Film Quarterly (1980) - "Peeping Tom": A Second Look

Details

• article: "Peeping Tom": A Second Look
• author(s): William Johnson
• journal: Film Quarterly (01/Apr/1980)
• issue: volume 33, issue 3, pages 2-10
• DOI: 10.1525/fq.1980.33.3.04a00030
• journal ISSN: 0015-1386
• publisher: University of California Press
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Anna Massey, Bertrand Augst, British Film Institute, Cahiers du Cinéma, Esmond Knight, Frenzy (1972), James Stewart, Laura Mulvey, Lifeboat (1944), Michael Powell, Motion pictures, Murders & murder attempts, New York City, New York, North by Northwest (1959), Paul Thomas, Psycho (1960), Raymond Durgnat, Rear Window (1954), Rope (1948), Vertigo (1958), Vincent Canby

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Abstract

Mark works at a commercial studio by day as focus-puller on a 35mm Mitchell, moonlights on his girlie pictures with an 8 x 10 view camera, and uses a specially equipped 16mm Bell and Howell Filmo for his personal project-which is not just a series of disconnected murder scenes but a documentary that includes the removal or discovery of the bodies and the police investigation-and culminates in Mark's suicide. On the one hand, the characters and settings look and sound as naturalistic as in any ordinary commercial film: where an artificial eyelid closed over the lens in A Matter of Life and Death, it is a real eye that opens at the start of Tom: where Sammy in The Small Back Room had delusions of a gigantic whisky bottle, Helen's alcoholic mother grapples with one of normal size; where the "Red Shoes" ballet used optical trickery to convert a flower into a knife, Mark's tripod becomes lethal with the simple removal of a sheath.