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Nosferatu (1922): Following a cautionary title-card, the iris opens briefly on a provincial town square. Shot from the roof of a Gothic church, its spire prominent in the foreground, the scene has the burnished feel of an albumen print. Tiny human figures can be made out on the streets below, the first harbingers of morning bustle. The iris reopens on Thomas Hutter, arranging his neckwear in a mirror, the back of his hair gilded by sunlight entering through the window at his right. With an air of characteristic self-approbation, he straightens and faces left. Suddenly, as if reined in by an unexpected sound, he tiptoes to the window and peers out over its ledge (Fig. 1).1 He has overheard his wife, Ellen, shown standing at an adjacent or facing window (Fig. 2). The sill is covered with potted plants; ornate wallpaper and an array of family portraits are visible in the room behind her. She is toying with a cat, inciting it to play with a locket on a chain. The camera lingers as Ellen contends with the kitten's nonchalance. The scene has all the attributes of a tableau, presented to a gaze of which it is, or purports to be, unaware. Ellen's innocence, which is consistent with the autonomy of the ambient space, depends on the absence of an observer. Or more accurately, the self-containment of the latter scene is made possible by the stealth within the former: Thomas, intent on being neither seen nor heard, takes pains to uphold the fiction of the absent spectator.
In the juxtaposition of these two shots, we find an apt and almost programmatic illustration of a paradox described by Michael Fried with respect to the "rapprochement between the aims of painting and drama" that occurred during the second half of the eighteenth century: "A tableau was visible . . . only from the beholder's point of view. But precisely because that was so, it helped persuade the beholder that the actors themselves were unconscious of his presence."2 Emphatically pictorial, the shot of Ellen at the window is reminiscent of those canvases, increasingly prevalent in the eighteenth century, in which an attitude of rapt attention or profound meditation was tantamount to an obliviousness towards the beholder. A similar...