Mark (Carl Boehn), the subject of 1960’s Peeping Tom, photographs women for his profession, as well as for his hobby. He’s a foreigner who’s off in a way you can’t quite articulate: Is it his accent? The awkward look of discomfort tugging slightly at his mouth, eyes ashine with secrets? Or just because he’s one of those weird, sensitive artist types? His vocational work concerns models, women posed salaciously in that 1960 London way (before the seismic shift to the swinging ’60s), standing alluringly in stylish tableaux in brick-walled lofts. His hobby—his passion project—is much more honest: a documentary of the final fleeting screams of women destined to die for the magic of the movies. Vérité, real cinema. Mark is the Vittorio De Seta of violence, a true auteur. A camera, that mechanical eye unburdened by the distortions of memory and yet still a man-made product with its own lies and fallibilities, preserves life by capturing death. By killing, the camera gives the girls immortality.
The venerable British filmmaker Michael Powell wasn’t just castigated for Peeping Tom when it was released, suffered not only the barbs of critics and the appalled common moviegoer, but was also effectively excommunicated from the UK moviemaking business. A lauded veteran artist was now suddenly a pariah, labeled a sicko and left to linger in the periphery as cinema, that ever-evolving thing, progressing and regressing and hobbling and lurching and leaping, went on without him. Tastes and trends eventually and inevitably caught up with Powell, and repertory screenings in the 1970s helped bring renewed attention, considerably more edified now, to Powell’s audacious, unnerving, and inexplicably empathetic film. It even got the Criterion treatment in the ’90s and regularly plays in New York to packed houses. So Powell did, before the end, hopefully find some solace. (It should be noted that the auteurists in France were the first to understand the film’s sublime beauty and blood-burning, fervid fear.)
Peeping Tom, a film about the life-and-death magnificence of filmmaking, is one of the gorgeously disturbing works of the pre–Bonnie and Clyde era, with lush layering in compositions whose prettiness betrays the air of dread pervading the film, the psychosexual depravity simmering in each big-eyed stare and awkward pause, and camera movement that often surprises and always has purpose. I’m thinking of Powell’s smooth, pre-Steadicam maneuvering through the apartment and lab of the film’s psycho cinematographer, and, of course, the POV shots of the attacks, voyeuristically gawking with the shameful licentiousness of the lonely, pushing in on the lovely ladies’ faces pulled tightly from the greatest fear ever known.
Peeping Tom is one of the gorgeously disturbing works of the pre–Bonnie and Clyde era, with lush layering in compositions whose prettiness betrays the air of dread pervading the film.
The vibrant variegations of color rupturing in well-lit rooms of handsome furniture and crowded with shelves and cabinets of film and chemicals and equipment is distinctly Powell, the work of the redoubtable co-director of The Red Shoes, with cinema instead of ballet as the dangerous medium, a way of expressing one’s own unfettered soul. When we first see Mark photograph a girl as her aloof attempts at small talk fail, the room is resplendent with a panoply of colors, most prominently varying hues of red that evoke passion and love and blood on the girls and walls. Dresses cascade down his subjects’ legs and lights spill across walls and faces; yellow beams sunny and swell and fake gold twinkles under the lights. Amid all the vibrance, there’s the harmless neutrality of Mark’s clothes. We see Mark in the crimson kiss of the light, that familiar symbol of a dark room, but we never see him wearing these colors.
Peeping Tom is inextricably tethered to Hitchcock’s Psycho, a much more successful film from the same year with similar psychosexual and sinister themes, and in many ways the spiritual kin to Powell’s film—the twin that mommy and daddy favored. Hitch shot punctiliously in black and white and frequently lit scenes fairly plainly with a lot of minimalist, grayscale design to better exacerbate the menace of the encroaching expressive shocks of style in shot choice and editing. He similarly explores the voyeuristic lust of a man afflicted with a violent other side. Anthony Perkins’s immortal portrayal of a man spiritually asunder, tormented with the unearthly manifestation of the tyrannical mother he killed, is a lonely, rather pitiful guy, like Mark: two maladjusted losers with women problems.
Watching the films today, 64 years later, it’s flummoxing how Hitchcock was heralded as a cinematic hero and Powell a bête noire.
Watching the films today, 64 years later, it’s flummoxing how Hitchcock was heralded as a cinematic hero and Powell a bête noire; the films are soulful siblings, different in aesthetic style but both formally daring, both assiduous works of artists with uncompromised vision. Hitchcock disturbs with his jagged yet fluid editing, those savage stabs of knife and string; Powell uses longish takes and POV stream-of-consciousness for his murder. He finds so many striking ways to capture faces: bathed in red, shrouded in dark, honest in daylight and beckoning before the camera. Like Hitchcock, Powell not only disturbs with his prodigious craftsmanship and uncanny empathy, but gets you feeling something else, something deeper than the fear engendered by a movie: Peeping Tom is a film about films, about filmmaking, but also a filmmaker, an alienated oddball. Why am I alone? The question that cannot be answered, and which brings with it an anxiety that won’t abate.
As such, we find ourselves wondering why Mark is alone, what happened to him, and if love can mitigate his violent inclinations. Art, we all know, is a great tool to help ameliorate the dolefulness. Boehm’s troubled filmmaker/killer is not evil, but one of the innumerable lonely souls trying to find purpose in his menial life through art. Who hasn’t channeled their malaise and melancholy into writing, music, or images? Watching these women bellow pitifully as the film spins 24 frames a second and the glinting sphere of the lens encroaches, a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald comes to mind: “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” FL
