Part of Made In England: Powell and Pressburger x6 and Shocktober
Having brought British cinema into exalted realms of fantasy and imagination, Michael Powell took a dark detour into obsession, voyeurism, and violence with this groundbreaking metacinematic investigation into the mechanics of fear. Armed with his killer camera, photographer and filmmaker Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) unleashes the traumas of his childhood by murdering women and recording their deaths — until he falls for his downstairs neighbor, and finds himself struggling against his dark compulsions. Received with revulsion upon its release only to be reclaimed as a masterpiece, the endlessly analyzed, still-shocking PEEPING TOM dares viewers to confront their own relationship to the violence on-screen. (Synopsis courtesy of Criterion Collection)
“In a cinematic oeuvre full of films that are visually stunning and narratively rich, Powell never made another movie quite as visceral — quite as vicious — as his 1960 solo effort…a thrilling examination of the dangers inherent in making and watching moving pictures. That PEEPING TOM was reviled by contemporary critics to the point of doing permanent damage to Powell’s directorial career feels almost unconscionable. It’s a horror classic of the highest order, a piece of master filmmaking by an iconic artist at the top of his game.” —Lee Jutton, Film Inquiry
“PEEPING TOM obsessively examines the social and psychological ramifications of overactive cinephilia. This situates Powell’s film as a direct precursor to later 1960s autocritiques along the lines of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW-UP and Haskell Wexler’s MEDIUM COOL.” —Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine
“Martin Scorsese famously described this career-killing Michael Powell chiller as a movie that ‘says everything that can be said about film-making’...It suggested that there is something fundamentally creepy about sitting in the dark and consuming unseen the captured images of pretty people spread out before us, for our delectation. Powell knew it. Scorsese knows it. The film remains dangerous, and brilliant, because of it.” —Kevin Maher, The Times (UK)
“Here voyeurism itself looks outwards and inwards, confounding perpetrator and victim, filmmaker and viewer, camera and phallic weapon, while observing a pathology as metacinematic as it is psychiatric.” —Anton Bitel, Little White Lies