FILM CLUB - Peeping Tom

Powell & Pressburger Season - 1960

The much lauded director Michael Powell was one half of Powell & Pressburger. Producers of unusual, yet classic films, from 1939 to 1957/ Such as The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp. On the surface accessible and quintessentially English films, but always a strangeness to their structural form and artistic content,communicating that these are very far from as straightforward as they seem. Questioning conventions, they couldn't help but subtly deconstruct what they were encountering and examining. Whether that was war, patriotism, colonialism, love, fame, artistic expression, and ye olde England, they poked at them quizzically as if they were roadkill.

By 1960, Powell's successful partnership with Emeric Pressburger had dissolved, and he released a new film Peeping Tom.  Peeping Tom's heightened colour and subject matter was a style Powell knew well of old. Here used to portray masculine repression, voyeurism and the murder of women as a means to seek a psychological resolution, never found. This was too in your face in its implicit criticism of film making and the male gaze, causing immense critical outrage, about its alleged depravity. So much so, the film was pulled from cinema release. With Powell's reputation left so tarnished by it that his career never recovered from its release.This was the same year as Psycho came out, which fared better critically and reputationally, even though it was more graphic and less complex in its psychology. There was something about Peeping Tom's matter of factness, that just got under the skin more. It wasn't until Martin Scorcese and Brian de Palma began praising its cinematic bravery that it began to re-emerge from its damning obscurity. You'll find contemporary echoes in Scorcese's film Taxi Driver, for instance. Through Brian de Palma we have the far more shabby and less edifying genre of slasher movies.

Powell does not, however, spare your blushes. Peeping Tom, is deliberately vulgar, yet vividly coloured cinema. Accompanied, as it is, by a stereotypical soundtrack, mimicking the style of a Victorian penny dreadful or melodrama. The film opens as though shot through a camera, in a street scene straight out of an Edmund Hopper painting. A prostitute stands there in the street waiting for her next pick up. Mark ( Karlheinz Bohm) secretly films her as he follows her to her lodging, watches as she is getting undressed, as he moves in for a close up on her agonised face as he kills her. He also returns to film the police discovering her body, the crowds in the street, as if he is making a documentary about it. Back home in his flat he watches the rushes, but there is always something not quite right about them. He has to try again.

Into his secret world comes Helen (Anna Massey) immaculately spoken and dressed,  kind and understanding. She manages to break Mark free for an evening, from obsessively carrying his camera around everywhere with him. Helen, after this, will to be treated differently to any other women. She will be protected from his dark side, he cannot kill her, she might ultimately be his liberator. Only her blind Mother ( Maxine Audley ) appears to instinctively sense the dark undertow to Mark's psyche, and though unnerved by him, wants to find out more.

Peeping Tom, even now, is uncomfortable viewing, and way ahead of its time. Its subject matter, the male gaze, taken here to its extreme would be controversial even today. What is remarkable is how unsparing Powell has been in the making of this film, without it becoming gratuitous or grossly exploitative of anyone, including Mark. Its part genteel love story, part not so genteel snuff movie, part a psychological sketch. Why does Mark have to film everything? What was his experimental psychologist Father trying to do to him as a child? Is there anyway out of this that is good for Mark?  Where the power of this movie lies, is in how it makes us all implicit in Mark's film making. Though we may squirm, we do not look away.

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8