At the age of nine, Thomas Hardy, the greatest of English novelists, justly
famed as a sensitive landscape painter of the southern counties, borrowed
a nautical telescope and climbed the hill neighbouring his cottage to watch,
in the pleasant town of Dorchester two miles away, the public hanging of
a young woman. At the same age, Mark Lewis, the `Peeping Tom' of
Michael Powell's film, watches a couple making love while his father
films his reactions with a hand-held camera.
The father is an academic who devoted his life to a study of the psychology
of fear, using as a guinea-pig his own son, whose every emotion he photographs
and records. In the middle of the night, camera in hand, he suddenly wakes
the boy; he slips a lizard into his bed so as to capture the expression
of
naked fear and disgust on his face.
Later he films him standing by his mother's death-bed.
He keeps the child under constant observation, creating in him a voyeur
psychosis that becomes identified in his mind with fear and the desire to
cause suffering.
Encouraged by his father, who presents him with a camera, the young Mark
reacts against this threat that is poisoning his childhood by spying in
his turn on the people around him.
After his father's death, the young man continues his
experiments, though not without adding certain refinements of his own, and
no longer in a scientific spirit.
Sharing the common view that the cinema was invented in order to photograph
the demise of pretty women in close-up, but preferring for the purpose a
camera-knife in place of the less effective camera-stylo, Mark Lewis
perfects a very special 16mm camera: one of its feet, whose end unscrews,
conceals a sharp-edged blade.
Wielding this unstudied sword horizontally in accompaniment to a final
tracking shot, the cameraman plunges it into the victim's throat,
keeping on filming her all the time, while a parabolic mirror clipped to
the lens means that she, seeing her agony reflected, is provoked to a
paroxysm of terror.
This sequence as filmed by Powell achieves, if one thinks about it, a level
of complexity disturbing as the play of mirrors in a celebrated painting
by Velazquez.
The camera films the murderous film-maker, who films his victim, who
observes the action first-hand as it unfolds.
The spectator cannot but be favourably impressed by this death-wish on
three planes.
But the purpose of Peeping Tom goes beyond these subtle games. It can be
seen as a delicately nuanced psychological study of an authentic film auteur,
who pushes a particular conception of the direction of actors to its limits.
For voyeurism alone is not enough to explain the character of Lewis:
he is also, and at one and the same time, a sadistic film-maker and murderer,
with these different facets forming a coherent whole.
A quite serious psychoanalytical explanation is adduced for this
collection of morbidities, which will come as no surprise to those who know
that in the look fixedly directed at someone, there lies an unconscious
wish to cause suffering, and even to kill.
One shoots with one's eyes and also, more effectively,
with that substitute far the eyes, the camera. Surrounded by the police,
Lewis, in place of the traditional machine-gun, turns his camera on them.
One could go on citing examples:
contrary to the old adage whereby we always kill the one we love
- otherwise admirably illustrated by Belmondo killing a cop in A Bout de
Souffle -
Lewis refuses to film the girl he loves, and the only lover's promise he
makes her is: `I will never photograph you'.
Worthy of note, too, is the care with which the sado-masochistic element
in voyeurism is made explicit.
Another English film has already offered for our delectation a pair of
binoculars tricked out with two hidden steel spikes violently ejected
by a spring into the eyeballs of anyone using them.
[Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)]
Here, by turning his camera on himself, Lewis ends by subjecting
himself to the same treatment as he inflicted on his victims,
completing his `documentary' with an admirable close-up.
But who is the voyeur? This pleasantly familar title of `Peeping Tom' also
applies to the spectator, who is exceptionally privileged here: for is he
not permitted to indulge that acme of voyeurism which consists in observing
the voyeur, seeing what he sees and watching him watch?
All the more so in that Powell's film is beautifully done.
The fragments of 16mm footage shot by Mark Lewis are edited and inserted
into the action with great skill, so that the same
sequence can be seen simultaneously from the point of view of the character
observing it through his camera, and from the point of view of the director
making the film.
Certain moments achieve a quite extraordinary sort of black poetry: the
excerpts from the father's experimental films are bathed in the sheer
light of terror, and the presence of the lizard in the child's bed is
enough to tell us all that needs to be told about onanism and the
castration complex.
Thanks to skilful lighting effects, the murder in the studio is
disturbingly effective. Lewis' final suicide, spectacular
enough in itself, is accompanied by impressive funeral rites: police sirens,
screaming children recorded on tape, flashbulbs exploding, cries of horror
and assorted noises. As for the humour, it is cleverly used to enhance the
moments of inaction. Lewis is in the street filming the police investigating
his first murder: an inquisitive bystander asks what paper he is working
for, and Lewis calmly responds by mentioning the very respectable British
Sunday, The Observer.
Similarly, the old gentleman venturing into a sleazy shop to buy dirty
pictures first asks for The Times.
And of course the only person to see clearly through
this whole voyeur business is a blind woman.
At a time when the cinema currently in favour addresses itself exclusively
to the intellect for admiration, it may seem beside the point to talk of
the pleasure one feels in watching Peeping Tom.
The extreme sophistication exercised by our modern film-makers in ringing
the changes on their love play never cuts to the
heart of the matter. In bed their characters behave like you and me. One
likes occasionally to turn to other horizons, where dawns a more fantastic
conception of eroticism. Photographing a largely unclothed woman in a
dingy room, Lewis, in order to capture an unexpected expression of
astonishment on her face, says to
her `Look at the sea'.
Good advice for scopophiliacs who are tired of the little birdies.
Translated by Tom Milne
