Post by petrolino on Oct 13, 2017 22:18:28 GMT
'Peeping Tom' tells the sordid story of secretive cameraman Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Bohm) who uses his viewfinder to objectify women for his own purposes. Lewis has a day job as a focus puller and spends his evenings taking glamour photos for a local paper shop to stock under the counter. He is a sick man.
'Peeping Tom' was released in 1960, believed by some to be the greatest year for horror cinema to date : Mario Bava's 'Black Sunday' (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' (1960), Georges Franju's 'Eyes Without A Face' (1960), Roger Vadim's 'Blood And Roses' (1960), Nobuo Nakagawa's 'Jigoku : The Sinners Of Hell' (1960), Kim-Ki Young's 'The Housemaid' (1960), Renato Polselli's 'The Vampire And The Ballerina' (1960), Giorgio Ferroni's 'Mill Of The Stone Women' (1960), Piero Regnoli's 'The Playgirls And The Vampire' (1960), Roger Corman's 'House Of Usher' (1960), Terence Fisher's 'The Brides Of Dracula' (1960), John Lllewellyn Moxey's 'City Of The Dead' (1960) and Wolf Rilla's 'Village Of The Damned' (1960) are other highly influential genre pictures that were released this year. The poor reception that greeted 'Peeping Tom' in 1960 took more than a decade to overturn, helped by a murmuring in New York where it came to be celebrated by a new generation of filmmakers.
One of the most potent factors at work in 'Peeping Tom' is Czech cinematographer Otto Heller's stunning visual designs. Powell shoots the picture with lurid colours that evoke the world of cheap, tatty pulp paperbacks and top shelf magazines. There are some extraordinary point-of-view shots taken through a divided camera viewfinder that are intelligently crafted. The camera performs a balancing act between voyeurism and perspective to perfection. The visceral impact of the film's visual design is so powerful, Martin Scorsese says Jim McBride was influenced by seeing it in the 1960s in a truncated, black and white edit that was screening in New York. Horror directors who've been influenced by 'Peeping Tom' are known to have explicitly referenced the picture in their movies; for example, a game show played in Brian De Palma's 'Sisters' (1973) is called 'Peeping Tom', a 'Peeping Tom' poster can be spotted in Mark Pirro's 'Deathrow Gameshow' (1987) and quizzical killer Ghostface poses a question about the movie in Wes Craven's 'Scream 4' (2011).
One of my favourite aspects of the movie is the contrasts made by Powell via visual technology. Particularly striking is Mark Lewis' glamour boudoir which displays a pervasive French influence through its sets, lighting, wardrobe and accoutrements. In contrast, the cheap decor of the room itself highlights some hideous floral English wallpaper. The French assemblage is studded with emblems of fetishism, vice and corruption which creates an alarming contrast to the everyday drabness of this damp little room. The action that occurs on a professional studio lot creates another beauteous contrast with Lewis' girlie shoots but the soundstage becomes an equally scary place after dark. Brian Easdale's piano music during these situations sounds like a live accompaniment to a screening of a silent movie filled with lust and betrayal.
For years after seeing 'Peeping Tom' I wrestled with my thoughts regarding Karlheinz Bohm's central performance but I've come around to thinking he's rather good. He portrays Mark as a deeply pathetic man who carries no discernible menace so he relies upon his modified weapon to target and instil fear in women. Powell's stylistic brilliance is to enable Mark to practically hypnotise his victims through the camera's gaze. We're left as viewers to sit back and observe a dance that many have played, between men who wish to stare when even a glance may be too much, and women who desire to be studied when even a held pose may be too provocative. It's a cold, calculated tale that deals with the kinds of "untruths" so many of us remain reluctant to acknowledge openly. When Mark caresses his camera appendage his vulnerabilities are laid bare and the gates of hell are opened.
"I think this film came just at the right moment for Michael Powell to show he could make a masterpiece without Emeric Pressburger."
- Bertrand Tavernier on 'Peeping Tom'
- Bertrand Tavernier on 'Peeping Tom'
The Red Shoes
'Peeping Tom' was released in 1960, believed by some to be the greatest year for horror cinema to date : Mario Bava's 'Black Sunday' (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' (1960), Georges Franju's 'Eyes Without A Face' (1960), Roger Vadim's 'Blood And Roses' (1960), Nobuo Nakagawa's 'Jigoku : The Sinners Of Hell' (1960), Kim-Ki Young's 'The Housemaid' (1960), Renato Polselli's 'The Vampire And The Ballerina' (1960), Giorgio Ferroni's 'Mill Of The Stone Women' (1960), Piero Regnoli's 'The Playgirls And The Vampire' (1960), Roger Corman's 'House Of Usher' (1960), Terence Fisher's 'The Brides Of Dracula' (1960), John Lllewellyn Moxey's 'City Of The Dead' (1960) and Wolf Rilla's 'Village Of The Damned' (1960) are other highly influential genre pictures that were released this year. The poor reception that greeted 'Peeping Tom' in 1960 took more than a decade to overturn, helped by a murmuring in New York where it came to be celebrated by a new generation of filmmakers.
"Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom," a 1960 movie about a man who filmed his victims as they died, broke the rules and crossed the line. It was so loathed on its first release that it was pulled from theaters, and effectively ended the career of one of Britain's greatest directors. Why did critics and the public hate it so? I think because it didn't allow the audience to lurk anonymously in the dark, but implicated us in the voyeurism of the title character. Martin Scorsese once said that this movie, and Federico Fellini's "8 1/2," contain all that can be said about directing. The Fellini film is about the world of deals and scripts and show biz, and the Powell is about the deep psychological process at work when a filmmaker tells his actors to do as he commands, while he stands in the shadows and watches. Scorsese is Powell's most famous admirer. As a child, he studied the films of "the Archers"--the team of director Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger. Scorsese haunted the late show screenings of their films, drinking in Powell's bold images and confident, unexpected story development."
- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times
"Two of Britain’s leading film critics at the time, both of them women, spearheaded the attack on Powell. The Observer’s Caroline Lejeune pulled no punches: “It’s a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom.” This was a serious reverse – Lejeune had long been a champion of Powell’s work. Dilys Powell of The Sunday Times complained that Peeping Tom was “essentially vicious”. No one else stepped forward in Powell’s defence. Why were the critical attacks on him so furious? The subject matter was disturbing, of course, yet other factors about Peeping Tom made it even more controversial. One is a home-movie sequence in which we see Mark as a young boy, being terrified and used in his father’s experiments. Powell himself played the father, and cast his own son Columba, then aged nine, as young Mark."
- David Gritten, The Telegraph
- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times
"Two of Britain’s leading film critics at the time, both of them women, spearheaded the attack on Powell. The Observer’s Caroline Lejeune pulled no punches: “It’s a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom.” This was a serious reverse – Lejeune had long been a champion of Powell’s work. Dilys Powell of The Sunday Times complained that Peeping Tom was “essentially vicious”. No one else stepped forward in Powell’s defence. Why were the critical attacks on him so furious? The subject matter was disturbing, of course, yet other factors about Peeping Tom made it even more controversial. One is a home-movie sequence in which we see Mark as a young boy, being terrified and used in his father’s experiments. Powell himself played the father, and cast his own son Columba, then aged nine, as young Mark."
- David Gritten, The Telegraph
Black Narcissus
One of the most potent factors at work in 'Peeping Tom' is Czech cinematographer Otto Heller's stunning visual designs. Powell shoots the picture with lurid colours that evoke the world of cheap, tatty pulp paperbacks and top shelf magazines. There are some extraordinary point-of-view shots taken through a divided camera viewfinder that are intelligently crafted. The camera performs a balancing act between voyeurism and perspective to perfection. The visceral impact of the film's visual design is so powerful, Martin Scorsese says Jim McBride was influenced by seeing it in the 1960s in a truncated, black and white edit that was screening in New York. Horror directors who've been influenced by 'Peeping Tom' are known to have explicitly referenced the picture in their movies; for example, a game show played in Brian De Palma's 'Sisters' (1973) is called 'Peeping Tom', a 'Peeping Tom' poster can be spotted in Mark Pirro's 'Deathrow Gameshow' (1987) and quizzical killer Ghostface poses a question about the movie in Wes Craven's 'Scream 4' (2011).
"Leopold Marks was educated at St Paul’s school, west London. His father, Benjamin, owned a London bookshop, later made famous by Helen Hanff’s memoir (also filmed) of her postal relationship with a dealer at the shop, Frank Doel: 84 Charing Cross Road. At the age of eight, Leopold, an only child, read Edgar Allen Poe’s story, The Gold Bug, about a treasure protected by a code; at the same age, he also cracked his father’s secret pricing code for second-hand books in a few minutes. Conscripted in January 1942, Marks was trained as a cryptographer, completing a week’s decipherment exercise in hours. Unlike the rest of his intake, who were sent to the main British codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park, he was assigned to SOE. There, he apparently failed another test when he took all day to break a text he was expected to decipher (with the aid of a key) in 20 minutes. Not untypically, SOE had forgotten to supply the key. Marks’s extraordinary ability brought rapid promotion to leadership of cryptography and cryptanalysis (making and breaking codes and ciphers) at SOE. Soon he was running a mini Bletchley at Grendon Underwood, in Buckinghamshire, staffed with 400 female volunteers specially chosen by him. But the young genius was not always comfortable at SOE, convinced that his Jewishness was held against him by some. Awarded an inconspicuous MBE for his war work, Marks kept in touch with the intelligence world after demobilisation, and went into a successful career writing for the theatre and films. Much of a not always brilliant output was derived from his SOE experience. In 1960, he wrote the script for Peeping Tom, about a serial killer who films young women as he stabs them to death. Filmed as if through the killer’s eye, it made the viewer a voyeur, if not an accomplice, a device which undermined Powell’s career: the film was first shown on television only in 1997. But the US film-maker Martin Scorsese acknowledged his debt to this picture, condemned at the time as pornographic and evil. There was clearly a dark side to Marks’s mind. He also worked for the Boulting brothers."
