A news magazine photographer, confined to his apartment due to a broken leg, kills time by observing his neighbors from his wheelchair. His neighbors themselves also spend ample time at their respective rear windows, looking out over the shared courtyard.

The photographer’s casual voyeurism takes a darker turn when he starts to suspect that something escapes his spying eye. What vanishes from sight when he trains his male gaze on the adjacent apartments?

Male Gazing reimagines Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window. This version turns the tables on the film’s male characters. Hitchcock’s signature suspense spreads like wildfire as characters fall victim to the gaze of the photographer. The lively courtyard is depopulated, then repopulated with new inhabitants.

Timeline

In a way, Male Gazing is a project 70 years in the making. Below are some dates and facts that influenced and inspired its inception.

September 1954

When Paramount released Rear Window in 1954, it sent out the customary Showmanship Manual to theater owners ⁽¹⁾. That manual contains promotional texts and visuals that theaters could adapt for their own use. A lot of the prepared texts play up the stars, James Stewart and Grace Kelly. However, in the visuals, they have to share the spotlight with the film’s impressive set.

In fact, the advertising manual refers to the set as one of two stars of the movie that won’t be noted on the marquees (the other one being Alfred Hitchcock):

“There have been bigger sets at Paramount than the one conceived and constructed for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”, which is due to open next ………. at the ………. Theatre, but none more unusual. Built on a huge sound stage, the set, including 10 buildings of different heights and styles, faithfully reproduces a section of New York’s fabled Greenwich Village.”

Some of the advertising visuals play fast and loose with the set-up of the apartments and their inhabitants. In several ads, the characters have been moved to another apartment than the one they occupy in the film. In one full-page ad, James Stewart’s character is even relocated to the apartment of the murderer, Thorwald.

Rear Window’s theatrical trailer also showcases the movie’s massive set. It starts with a wide shot of the set that includes the technical crew. A camera, a spotlight, a sound boom, and the back of the director are silhouetted against the apartment building facing James Stewart’s living room. “This is the scene of the crime,” the voice over tells us, “A crime of passion filmed in a way you have never seen before”. All the apartments in this promotional footage are empty: there are no characters inhabiting them.

June 1964

Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono contains literally hundreds of fanciful directives to make artistic pieces ranging from music over poetry to objects. Yoko Ono also included several “film scripts”. Those scripts are conceptual guidances for the reader to create their own cinematic experience. Her Film Script 5 from June 1964 includes this instruction:

“Ask the audience the following:
1. not to look at Rock Hudson, but only Doris Day.”

May 1967

The French painter Gilles Aillaud is primarily known for his paintings of animals, often depicted in pens or behind bars in zoos. Humans are notably absent, at least within his canvases. In May 1967, a series of Aillaud’s works were exhibited in an art gallery in Rome. Italian art critic Vitaliano Corbi penned a preface for the show’s catalogue. In it, he states:

“The presence of man is felt in the gaze that scrutinizes and meticulously insinuates itself into the scene (…). Man, not figured within the scene, in fact polarizes the scene through his gaze. Yet assuming the part of the observer does not generate restful security. On the contrary, the more the gaze upon the “other” appears lucid and pitiless, the more it is accompanied by a feeling of ambiguity and restlessness. A man who becomes the object of his own vision alienates himself (…).” ⁽²⁾

October 1975

In the autumn 1975 issue of Screen, Laura Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is published. This text effectively introduces the concept of the “male gaze” in cinematic discourse. Mulvey critiques the ways in which traditional Hollywood cinema is structured from and caters to a heterosexual male perspective:

“The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” ⁽³⁾

Mulvey’s writing is explicitly activist, but she also sees a role for film itself to challenge the patriarchal order that reigns over Hollywood. Cheaper and more accessible means of production can help challenge the dominant ideology:

“Technological advances (16mm, etc.) have changed the economic conditions of cinematic production, which can now be artisanal as well as capitalist. Thus it has been possible for an alternative cinema to develop. (…) The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film.” ⁽³⁾

Fifty years later, postproduction technology has become even more accessible, providing filmmakers and video essayists with new tools for expression and critique.

June 1984

My parents were professional ballroom dancers who ran a dance school. They taught courses in classic and Latin dances several evenings of the week. On Saturday evenings, they had to be at the dance school from eight till midnight. Instead of paying for a babysitter, they sometimes dropped me off at a cinema at half past seven and picked me up again after midnight. In the meantime, I would treat myself to a double bill.

On one such Saturday evening in 1984, I caught the reissue of Rear Window. I can’t remember the other film I saw that evening. (It may have been Rumble Fish, or The Outsiders, or even To Be or Not to Be). I was thirteen.

January 2015

Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh perfects his craft by studying his favorite movies in great detail. That often includes tampering with the object of his affection: he has made a cutdown of Heaven’s Gate and a black-and-white version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. His goal is not iconoclasm but intimacy, as he writes on his blog:

“maybe this is what happens when you spend too much time with a movie: you start thinking about it when it’s not around, and then you start wanting to touch it. i’ve been watching 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY regularly for four decades, but it wasn’t until a few years ago i started thinking about touching it, and then over the holidays i decided to make my move. why now? I don’t know. maybe i wasn’t old enough to touch it until now. maybe i was too scared to touch it until now, because not only does the film not need my—or anyone else’s—help, but if it’s not THE most impressively imagined and sustained piece of visual art created in the 20th century, then it’s tied for first. meaning IF i was finally going to touch it, i’d better have a bigger idea than just trimming or re-scoring.” ⁽⁴⁾

January 2018

When Star Wars: The Last Jedi was released in 2017, it incensed some of its own fanbase. A sizable number of male fans took offense at the importance and agency given to female characters in the space opera’s eighth installment. They protested that a female protagonist (Rey), a female leader of the Resistance (Leia Organa), and the inclusion of several more key female characters (Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo, mechanic Rose Tico) strayed from Star Wars’ male-driven canonical lore.

In January 2018, one such (anonymous) fan uploaded a homemade alternative edit of the film to The Pirate Bay. Titled The Last Jedi: De-Feminized Fanedit, his recut removed all the women from the film. For instance, the “chauvinist cut”, as it is also known, excised shots “showing female fighters/pilots and female officers commanding people around/having ideas.”

This misogynistic hatchet job resulted in a version that was just 46 minutes long, down from the 152 minutes the original clocked in at. Not only did it remove the women from view, but it also brought the toxicity of a certain male fandom into sharp focus.

February 2024

I finish work on Male Gazing, finetuning the last of its exactly 90 shots. Of those 90 shots, 15 are lifted straight from Rear Window and used unaltered. However, the vast majority (the remaining 75 shots) are doctored to some degree. These interventions vary widely in technique and level of difficulty.

Characters and objects were digitally removed, while dozens of new elements were added. Shots were resized, reframed, relit, or retimed. A bar was closed, a thunderstorm was intensified, a look was fabricated, a chair was emptied. And I changed the color of James Stewart’s pajamas.