a broken leg suffered in his last assignment. Throughout the entire picture he remains grounded to his wheel-chair, which is placed in the rear window of his Greenwich Village apartment. From this vantage point, and with little else to do, he gazes idly at the apartments and their occupants opposite and to both sides of him. After a few days, he has reason to believe that one of the apartment dwellers has murdered his wife, sliced up her body, and disposed of it in a flower bed in the courtyard below. At this point, Stewart uses binoculars to study the suspect at closer range, and later he scans the scene even more minutely through the telephoto lens attached to his reflex-type camera. Although evidence he gathers points to a correct summation on his part, it is up to him to prove his case to his fiancee, Grace Kelly; his war-time buddy, now a detective, portrayed by Wendell Corey; and to his nurse, Thelma Ritter. As the story progresses, occupants of the 31 apartments within his vantage point continue their various ways of life. But Stewart's chief interest is in the activities of Raymond Burr, who plays the part of the salesman-murderer, and he eventually brings about his arrest. Because all shots had to be taken as from Stewart's eye-level as he looked across the courtyard to the apartments beyond, oftentimes pinpointing small objects, Burks, shooting the picture in Eastman Colour negative and for the wide-screen, had to use a variety of lenses, including the very powerful six-inch telephoto. Latest Hitchcock thriller is told through the eyes of one man, with the camera shooting from one and the same point of view in his apartment. Here is how it was done, as described by Arthur Gavin in "American Cinematographer." The latter was used in shooting a great deal of the picture because so much of the action took place across the courtyard — at distances ranging from 40 to 80 feet away. " Our chief problem here," said Burks, " was definition. Try to visualise shooting scenes in which the players never get any closer to the camera than 70 feet; where our objective is to convey purely by pantomime what is taking place ; and you'll understand what problems we had to contend with. All these shots were silent because it would be illogical for Stewart to hear any of the conversations of people inside the distant apartments." In the beginning, Burks used a 10-inch telephoto; but because the depth of field obtained at the distance was only about a foot and a half or so, the lens was abandoned in favour of a 6-inch telephoto, and the camera moved out over the courtyard on a boom. Other lenses used were a 2-inch and a 3-inch. These three lenses recorded the action as seen by Stewart with the naked eye or with the aid of binoculars or camera telephoto lens. " We used the 2-inch lens for scenes representing Stewart's naked eye point of view," said Burks. " The 3-inch lens was also used for this purpose where double cutting was involved ; that is, say, where Stewart studies a certain action across the courtyard, then the camera cuts back to him momentarily, and then back to what he sees. To lend variety, the 3-inch lens was used for the cut-back shots." " When I started to make the series of telephoto shots," Burks continued, " I began working with the set illumination at a very high key in order to be able to stop down the lens as much as possible to gain depth and definition. Here I was working at 1600 foot candles and shooting at f/5.6. " We had one shot in the picture that was a key shot in the plot, and it illustrates a typical experience in our use of telephotos. The salesman-murderer is observed by Stewart from his window vantage point going through his wife's effects during her absence. He takes her wedding ring out of her purse and looks at it. Now ordinarily, a shot of this kind would be handled by moving in close and making an insert shot; but we had to sell the idea of seeing the ring from Stewart's vantage point — about 70 feet