This book has focused on the many manifestations and aspects of sculpture in cinema. We have demonstrated that sculpture – especially figural sculpture – engages the living figure in a range of intermedial ways in film, heightening tensions around motion and stasis, the animate and inanimate, life and death, presence and absence, as well as embodying narrative themes. This is in theory as true for sculptures that play a small role, as props or minor plot devices, as for those that are central actors. In Rear Window, for instance, the abstract sculpture on which a neighbor of Jeff’s is shown working is seen briefly and intermittently but it is overdetermined. The lady artist is a Greenwich Village cliché and she is ridiculed along predictably sexist lines. Along with the dancer and the composer who are among Jeff’s other neighbors, she exemplifies the bohemian milieu in ways both realist and comical. The sculpture itself, as with the ballerina referred to as “Miss Torso,” is suggestive of – even almost a substitute for – the dismembered body of Mrs. Thorwald that cannot be shown: only imagined.
Can I Be Me With You at Work? Examining Relational Authenticity and Discretionary Behaviors in the Workplace