- Dan Van Der Vat, The Guardian
"I'd love to work with [Martin] Scorsese, so I hope he reads this. If only Michael Powell had known that too. He was a wonderful character. He dressed in Jodhpurs and riding boots and carried a whip! Yes. However, he was very kind to me. Regarding its content, I don't know if I read the script or just my part. I was still a teenager and would never have questioned Michael Powell on whether it was good, bad or indifferent. I was thrilled to be asked to appear in the film. I knew it was a spooky story, but a good spooky story. I saw it recently while touring and couldn't believe it. There I was on screen playing this daffy, silly girl. I was being told what to do by this man playing a director who kept saying "Oh, do it again, darling" and clichés like that. Michael Powell was nothing like that. He was very pleased with what I did, saying "That's good, Shirley Anne" and that brought out a side of my character which I've not used since which was to send up the 'movie star' persona. I was so young I didn't know about other movie stars, but I did it slightly over the top and it seemed to work. He never corrected me on anything and left me to be myself. Michael Powell was very much sort of a father figure on set. He was authoritarian but very nice."
- Shirley Anne Field recalls the making of 'Peeping Tom', Cinema Retro
- Dan Van Der Vat, The Guardian
"I'd love to work with [Martin] Scorsese, so I hope he reads this. If only Michael Powell had known that too. He was a wonderful character. He dressed in Jodhpurs and riding boots and carried a whip! Yes. However, he was very kind to me. Regarding its content, I don't know if I read the script or just my part. I was still a teenager and would never have questioned Michael Powell on whether it was good, bad or indifferent. I was thrilled to be asked to appear in the film. I knew it was a spooky story, but a good spooky story. I saw it recently while touring and couldn't believe it. There I was on screen playing this daffy, silly girl. I was being told what to do by this man playing a director who kept saying "Oh, do it again, darling" and clichés like that. Michael Powell was nothing like that. He was very pleased with what I did, saying "That's good, Shirley Anne" and that brought out a side of my character which I've not used since which was to send up the 'movie star' persona. I was so young I didn't know about other movie stars, but I did it slightly over the top and it seemed to work. He never corrected me on anything and left me to be myself. Michael Powell was very much sort of a father figure on set. He was authoritarian but very nice."
- Shirley Anne Field recalls the making of 'Peeping Tom', Cinema Retro
The Tales Of Hoffman
One of my favourite aspects of the movie is the contrasts made by Powell via visual technology. Particularly striking is Mark Lewis' glamour boudoir which displays a pervasive French influence through its sets, lighting, wardrobe and accoutrements. In contrast, the cheap decor of the room itself highlights some hideous floral English wallpaper. The French assemblage is studded with emblems of fetishism, vice and corruption which creates an alarming contrast to the everyday drabness of this damp little room. The action that occurs on a professional studio lot creates another beauteous contrast with Lewis' girlie shoots but the soundstage becomes an equally scary place after dark. Brian Easdale's piano music during these situations sounds like a live accompaniment to a screening of a silent movie filled with lust and betrayal.
"Beyond its thriller exterior, “Peeping Tom” is a massive commentary on the voyeuristic and fetishistic aspects of filmmaking; even, to a point, a commentary by Michael Powell, the director, on his own career up to that point. Mark’s day job is adjusting lens focuses on a high-profile film production, the leading lady of which is a spoiled red-headed starlet whose whining and poor acting causes the film’s director no end of frustration. It mirrors Powell’s own frustrations with lead actress Moira Shearer on “The Red Shoes,” another redhead whose reportedly “spoiled” nature troubled the production. It’s no coincidence that Shearer herself is in “Peeping Tom,” playing an extra who is friends with Mark. She enters the film to the side of the soundstage, watching her counterpart’s antics, as if Powell is forcing her to see how difficult she was."
