slides, available after class

Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
2:30
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
Peeping Tom, obviously a film ahead of its time. But, what is it that the modern filmmakers Tavernier, Scorcese
and all the others like so much in this film? Everything in this film is about viewing and being viewed, the main
theme is the desire to look, but this desire to look has many forms, it can be glancing or glimpsing, peeking or
staring, beholding or gazing for example; and it is obviously not an easy one, but is also has some kind of
uneasiness in it. Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom reveals something in our desire to look, which is inextricably
linked with it, like the other side of the coin. Viewing as a desire is always intertwined with the fear of being
viewed; that is the tagline of this film Peeping Tom. And again, it is one of Powell's great capabilities as a
filmmaker that exposes the important issue right at the beginning of the movie, almost in its first sequence, but
more in passing, as a side note played by a supporting role, namely this old lecherous Elderly Gentleman who
has been told about some “views for sale”.
Look, how clever Powell is exposing that fundamental theme of his movie, because none of us feels touched by
what this elderly gentlemen is looking for, so we are immediately excused and can laugh a bit about this old
dude. We laugh a bit like Mark does in his corner. We would never go into a store like this and buy such views.
So the trick is that we even do not recognize that in this scene Powell is unfolding the main topic of the film.
And that is: The desire of viewing is always intertwined with the fear of being viewed, or, to put it the other way
round: the anxiety to look around is always combined with the desire and anxiety of being looked at.
To get that done, to get us in that situation of this old man without looking at any boring half naked pin-up girls,
Powell is using a huge trick. One of the greatest cinematic ploys of Peeping Tom is the staging of a permanent
co-presence of at least two cameras.
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
Almost during the whole duration of the film we have two cameras involved in the action. There is the one we
often see on screen, Mark’s camera, shooting a documentary of his deeds, so to speak, and there is the other
one, the camera we don’t see but which is indispensable for us to see the movie. In film theory we call the first
one “intra-diegetic”, because it tells us parts of the story from an inside point of view.
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
"Diegetic", in cinema, typically refers to the whole world created by the plot and the story the characters
experience and encounter: it refers to all the parts of the story, both those that are shown and those that are no
actually shown on the screen. Intra-diegetic actions are means with which we encounter parts of the narrative in
a way that we see who is telling us what we see. Therefore we can call Mark’s camera “intra-diegetic” because
we see what he films and then we see him showing what he has filmed. On our side we have the extra-diegetic
perspective; that is, the camera which tells us the whole thing, a camera we don’t see, except the intra-diegetic
camera films the extra-diegetic one filming the intra-diegetic one. This reciprocity is a big issue in Peeping Tom
and in the very beginning we see how the two camera perspectives meet. We see Mark’s intra-diegetic camera
under his duffle coat filming directly into our extra-diegetic camera, but we will never see the picture he has
taken in that scene.
Photographing and being photographed, the narration in the movie, its di-e-gesis, makes this reciprocity an
issue, showing the ambivalence of the desire of viewing and the fear of being viewed. Mark also wants to get
this ambivalence recorded on his film, he wants to see the fear of being viewed while viewing someone, and
that’s the reason why he kills. In this case Vivian.
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
Now what are you doing? asks Vivian, and Mark replies: Photographing you photographing me. Are we, the
spectators, being photographed as well? If everyone in this film is being photographed, does that include or
exclude us? - And Viv again: Oh, Mark, you're brilliant. - Yes, a brilliant idea, photographing someone while
killing her, or, the other way round: killing someone while photographing him. Brilliant idea of being killed while
being photographically watched. “Will you... go and stand on your cross, please?” asks Mark? And that cross he
just made, because he is a focus puller, which means that this cross is the point which is the best focus for his
camera.
So - murders in cinema? What is the problem! We have seen that already a thousand times. But murders as they
are being filmed, while they are being filmed; that we did not actually see so much because these murders are
not taking place in reality. We're almost dying to see people being murdered in movies, but we’re also quite
sure that these are never going happen. And here these people are all women. What kind of voyeurism is it to
see a woman dying? And what exactly do we see there when we see? All these issues arise in Peeping Tom:
What do we see when we watch film? “I believe that the cinema makes voyeurs of us all.” the screenwriter Leo
Marks said once, and that leads us to our first question.
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
>> The film received horrible reviews after its release, was pulled from the theaters, and it virtually ended the
career of Michael Powell, who was at the time one of Britain’s most promising directors. What do you think was
the cause of this outrage?
