Rear Window

1954, Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 115 min.

Introduced by psychology and biology professor Dr. Tony Ro

A Hitchcock classic, Rear Window tells the story of a photographer who spies on his neighbors while confined to his apartment following an accident. From this vantage point, he becomes convinced he’s stumbled upon a murder.

“Witty, suspenseful, sad, funny and wise, the film confronts an audience with its complicity in the stories they see, but also works up to one of cinema’s great hero-and-killer confrontations”¦ Flawless, essential viewing.”

—Kim Newman

“Hitchcock made a career out of indulging our voyeuristic tendencies, and he never excited them more skillfully, or with more gleeful self-awareness, than in Rear Window.”

—Killian Fox

About Cabaret Cinema: Perception

Can the truth truly be trusted? Is it objective or rather tinted by our experience and memories? Perhaps there is no better medium with which to explore these questions than the illusory cinema. In that pursuit we have invited scientists to introduce films that potently demonstrate that much of our perception is clouded by the distorted lens of our assumptions and desires.

About the Introducer

Tony Ro received his undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and his PhD in Neuroscience from the University of California, Davis. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University College London. He is currently a Presidential Professor in Psychology and Biology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he teaches and conducts research on the neural mechanisms underlying sensation and perception. His research has been federally funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, PBS Newshour, and other media outlets.