Hitchcock’s Subjective POV Shots by Craig Hammill
We’re in full bloom on our Alfred Hitchcock: Director of 2023 series and already some of Hitchcock’s key stylistic devices are reoccurring in movie after movie.
With some directors, the repeated use of a technique can eventually feel like stagnation or recycling. But Hitchcock, like Bach in music, seems to return to key stylistic devices and find endless variation in expression.
Ultimately the bedrock foundation and frame upon which Hitchcock builds his cinematic house is centered on several key techniques. Understanding and maybe even employing them in our own moviemaking seems worthwhile so here we go. Today, let’s take a look at:
The Subjective POV Shot
Maybe no other technique is so crucial to the Hitchcock style as his use of the subjective POV shot. In its simplest form, the technique works like this.
SHOT A: A medium close up or close up of Character A looking at something.
SHOT B: We see what Character A sees as they would see it. In other words, if they are looking at a woman dancing in an apartment across the courtyard (as Jimmy Stewart does in Rear Window), the distance, size of the dancing woman, what is in the frame, all replicates how we would see it from Jimmy Stewart’s apartment.
SHOT A: We return to Shot A (though sometimes we punch in to a tighter close up to emphasize an intensification of emotion) to see how Character A reacts.
What often separates Hitchcock from other moviemakers is that Hitchcock is rigorous in not cheating distance, perspective, perception. Further, Hitch often adds a level of psychological distortion or customization to the SHOT B POV to intensify the experience of how Character A perceives the thing they are seeing.
Here are several key examples:
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
In one of the key scenes, Joseph Cotton’s Uncle Charlie delivers a bone chilling monologue about how rich widows deserve to be slaughtered like cattle. However, we experience the entire monologue from the point of view of his adoring niece, Charlie, played by an increasingly terrified Teresa Wright.
Charlie is sitting to Uncle Charlie’s right at the family table. So SHOT B is clearly how Charlie would see Uncle Charlie being just on his right.
What gives this shot it’s incredible power is that at the end of the monologue Uncle Charlie suddenly turns and looks RIGHT INTO THE CAMERA.
Right into Charlie’s eyes.
And we, like she, jolt with surprise.
Notorious (1946)
Early in the movie Ingrid Bergman’s self-hating daughter of a Nazi, Alicia, gets drunk. Cary Grant’s Devlin, who is there to recruit her to be a spy for America, puts her in her bed. When she wakes up, she looks up and sees Devlin cross the room.
Hitchcock then cuts to SHOT B which shows Devlin seemingly rotate to an upside down perspective as Alicia, her head on the bed, watches him cross.
The brilliance of this shot is rich and multi-faceted. It replicates what it’s like to be so hungover/drunk, you don’t want to lift your head. It creates a sense of mysterious unease since we don’t normally think of perceiving people as diagnolly oriented or upside down. And it subtly foretells that Alicia’s life is about to be turned upside down emotionally and psychically by Devlin.
It’s hard to put too fine a point on what a risk Hitchcock takes in a shot like this and what a payoff it is when it works. Most of us filmmakers are too timid to really commit to such a strange moment. But Hitchcock, in his mix of craft, talent, and profound psychological acuity, knows this is exactly the kind of shot that best tells the story at this moment.
Rear Window (1954)
Maybe most famously, Hitchcock built an entire movie around the subjective POV shot when he made Rear Window. Here, Jimmy Stewart’s L.B. Jeffries sits in his apartment with a broken leg and spends his days looking out his window at at least 8 apartments across from him in the courtyard (each telling a different story about romantic love, commitment, marriage). Ultimately Jeff thinks he may have heard and witnessed a murder.
If ever you needed proof about the power of the subjective POV shot, Rear Window is it. One of Hitchcock’s absolute greatest movies, the subjective POV shot both helps us identify with Jeff’s growing fascination, horror and implicates us in Jeff’s voyeurism.
For that’s the double edged sword of the subjective POV shot: it also forces you to identify with a character whether you want to or not. Hitchcock probably does this most disturbingly in Psycho when we get several subjective POV shots from Norman Bates POV early in the movie. Since we don’t yet know Norman’s full story, we are much more sympathetic to him here. And ultimately, even after the twist reveal, we remain, to some extent, empathetic to his tortured situation.
This also distinguishes Hitchcock’s use of the subjective POV shot from how it would be used (and maybe even abused) in later slasher movies. Hitch seems to reserve the shot mostly for his protagonists or his most empathetic antagonists. He very rarely employs it to create “predatory” tension the way later moviemakers would by forcing us to see “through the eyes of the killer” as a character is stalked.
When he does, as he does interestingly in the climax of Spellbound (1945), it often is to show a moral conflict or dilemma in the heart of the antagonist. The shot here of the antagonist’s huge hand pointing a gun at Ingrid Bergman before turning it and pointing it at himself and firing is gripping. And ultimately shocking.
We could write a laundry list of great moments in Hitchcock movies that employ the subjective POV. But let’s not. Rather, here are a few other key movies and moments:
Vertigo (1958) Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie pursues Madeline (Kim Novak) through San Francisco in a pursuit that ultimately becomes hypnotic and transfixing and obsessive.
The Lady Vanishes (1938) Margaret Lockwood’s Iris realizes she is being gaslit by everyone on the train who says that the old lady Miss Froy who befriended Iris never existed. We experience Iris’s growing panic and anger and realizations as a succession of subjective (and often distorted by anxiety) subjective POV shots.
Rebecca (1940) Hitchcock brilliantly evokes the presence of the first Mrs. De Winter, presumed dead, through subjective POV shots in which we never see Rebecca but we sense how her spirit is omnipresent. He does this by showing Joan Fontaine’s second Mrs. De Winter feeling more and more inferior and unable to compete with the ghost of her husband’s first wife as she notes how Rebecca’s influence and impact on Mannerly, the home, is in every room, on every monogrammed bedsheet and robe, etc.
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Okay, let’s call it a day. As we watch Hitchcock movies across the year, we’ll come back from time to time to look at another one of his stylistic devices. What’s so key about Hitchcock’s cinema is that it is all in the service of telling the story. Rarely, if ever, does a Hitchcock shot, as impressive as it is, feel gratuitous. It always feels grounded in either advancing story, atmosphere, or character.
And that rigor is at the heart of Hitchcockian cinema.
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.