Alfred Hitchcock watches people watching other people
Many famous directors have their pet themes, topics they return to again and again in their careers because they’re seemingly never quite finished with them. Martin Scorsese has his Catholic guilt. Hal Needham had his car chases. Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite itch to scratch was his obsession with voyeurism. People who surreptitiously watch people, after all, are the most Hitchcockian people in the world. And now, Spanish video essayist Jorge Luengo Ruiz has distilled Hitch’s most peep-heavy moments into a supercut entitled “The Voyeurism Of Hitchcock.” As one might expect, this montage leans heavily on Rear Window and Psycho, since Jimmy Stewart spends much of the former clutching a pair of binoculars he uses to keep tabs on his neighbors, while Anthony Perkins spies on Janet Leigh through a hole in the wall in the latter. Luengo Ruiz even employs Bernard Herrmann’s tense Psycho score throughout the video.