The Construction of Mystery and Suspense Yasmine Kattan

Yasmine Kattan

The Construction of Mystery and Suspense: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window

The connection between architecture and film is an exciting world to understand and be part of. This is why my Barrett thesis this semester is about observing how architecture creates mystery and suspense. The investigation used Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) as the case study analyzed to re-scripting two of its sequences as short movies. The goal was to test the spatial construction of mystery and observe the feeling of suspense in architecture. So, I investigated two kinds of spaces for the shooting; spaces of architectural significance on campus, such as the secret garden, the bridge at The Design School, and Tempe Town Hall and the private domestic space of my apartment. The research revealed many connections existing between architecture and movies. The discourse around film can identify in the ways in wich buildings are mysterious, and how architects, like film directors, construct buildings as scripts.

While in search of locations, I entered and exited buildings, passing under structures that restrict individuals from seeing who is coming in or out. I reinterpreted Hitchcock’s courtyard by using spaces as a corridor, a staircase, a hallway, and a facade. While editing the footage, I noticed the connections between what happened in my different movies’ space, or between myself and Hithcock’s main character, Jeffrey. In re-coding the sequences, I did not always follow the movie’s script or the main character as I noitced what was happening around me. For example, Hitchcock’s movie’s mysterious and suspenseful scenes were shot at night, while my movies were shot during the day for safety reasons. It was precisely the re-adaptation of the original sequence to new contexts that showed something new: the reinterpretation of what the concept of Rear Window on courtyards is when transferred at the scale of a campus. This showed the significance of cameras as tools which architects can use in addition to discovering mystery and suspense while designing projects. By scripting lives as a program, architecture can better connect to people.