- Abby Olcese, 'Minding The Gap : Peeping Tom'
"Horror movies like to place their characters in peril, and their almost exclusively male directors invariably view women as more vulnerable, more easily terrorised than their male counterparts, fair game. "You fear more for her than you would for a husky man," said Brian De Palma. But, as far as the slasher movie goes, Jason or Michael or Leatherface seem to me to be equal-opportunity psychokillers, happy to eviscerate victims of either gender, and while it's the women who do most of the screaming – and as far back as Peeping Tom, the subjective camera has preferred to stalk the female of the species – I don't think the slasher subgenre is misogynist per se. Indeed, Carol J Clover famously made a case for the opposite in Men, Women and Chainsaws, suggesting male viewers identify with the female victims rather than with the sadistic killers, and defining the convention of "the final girl", the Jamie Lee Curtis character who ultimately defeats the bogeyman. I would go further, and contend that horror, at its best, really is a feminist genre, having the capacity to express more about the female condition than all the romcoms and family dramas commonly referred to as "chick-flicks". Carrie and Ginger Snaps, for example, deal with the onset of menstruation with a directness few mainstream movies dare emulate, while Black Swan is a virtual treatise on female body image. This is not to say films like Martyrs, Captivity or the forthcoming I Saw the Devil don't make me uncomfortable in the way they seem to revel in female suffering, but in my favourite kind of horror movies – dark fairytales such as A Nightmare on Elm Street or Pan's Labyrinth or The Orphanage – heroines embark on quests as protagonists, rather than passive victims. The films of Wes Craven, George Romero, even David Cronenberg, are rich in strong, resourceful female characters who aren't simply butt-kicking male surrogates like (terrific though she is) Sigourney Weaver in the first Alien movie. And while Dario Argento may get his kicks out of killing beautiful women, Suspiria and Phenomena feature heroines as plucky as they come; even The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Profondo Rosso or The Stendhal Syndrome subvert traditional female roles. Unlike some feminists, I don't require all my horror heroines to be positive role models, so I'm not discombobulated when the protagonists of Repulsion or The Others display neurosis or psychosis and turn to the dark side."
- Anne Billson, 'Not Another Terrorised Film Female'
- Abby Olcese, 'Minding The Gap : Peeping Tom'
"Horror movies like to place their characters in peril, and their almost exclusively male directors invariably view women as more vulnerable, more easily terrorised than their male counterparts, fair game. "You fear more for her than you would for a husky man," said Brian De Palma. But, as far as the slasher movie goes, Jason or Michael or Leatherface seem to me to be equal-opportunity psychokillers, happy to eviscerate victims of either gender, and while it's the women who do most of the screaming – and as far back as Peeping Tom, the subjective camera has preferred to stalk the female of the species – I don't think the slasher subgenre is misogynist per se. Indeed, Carol J Clover famously made a case for the opposite in Men, Women and Chainsaws, suggesting male viewers identify with the female victims rather than with the sadistic killers, and defining the convention of "the final girl", the Jamie Lee Curtis character who ultimately defeats the bogeyman. I would go further, and contend that horror, at its best, really is a feminist genre, having the capacity to express more about the female condition than all the romcoms and family dramas commonly referred to as "chick-flicks". Carrie and Ginger Snaps, for example, deal with the onset of menstruation with a directness few mainstream movies dare emulate, while Black Swan is a virtual treatise on female body image. This is not to say films like Martyrs, Captivity or the forthcoming I Saw the Devil don't make me uncomfortable in the way they seem to revel in female suffering, but in my favourite kind of horror movies – dark fairytales such as A Nightmare on Elm Street or Pan's Labyrinth or The Orphanage – heroines embark on quests as protagonists, rather than passive victims. The films of Wes Craven, George Romero, even David Cronenberg, are rich in strong, resourceful female characters who aren't simply butt-kicking male surrogates like (terrific though she is) Sigourney Weaver in the first Alien movie. And while Dario Argento may get his kicks out of killing beautiful women, Suspiria and Phenomena feature heroines as plucky as they come; even The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Profondo Rosso or The Stendhal Syndrome subvert traditional female roles. Unlike some feminists, I don't require all my horror heroines to be positive role models, so I'm not discombobulated when the protagonists of Repulsion or The Others display neurosis or psychosis and turn to the dark side."
- Anne Billson, 'Not Another Terrorised Film Female'
Peeping Tom
'Hook In Her Head' - Throwing Muses
For years after seeing 'Peeping Tom' I wrestled with my thoughts regarding Karlheinz Bohm's central performance but I've come around to thinking he's rather good. He portrays Mark as a deeply pathetic man who carries no discernible menace so he relies upon his modified weapon to target and instil fear in women. Powell's stylistic brilliance is to enable Mark to practically hypnotise his victims through the camera's gaze. We're left as viewers to sit back and observe a dance that many have played, between men who wish to stare when even a glance may be too much, and women who desire to be studied when even a held pose may be too provocative. It's a cold, calculated tale that deals with the kinds of "untruths" so many of us remain reluctant to acknowledge openly. When Mark caresses his camera appendage his vulnerabilities are laid bare and the gates of hell are opened.
