Peeping Tom

Michael Powell, UK, 1960, 109 minutes

Peeping Tom tells the story of Mark, a quiet young man traumatized by his upbringing, such that he has developed a compulsion to observe and record terror, killing in order to do so. It was the film which effectively ended Michael Powell's career, attracting unprecedented condemnation upon its release. Subsequently it has been re-evaluated as a classic. Why? Well: Critics and audiences in 1960 were unprepared for Peeping Tom's relentless self-reflexive examination of the voyeurism and sadism explicit in the experience of watching movies, wanting to close their eyes as a means of denying their complicity in the events unfolding on screen. To a 1990s audience, used to all manner of screen brutalities; serial killers as heroes; and the use of subjective camera from the aggressors point of view, Peeping Tom may well seem tame. You should still go see it though. Few films have dared to ask the questions which Peeping Tom does, fewer still with comparable awareness and conviction. For the Powell fan, the movie also offers a compendium of references and in-jokes.

Peeping Tom is perhaps surprisingly realistic for a Powell film, further demonstrating his versatility. Ironically, this realism probably contributed to the critics hostility. They would have been unprepared, given Powell's track record. Moreover, in the context of the horror genre of the time, Powell's colour-realism combination was a uniquely threatening one: Most colour horror films of the time (the Hammer Gothic's) were set in the past. This provided a means of mediating their threat. Most horror films with a contemporary setting (Psycho - released the same year - and its imitators) were in black and white, helping to distance them from the real world of their audience.

Review by Keith H. Brown
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96

'Sex, Murder, Art'. This is the title of a book about the necro-porno-horror films of German director Jorg Buttgereit, but could easily be a subtitle for Powell's Peeping Tom. Just as Buttgereit defines the limits of cinematic acceptability today, Powell's film shows what the limits were some 35 years ago. By seeing it, we can see just how far we have come (or gone) since then.

In 1956 The Archers made their last film together, Ill Met By Moonlight. Powell was unhappy with the film - here were the colour pioneers and anti-realists making a black and white movie that often seemed little more than a documentary - and deeply dissatisfied with the position of independent film-makers in the UK movie industry. After The Archers split, Powell met scriptwriter Leo Marks. Marks was expert on two subjects, espionage and psychology. The former was out - Ill Met by Moonlight had been about a WWII covert operation. Marks proposed a biopic of Freud to Powell, only for them to find that John Huston was already working on a such a movie. Marks then suggested another psychological subject - a movie about a man obsessed with watching and recording the expressions of terror on his victims faces as he kills them (using a specially constructed tripod with a concealed spike). Powell was enthusiastic.

Powell took the proposal for what would become Peeping Tom to various companies, eventually finding a backer in Anglo-Amalgamated. They had entered the horror market in the wake of Hammer's successes with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958). Two of their previous films, Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) and Circus of Horrors (1959) had explored the same areas as Peeping Tom would - the voyeuristic appetite for violence. The Horrors films were sensationalist and exploitative. They allowed the audience to unreflexively enjoy some sex (rather, titillation) and violence. Neither had attracted much criticism or attention - each could, after all, be dismissed as typical horror fare for idiots, beneath the level of the critic.

When Peeping Tom came out it was a different matter entirely. Powell was a famous name and an artist, someone who's work required a critical response. In the UK, the response was uniformly negative, all but ending Powell's career here. Two elements of the film must have been expecially shocking in 1960. Firstly, the sympathetic and serious portrayal of Mark, a serial killer, as hero-victim of the story. Secondly, the relentless self-reflexivity of the movie as a whole, with its constant highlighting of the voyeurism and sadism that are presented as implicit in the experience of watching movies.

Peeping Tom opens with the murder of a prostitute, seen through camera eye from the attackers point-of view. Then we see the same scene, only now as a home movie, being watched by its perpetrator, Mark (or scriptwriter Marks?), and us. The movie unfolds. Mark carries his camera everywhere. He works as focus puller in a film studio, and supplements his income by taking nudie photos. We learn his psychopathology stems from his father's experiments in inducing and recording fear in him as a child, and see these films.

Powell loads Peeping Tom with in-jokes and references to his other films: One of Mark's models, Pamela Green, was a real figure in the 1950s nudie pic industry. Moira Shearer, Mark's victim in the film studio, was the ballerina star of The Red Shoes (1948), where she had also died for art (the notion of dying for art was apparently something Powell was deadly serious about). The crass film director was modelled on John Davis, Powell's 'enemy' within the Rank organisation. Mark's house was across the road from Powell's own. Powell and his son Columba play the roles of Mark's father and the young Mark in Mark's home movies we see, with Powell thereby further implicating himself and his art in Mark's psychopathology (Powell: "In the final scene [my son] got frightened, to everybody's embarassment, including my own. I felt like a murderer, deservedly. Needless to say, I used the scene in my film..."). Eye metaphors abound, recalling A Matter of Life and Death (1946), The Tales of Hoffman (1951) and others.

35 years on once shocking ideas are commonplace: The subjective camera, from the POV of the attacker has become a staple of stalk and slash movies (cf. John Carpenter's influential Halloween (1978)). The serial killer as hero is a frequent occurrence (cf. Freddy Krueger, Hannibal Lecter, and - more unnervingly - Henry, Portrait of a serial killer (1990) or Man Bites Dog (1992)). Cinematic self-reflexivity, in one form or another, is just about everywhere (cf. flavour of the year Tarantino's ouvre).

Review by Keith H. Brown
Taken from EUFS Programme Note 1995-96