Then it catches up to us, the sculpturally slow motion of the projected image. Two young men appear out of darkness. Once in full view, we notice that they continue to move in an unnaturally slow manner, sipping coffee and sharing each other’s company. The pacing of the scene is arresting. It captures the moment unfolding as if it were the visual record of a photograph being developed in real time— a unique form of video portraiture. It’s not surprising, then, to encounter a triptych. A young woman casually turns the pages of a newspaper. She’s clearly not reading, but simply enjoying the mesmerizing spell of its purposeless repetition. To add to her pleasure in this brief moment of release an older woman gently runs fingers through her hair, while a young man jokes amiably. We wonder if this is the older woman’s daughter, or if the intimacy is merely a gesture of comfort and solidarity. In contemplating the significance of the scene in this manner, we have stepped beyond the portal of the screen and become immersed in their world.

The very notion of the window implies the reversal of interior and exterior points of view. Someone looks in, someone else looks out. It is this convergence of simultaneous perspectives that is lyrically captured in the personal vignettes to be encountered in Rear Window. The accelerated slow motion (please excuse the contradiction) of these portraits disrupts our familiar way of perceiving the moving image; hence the previous description of the work as an “intervention”. In doing so we have to adjust our understanding of who is observing whom. In the traditional cinematic sense we are voyeurs privy to commonplace yet private moments of people taking time out from work. But we are also potentially the objects of their gaze, since we too pass just as momentarily through their space and their field of vision. The implications of this blurring of public and private space are significant. Just as we reflect on their stories as we watch them fleetingly appear as an object of attention, we can only ponder what thoughts to do with our passage through the street detain their fatigued minds. However both viewer and viewed do share a common ground of experience. Both are inextricably bound and united in this fragile coincidence by the indeterminate and enveloping soundscape of the street itself, the ambient soundtrack to the Rear Window cinematic experience.

I’m sure it’s no accident that one of the sites chosen for the projection of these images of revelation is the Chinese Anglican Mission of the Epiphany in Croft Alley. In Christian theology the Epiphany is a holy day that commemorates the manifestation of Jesus Christ in the form of the three Magi. Derived from the Greek, meaning to “show forth”, the word gained a persuasive secular currency in relation to perception and aesthetics in the work of James Joyce. As articulated through his alter-ego Stephen Dedalus, epiphanies are those moments of sudden realization in which the ordinariness of the world around us is seen anew, as if for the first time. In unexpected moments of transcendence, commonplace things punctuate the familiar world of objects and experience, elevating a moment in time to a vision of crystal stillness. And the epiphany always courts the viewer, captivating their attention in totally surprising ways. While it stands out of the ordinary, it emerges and remains grounded within it. Think of all the times you’ve ever walked down Little Bourke Street and not noticed a young restaurant worker temporarily at rest.

In Joyce’s autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Stephen describes this process, whereby the aesthetic image emerges in the artist’s mind under the spell of an epiphany, as “a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative”. The key word here is lambent, with its dual inflections of moving lightly over a surface and dealing gracefully with a subject. Both meanings are highly suggestive of the projection process in Rear Window as a means of generating epiphanies. The manifestation of each image and its implicit narrative is indeed gracefully achieved and evokes in its flow the rhythm of the epiphany as a revealing moment of perception. The choice of specific windows by the artists required the right kind of texture to receive the projection of light over its surface. The glass had to hold the image indelibly, like paint being applied to a canvas. Some windows selected were tarnished by time or aged with fine patinas of dust, while, as chance (or providence) would have it, the window in the Mission of the Epiphany had just the right opacity in its texture to capture the projected images from within.

In Rear Window the mysterious radiance of the epiphany may well be the most recent technique to emerge in the visual language of the moving image. Its simple poetry of manifestation and evanescence, of gradual fading out of and towards a vanishing point of darkness, is an apt analogy of the elevation of the commonplace to something profound. Its significance may be trivial, personal and elusive. We may never know, for instance, that the young man we see talking with such animation is in fact the son, visiting from China, of the elderly parishioner of the church with whom he is so engaged. But this possibility of not knowing enriches the profundity of such casual encounters that we blithely sidestep on our way to somewhere else.

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Yes, indeed, there are a lot of Chinese restaurants in and around Little Bourke Street. Happening upon the window of the Mission of the Epiphany, you make take time out to reflect upon the unseen work responsible for all those Yum Cha baskets that endlessly appear for your pleasure on a lazy Sunday morning. You may reflect, too, on the memory of the carpenters and joiners who once took time out from honest toil on the cobbles of Guildford and Flanigan lanes. The traces of their presence here are evocative and respectful reminders of the history of those parts of the city we never visit, take for granted or may not even know exist. Blending art and life in unexpected ways, Rear Window is an inventive and compassionate expanded cinema event. It synthesizes the unrehearsed flow of pedestrian traffic within the built environment with an orchestrated cinematic event that extends the traditional theatrical notion of the screen. In this it gestures to both a living art and an art of living that is indicative of contemporary moving image culture.

Darren Tofts is a Melbourne writer and Associate Professor of Media & Communications, Swinburne University of Technology.