What i see

After watching the movie Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock, it was easy to point out many instances in how Hitchcock was able to use the camera work alone to enhance and  progress the story along. The entire movie takes place in one apartment which makes it all the more difficult to keep the audience interested. through the use of camera angles and effects he was able to keep our focus.

There were many great examples of the kulashov effect in the movie. The scenes where James Stewart ( Jefferies) would look through the courtyard and into his neighbors lives. As he watched in, Hitchcock would use cuts, showing actions and reaction shots, many times Jefferies would have the slightest facial reactions but with the editing we were able to understand based on what we knew he was looking at. It was also interesting to see the camera techniques that Hitchcock used to enhance our vision on what we saw in the courtyard. as Jefferies would sometimes use his own still camera with a long lens to zoom into his neighbors apartments, Hitchcock would cut to a close up POV of what Stewart was looking through his camera.

The use of framing played a great role in this movie. the courtyard itself seemed to be a large painting with separate little frames in which each character lived there own little lives. and the only time Stewart could look into their lives if they were in the room ( the frame) that faced into the courtyard.

museum of moving image

The museum showed a lot of famous memorabilia and old fashion systems that really helped display how technology in media began and in some cases, is still used today. I was particularly interested in the station that showed the live sports editing. I always knew that sports games involved live camera editing but i never knew it was coming from one man in charge calling all the shots. After watching it in the booth it seemed extremely complicated an requires a lot of concentration an quick thinking. The technicolor printer was also pretty interesting. The machine itself was extremely large and looked pretty complicated, but after the tour guide explained how the three film strips get combined into one, it seemed like a much simpler process, and only needed to be controlled by one person.

After finally looking through a real kinetoscope, i was amazed to see how far the moving image technology has come. the viewing hole was extremely small, and the film only lasted about 30 seconds and only had one subject to look at, without a background. The film color itself wasn't even black and white it was more of a sepia color, and the lady explained that the machine was flamable and would blow up sometimes when people watched it. Today we have the comfort of large movie theaters and home theatre system with clear HD movies, without the process of a Technicolor printers and manual editing of the film strips.