The window in Truffaut's Jules et Jim

The window pane is a surface which defies inscription or recording: it is a pure medium in that it does nothing other than intervene. Its intervention however solid from a physical point of view (it keeps out and keeps in: it holds) is transparent (usually). If blacked out then it is in some sense no longer a window but a wall. It cannot record or archive the figures reflected in it or which pass in front of it and the gaze of the person stationed at it. It is in some sense erased by reflections upon it. And yet this erasure is paradoxically achieved by embellishing and thickening it, giving it body, even if spectral body.

Any film featuring a medium shot of a window automatically reflects whether intentionally or not on the frame within which it itself falls. A curious thing occurs in Truffaut’s handling of an already interesting window scene in Jules et Jim. They have been looking out at night, then they are filmed from behind, which image is revealed and brought into light by a diagonal wipe which starts with a small square in the top right hand corner and proceeds across the screen in a right to left diagonal axis in order, finally, to fill it with a window scene shot from the interior. It is a remarkable inversion and interpenetration of juxtaposed perspectives and spaces.

__________________________________________________________

And yet also:

Like any surface capable of being projected upon – and of course windows are surfaces receptive of that most evanescent of modes of inscription involving the technologies of breath and finger combined – the window has in literature enjoyed a rich metaphorical life. Frequently it is summoned within a long tradition of metonymy whereby the writing itself finds itself subject to miniature and emblematic scrutiny. Of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves one commentator asserts that “the window is seen in relation to the awakening of the day, the tabula rasa of the child’s mind, as well as the creation of the novel” (Senn 47).

Cathrin Senn, Framed Views and Dual Worlds: The Motif of the Window as a Narrative Device and Structural Metaphor in Prose Fiction (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001)