Let’s firstly quote some of these scathing critics:
“It turns out to be the sickest and filthiest film I remember seeing.... children’s terror used as entertainment,
atrocious cruelty put on the screen for fun” wrote one.
“The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down
the nearest sewer. Even then, the stench would remain.” is another harsh commentary and finally:
“Mr. Michael Powell produced and directed Peeping Tom and I think he ought to be ashamed of himself. The
acting is good. The photography is fine. But what is the result as I saw it on the screen? Sadism, sex, and the
exploitation of human degradation.”
These violent reactions all point in the same direction. The dominant metaphor is revolving around excrement
and repressed sexuality. When the film first came out, the audience felt something repugnant. But what is so
disgusting in this film? There is not a single explicit image in the whole movie. Once again, we see no blood,
just once a slightly disfigured face, and even then the history of cinema since then has shown more brutal
scenes and malformed faces. We don’t see any sexually and violently graphic images. Everything disgusting
obviously takes place in the viewer’s mind, in his perception and in his head. As Martin Scorsese says: There is
something very unpleasant in this movie. Something really unhealthy.
To answer the question very precisely: The film may have caused this aggression because of the uneasiness
the film stimulates in the audience. It’s in a way a very unspecific uneasiness or discomfiture and it is somehow
touching the nerve of watching films in general. Peeping Tom calls forth unpleasant ideas in us, although it
shows nothing really inappropriate. But we are shaken all the more by our pure imagination as it is caused in
us through the mere allusion to nudity and the murderous abuse of women. But it is exactly this mechanism,
allusion stimulating our imagination, that is the way cinema works. Also, the uneasiness in watching this movie
is because we feel this mechanism of movie-watching probably for the first time as such. The sharpness of the
critics from 1960 is not least because as spectators they are complaining of having been abused in being
made to feel for the first time as mere spectators.
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
>> What is a „focus puller“, what is his job and which role plays ‚focus pulling‘ in this movie?
The answer, again, we’ll find in the movie when the doctor explains what his main interest is. He is an expert in
“scoptophilia” and this term, in a way, describes the theoretical background of the whole movie Peeping Tom.
“The morbid urge to gaze,” explains the doctor, and indeed: Scopophilia or scoptophilia (from Greek verb
σκοπέω skopeō, "look to, examine" and φιλία philia, “love” or "tendency toward”) refers to the sexual
pleasure derived from looking at erotic objects: naked bodies etc. The term was introduced through Sigmund
Freud’s concept of “Schaulust”, or pleasure in seeing, whereby Freud considered pleasure in looking to be a
normal desire in childhood, which might be sublimated into interest in art, or alternatively become fixated into a
different kind of gazing at erotic things.
Mark is a focus puller, that is to say he draws the sharpness and quality of pictures shot by the big studio
cameras of that time, but that doesn’t necessarily say that he is a scoptophilic guy. He does not murder because
he wants to see erotic objects, he just wants to see the fear in their faces, and this fear is his own fear, which can
be seen in his father’s aggressive, molesting and cruel movies. For him, to get to these objects of his desire, he
has to deal with the porno business, to get those objects in front of his camera, those who are willing to pose
and expose themselves.
But, in the scenes where he is shooting the posing pin-up girls, the only one really uninterested in erotic things
seems to be Mark. Milly is really kind of angry about that and provokes him a bit, without any success. No, it is
not sure that Mark, the focus puller, is the Peeping Tom in the sense that he wants to watch as a scoptophilic
voyeur the nudity and eroticism of partially revealed sexual characteristics. Maybe, we are the Peeping Toms:
firstly it is our scoptophilia to watch movies in the first place, because all of us might use it to satisfy an
indispensable human desire to look, to view, always in the danger of being viewed while viewing. In that case,
the Peeping Tom of Mark Lewis, who seeks objects to be drawn and scared by his camera, is the character in the
film who draws the sharpness for our view in the movie 7and is therefore the real focus puller - for us.
Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
>> Who is the observer and who are the observed?
“A foregrounded playing around with reflexive processes of double observation recurs throughout
Peeping Tom.” says Jeremy Hawthorne in his essay about Peeping Tom. ”Mark's father films the young
Mark watching a couple embrace (and the young Mark is played by director Michael Powell's own son —
so that the representation of a father filming his son involves a father filming his son)” “Mark wishes to
film Helen watching a film of himself ('wanted to photograph you watching’)”
Jeremy Hawthorne
”Mark's father films the young Mark watching a couple embrace (and the young Mark is played by director
Michael Powell's own son — so that the representation of a father filming his son involves a father filming his
son).”
