Despite the vast critical attention it has received, one aspect of Rear Window remains underappreciated and under-analyzed: its soundtrack. Elizabeth Weiss went a long way towards rectifying that situation in the chapter on Rear Window in her excellent study of Hitchcock's soundtracks, The Silent Scream. Still Weiss tends to emphasize the film's musical score, whereas much of the soundtrack's success lies in Hitchcock's "musique concret," his careful attention (in the tradition of Bresson and Tati) to the rhythm and arrangement of natural sounds and the way he mixes those sounds with snippets of music. Also, though Weiss is alive to the clever construction of Hitchcock's soundtrack, its meticulous counterpoint and clever ironies, she often misses the emotive quality of the sounds. It was Hitchcock's "deep emotivity" that Francois Truffaut most valued in Hitchcock's films (346), and many of the hushed and isolated sounds that punctuate the soundtrack of Rear Window express a deep empathy for humankind with which Hitchcock is rarely associated.

UNITED THROUGH SOUND

Hitchcock's films are famed for their unity, particularly Rear Window, with its single set and its highly focused point of view. Hitchcock also strengthened the unity of Rear Window through his soundtrack. Weiss has noted that Hitchcock's soundtracks were particularly creative in those films (Lifeboat, Rope, Dial M. for Murder, and Rear Window) where he experimented with highly restricted space: "Having established such stringent visual limitations, Hitchcock uses sound in a highly creative way, often depending on it to establish tension" (23). In other films, Weiss notes, Hitchcock "creates tension between what is in a frame and what is out of the frame. In the single set films he creates tension between onset and offset space" (23-24). The ingenuity of Hitchcock's soundtrack in Rear Window, perhaps the best of his soundtracks, is probably owing to the strict limitations he imposed upon himself in the film. By forcing himself to respect unity of space, by limiting his visual scope, he found himself more dependent on sound and consequently used sound more creatively. Moreover, the sounds he used, all incidental to the set, served to deepen the sense of place.

The soundtrack of Rear Window is comprised almost entirely of incidental sounds. The music that we hear in the film issues from the apartment complex in which the hero L.B. Jefferies (played by Jimmy Stewart) resides. Hitchcock cheats a little in the opening jazz theme, which seems to exist outside the action of the film. But, as the action begins, Hitchcock makes the music thinner and tinnier, as though it were issuing from the courtyard, and finally reveals its source as a radio within the apartment complex.

Hitchcock's soundtrack intensifies the unity of his film in several ways. First, by never allowing sounds to enter into the film from outside the world depicted in the film, he maintains his seal over his universe. It is true to itself, self-contained. Second, by only using sounds from the world of the apartment complex he is able to keep using...