Private Optical Colonialism

Something that really interested me with Rear Window was a tension between the public and the private, or perhaps more accurately, a tension between what we perceive as public and what we perceive as private. Doyle accosts Jeff for his voyeurism:

“That’s a secret and private world you’re looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private that they couldn’t explain in public.”

When Doyle delivered this line, all I could think of was the stipulation in the Fourth Amendment about objects in plain view, and my high school government teacher’s subsequent (and slightly sarcastic) warning against any attempt to grow marijuana in our backyards if we had low fences.

Rear Window seems to explore the possibilities of what happens when a variety of seemingly private actions occur in plain view; does plain view constitute as public? Either way, this ambiguity seems of particular relevance to documentary film, television news and photography in general, if we are reading Jeff’s voyeurism as Hitchcock’s commentary on the nature of cinema itself. In documentaries, news, and images of people rather than images of characters, what is being preyed on and peered into is reality itself. What are the boundaries of a camera’s freedom? The camera has the ability to capture images and events that transcend its own physical presence - in that a lens can capture and reveal very distant places and things - and to reveal these images and events to individuals who were elsewhere. The camera transforms the voyeurism of one into the voyeurism of a thousand, well, more than a thousand, but I don't know the exact number of spectators in the world.

The phrase “optical colonialism” from Sneads’ article is of particular relevance. As spectators, we follow the camera’s venturing to and from distant lands and relish in the foreign visual souvenirs it has collected. To what extent should the camera enter private lands, however? Doyle would undoubtedly say to no extent whatsoever. But the law, while not condoning trespassing, would probably support the documentation of whatever is in plain view. A camera allows us to trespass without ourselves physically trespassing; it essentially allows us to legally trespass. When a scandal occurs, we tend to think and question less of how the news came to be and more of the news or the scandal itself.

As a completely different topic, the concreteness and absolute terms got me searching for a contradiction. I was thinking of Ceddo in particular; how do you think Mulvey would perceive Dior? She belongs to a patriarchal society, she more or less effectively castrates a man (by killing him). I'm not quite sure I understand where she fits into Mulvey's theories.