“Mark wishes to film Helen watching a film of himself ('wanted to photograph you watching’)” “Mark explains
to Vivian that he is 'photographing you photographing me’.”
“Mark is watched by a detective as he himself observes Helen leaving work”; and as he arranges his own
death he says of the cameras he has set to film his own death: 'Watch them Helen, watch them say good-bye!'.
The repetitive pattern cannot but remind the viewer that he or she is also watching someone watching
someone” says Jeremy Hawthore and he is perfectly right.
!
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
>> Who is the observer and who are the observed?
In the whole film there is always the interplay between an observer and the
observed, be it that Mark is filming or be it that he is the observed in the eyes
of Helen, that is, or even through the blind eyes of Helen’s mother, who, as she
tells us, can perceive through her neck. In the end, as spectators, we are also in
the role of one of the observers in the film, probably the main one, because it is
because of us that the whole thing is made. But, as everyone in the film is
watching while at the same time being watched, somehow we cannot avoid
getting the feeling that we are not only observers but also the observed.
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
>> How would you explain a possible relation between the gaze and the fear?
In the whole film there is always the interplay between an observer and the observed, be it
that Mark is filming or be it that he is the observed in the eyes of Helen, that is, or even
through the blind eyes of Helen’s mother, who, as she tells us, can perceive through her neck.
In the end, as spectators, we are also in the role of one of the observers in the film, probably
the main one, because it is because of us that the whole thing is made. But, as everyone in the
film is watching while at the same time being watched, somehow we cannot avoid getting the
feeling that we are not only observers but also the observed.
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
>> What makes Mark’s „scopophilia“ pathological and the voyeurism of us, the film audience,
normal?
Marks character is pathological because it is a desire to see and film a fear in the
face of his victims when he is murdering them. What he is showing thereby is not
our, the movie-goers, scopophilia, which is a desire to look and view, intermingled
with the desire and fear to be always aware of a gaze on us, to be viewed in
viewing. But is our Scoptophilia in its very depth also murderous? The french
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has explained this doublet of desire and fear to view
with the dramatic scene in our earliest youth, when we, for the first time, become
aware the fact that the beloved mother is gone, that we are separated from her, so
that we are going to become aware of an beloved object which is gone, and
thereby firstly learn what object are in general, and we are immediately going to
look out for this lost object with our desiring views, knowing that the object has to
see us, even if it not necessarily comes back though. May be, this is an explanation,
or not. But the fact remains, that the desire of viewing and the fear of being
viewed is deeply connected.
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
>> Cinema involves different types of gaze: the look of the camera on the world it records,
the look of characters in the film, and the look of the audience on the film. How does Peeping
Tom distinguish between these gazes?
This question will change some points that we have already discussed. But also the
question once again makes clear the perspectives we have to differentiate. The camera in
the film, the intra-diegetic perspective, refers to the inner world of the film, but we also
look through the camera lens that catches the entire film from the outside, the extradiegetic perspective. Both camera perspectives are present in Peeping Tom and the fact
that they are there causes the viewer an uneasiness in defining his own perspective.
Peeping Tom distinguishes between the intra- and the extra-diegetic gazes just for the
reason that we, the movie goers, are going to be disturbed and become uncertain about
our own identity. Somehow, the same goes for the main characters in the film, who on the
one hand are filming or are being filmed by the camera on screen and off screen as well.
Here, perhaps, the role of Helen is best played. The actress is Anna Massey, later known
for her role in Frenzy or in The Machinist. In her acting you always have the impression that
she looks as if she is being filmed by someone who is filming in the movie, but that, as we
know, is not the case, and will never happen, because Mark does not photograph her.
Whatever I photograph, he says, I always lose.
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
>> How are, in general, the gender roles assigned in this movie, and is any of these gazes
(the camera, the character, the spectator) assigned to a specific gender?
The great Us-American film theoretician Kaja Silverman argues here as follows:
“Peeping Tom gives new emphasis to the concept of reflexivity. Not only does it
foreground the workings of the apparatus, and the place given there to voyeurism and
sadism, but its remarkable structure suggests that dominant cinema is indeed a mirror with
a delayed reflection. It deploys the film-within-a-film trope with a new and radical effect,
making it into a device for dramatizing the displacement of lack from the male to the
female subject.”
