In Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966), the Master of Suspense remarked, “Nine out of ten people, if they see a woman across the courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his room, will stay and look; no one turns away”. Voyeurism is the backbone of Hitchcock’s filmography, tapping into the universal human need to pull back the curtain of curiosity, and punishing us with what we discover. A vast retinue of films follow in Hitchcock’s wake, from Michelangelo Antonioni’s enigmatic Blow-Up (1966) and Brian De Palma’s homage Blow Out (1981), to Michael Powell’s career-ending Peeping Tom (1960), and Francis Ford Coppola’s audio sleuth in The Conversation (1974), all of which present voyeurism as a nefarious act. Céline Sciamma sees things differently.

In Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019), Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) is introduced in a POV shot focused on the unkempt swirls on the back of her head, intentionally echoing the maddening swirls of Madeline’s (Kim Novak) hair from Vertigo (1958), Hitchcock’s urtext of obsessional voyeurism. Like Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) watching the platinum blonde as he winds through the streets of 1950s San Francisco, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) in Sciamma’s film is tasked with covertly observing her subject as she attempts to complete a portrait from fleeting glances, sketches made rapidly on a windswept beach, and a body double.

In both films, the voyeur’s distance from the subject leads to representations without depth: Scottie recreates an idealised woman who never existed, while Marianne’s portrait is shallow and constrained by male society’s conventions of female portraiture. For Hitchcock, observation can only lead us so far, and in the case of Vertigo, it leads Scottie down the wrong path until it is too late. For Sciamma’s Portrait, observation is only the beginning.

A camera can imitate a voyeur, lingering in the distance, obscuring detail and information, but it is more like an omnipotent eye, able to investigate private places where characters reveal themselves and secret meanings, like a hand bookmarking page twenty-eight. The first sequence of Sciamma’s Portrait replicates Hitchcock’s voyeur cinema, while the second sequence, as Marianne sets to work on a second portrait, is a true representation of cinema’s infinite possibility of observing in order to reveal character, and in doing so, removing the line between characters.

This is a common structure in voyeurism films like Vertigo, beginning with a watcher and then slowly reversing this position. This often leads to a moment of horror, like Scottie believing himself an invisible observer only to learn that he is the observed, manipulated as part of a fiendish plot. Sciamma replicates this moment too. While Héloïse sits patiently for her second portrait, Marianne’s eyes flicking between the canvas and the subject, the observed subject asks, ‘‘If you look at me, who do I look at?’’. Sciamma answers with a reverse shot of Marianne.

This moment is not terror, but intimacy, and also one of conversation; and this last is also an increasing feature of expression in an internet age between audience and artist. While Vertigo’s audience was very much at a distance, with only published critics having their say, the internet has opened the conversation to anyone with internet access. And while it may be a horror for a represented filmmaker like Hitchcock to be ‘seen’, to have attention drawn to the ‘invisible hand’ behind the strings of cinematic illusion, it is absolutely necessary to notice twenty-first-century filmmakers telling under-represented stories like Portrait.

Sciamma encourages this kind of audience awareness by breaking the fourth wall. In Héloïse’s introductory image, she stops short of the cliffside and turns to transfix us with piercing blue eyes. As audiences in the dark, whether it be the floating head of Scottie swirling in colour, a madman’s stare in Jonathan Demme’s exquisite close-ups, or an accusatory look in the closing moments of Bong Joon-ho’s Memories Of Murder (2003), it is startling to be seen. But we are always observed. Filmmakers create films to be seen, consistently factoring in an audience presence. Sciamma reminds us of this early on so we become aware that, while cinema begins initially as voyeurism, it develops to become absorption and even empathy.

This is most evident in the closing image. While Hitchcock chooses to end Vertigo with a shot pulling away from Scottie as he looks at his deceased lover off-screen, Sciamma decides to do the very opposite. Sciamma’s final image is of Héloïse watching a performance of Vivaldi which stirs private emotions projected behind her eyes. While Marianne is missing physically from this shot, she is fully present. We are watching with and through Marianne. In the course of two hours, we begin by observing behind a line until this observation makes strangers familiar, absorbing us into their world and emotions until, finally, we take the same position as a heartbroken lover. We become absorbed until the line can no longer be seen.

Jack Wightman occasionally leaves his home either for coffee, the cinema or to browse a bookshop. If you don’t happen to find him there, please send for help – he will most likely be trapped under his book collection.