Arquivo

A version of Alfred Hitchcock?s classic, restored by partners Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz. The film underwent complete digital restoration as from the original negative, deteriorated by successive copying and inadequate storage and conservation in the Paramount files. The new copy re-presented at the Film Forum, in New York does not end in the same way. The story originally ended with the image of Persian blinds being drawn over the Paramount logotype and this was cut from all of the copies commercialized by Universal. In a Greenwich Village building in New York, a voyeur photographer, Jeffries, peers out of his window at the lives of other people and, one day, witnesses a murder. He has broken his foot and whiles away his time, day and night, spying on his neighbors. Two women who make a fuss over him, call him a Peeping Tom and a Window Shopper. The climax of their fantasy, later to become a nightmare, is the murder of an invalid woman. To French critic André Bazin, the film is a metaphor of the vision in cinema, in that the photographer does with his girlfriend Lisa what the audience symbolically do to the characters on the screen: when adversities arise, Lisa will present herself and not Jeffries, a mere spectator pinned to a wheel chair.