The lack from the male to the female subject is our keyword here. Indeed, Peeping Tom
narrates the story of a young man who has lost his mother in young age and was educated by
her successor, as Mark says kind of bitterly. All the filming persons in the picture are male, and
all the filmed persons, as far as they have any importance, are female. These are the facts. Men,
especially the police officers later on, even feel a bit alienated by the idea of being filmed. Not
so all the woman in the film. They are eager to be filmed, Milly as the model in the new agent’s
shop as well as Vivian the actress in the commercial movie. Women are the objects in this film,
and men are the offenders, in any sense of the word. Baden, the director of the commercial
movie, is always insulting his female main actor, as well as Mark, charming as he is, who stages
his victims because they are female. His suicide in the end shows us that he is not that
scopophilic guy who is just and only interested in woman in a sexual sense. Also, his sad and
always yearning relation to Helen lets us learn that he is not a typical male offender and
perpetrator against woman. But, in the end, he kills them, for the reason that they are objects
who will give him his one and only chance to film this fear to be filmed, which as such is not a
gender-bound matter in this film. That is the reason, why Kaja Silverman writes about a
“displacement” of the gender relation in this film, which has the chance in it not to confirm
again the paternalistic male domination in western culture but to show it and to deconstruct it
by disturbing our customary and common views.
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
>> What is the relation between Mark’s movies (“perfect documentaries”) and the other types of films
(pornography, studio productions, documents from Mark’s father’s research, and the pictures to be taken by the
“magic camera” in Helen’s books for children)?
Indeed, in Peeping Tom five different filming topics are virulent, or, to say it more simply: The plot of Peeping
Tom contains five different acting cameras: first the one with which Mark is filming his multi-act documentary,
three murders included. First Dora, she’s dead already before the film really starts, then Vivian and in the end
Milly, and all finishing in his suicide while he is filming himself…
Second, the camera for the series of photographs of the pin-up girls Milly and Lorraine upstairs in the house of
the newsagent store.
Third, the camera his father had filmed Mark as little boy with,
including the picture his stepmother made of him, out of focus, and showing the next camera as a birthday
present to the young Mark.
Fourth, the big studio camera for “The Walls Are Closing In”, this commercial movie Mark is working for as a
camera assistant and focus puller
And, fifth, the imaginary camera Helen is coming up with for her new children’s book: What does your magic
camera photograph?, asks Mark, “People” “Yes?”
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Michael Powells „Peeping Tom“
>> What is the relation between Mark’s movies (“perfect documentaries”) and the other types of films
(pornography, studio productions, documents from Mark’s father’s research, and the pictures to be taken by the
“magic camera” in Helen’s books for children)?
Helen continues “It's owned by a little boy who is terrified of grown-ups... but when he looks in his magic
camera he sees grown-ups as they were when they were children... and he isn't frightened any longer.”
Unspoken, the question we discussing here includes a sixth camera, and that is the extra-diegetic camera
which tells us the whole plot and the narrated story – and the narrated story is not identical with the
documentary film Mark is doing in the film. Mark’s documentary wants to show the best expression of fear on
the face of a person who wants to see and who wants be seen. His films repeat everything his father has done
to him as a little boy. He’s a kind of “repeat offender” who repeats what his father has done to him. For
allegedly scientific purposes, his father wanted to scare the young Mark in the worst thinkable way. That is
what the growing up Mark repeats by literally scaring women to death and documenting it in the best possible
way.
But this is not the film we see. Mark’s film is not our film. The relation to the other films and cameras we see in
the film, all that shows us that we are not seeing Mark’s film, although we learn step by step what his film is
going to be about. The more we see the film going on, the more we learn that our film is not Mark’s film. That
raises the question - what then, for heaven’s sake, is the film we are seeing? In the film we see how people try
to shoot film: this horrible commercial thing in the studio or Helen’s plan for a film of normal adults looking
through an imaginary camera as little children. What is the film we are seeing? This question remains open and
all the ambiguities regarding this question are not resolved in the end. Can we identify with Mark? Yes and no.
Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom is a masterpiece because it raises fundamental and disturbing questions related
to the way we watch movies without presenting conclusive answers. Paradoxical as it sounds, Peeping Tom
tells us that we go to the movies because we want to be seen without being seen that we want to be seen.
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