Fenêtre sur cour / Rear window
As time passes, the mere title of certain works acquires a powerful impact. It exists per se. When we take another look at these works, when we re-interpret them, sometimes familiar, even though we have never seen them, they are regenerated, they never conform, they are never quite the same and they are never clear-cut. As changes and all sorts of (r)evolutionary events occur, the works become part of, or may be experienced in different ways, in each subsequent period, depending on the place and society in question... They nevetheless strike a chord, and they also have links with other works.
In the inner courtyard, away from prying eyes; other things happen there. One day, however, in an almost inexorable way, all is revealed. Because somebody took a look. Fabryce Hybert invented the initial C.Q.R: celui qui regarde, literally, he who looks or watches, the onlooker.
Rear Window is made up of interposed ways of looking: through the eye of the director, the artist, the eye of the actor, and the eye of the onlooker, the viewer - all interwoven. Fiction thus mingles with reality. It was Hitchcock's intent to use the subjectivity of James Stewart / Jefferies as a filter between the images of the courtyard he films and himself, the director.
In Rear Window, he applies what he calls 'the subjective treatment' - reconstructing, first and foremost, a mental process.
This approach helps him to sidestep a conventional narrative logic, and steer the onlooker in unforseen directions. It acts as a device which frees up both the works, and the way the work is looked at.
The desire to sidestep the previous logic, the desire of looking is an unknown direction, the ambivalence, the contradictions inherent in certain works, in this case contemporary, are all the causes and effects of a construction which is like the 'subjective treatment'.
From the entanglement peculiar to this method of construction there stems an ambiguous, disconcerting, individual enticement.
This is the kink between the photos, videos and paintings brought together for the exhibition Fenêtre sur Cour / Rear Window.
