Gilberto Perez

When I was a child in my native Havana, I thought that every capital city had a Capitolio that looked like the Capitol in Washington. Cubans were proud of their Capitolio: an aerial view of Havana with the building at the centre appeared on the cover of the civics book my mother wrote. Eventually I found out that our Capitolio was a copy of the one in Washington and I started to feel ashamed of the look-alike. Couldn’t we Cubans do any better?

Alfred Hitchcock is famous for planning everything beforehand, shooting his films in his head, never looking through the camera because he knew exactly what he would find. But the photographs in Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks show him always sitting by the camera. He may not have looked through the viewfinder but he identified with the camera: the eye that knew exactly what it would find, the gaze for whose benefit everything would perform according to plan. We see him sitting by the camera on the set of Rear Window, looking out of the same rear window through which the immobilised protagonist spies on his neighbours, and using a microphone to direct the actors playing the neighbours in the apartment across the courtyard. This is a god spying on the people whose every move he commands.