Published On Aug 6, 2024
Now playing on the Criterion Channel!
The inextricable link between cinema and photography has long made the latter a subject of intense fascination for filmmakers, who have found in the adjacent medium a means to explore heady themes of voyeurism and obsession, perception and identity, and the relationship between art and reality. In REAR WINDOW, a photographer’s confinement to his apartment transforms him into an unwitting observer of his neighbors’ secret lives; in BLOW-UP, a fashion photographer inadvertently captures a potential crime; and ONE HOUR PHOTO hauntingly portrays a photo technician’s fixation with a family whose pictures unlock his deep isolation and yearning. By turns provocative, perverse, and thrilling, these films reach deep into our compulsive relationship with images and, by extension, with cinema itself.