Fighting cinematic ingnorance

Sundays at 8PM - Stúdentakjallaranum

fimmtudagur, febrúar 15, 2007



Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960, UK)

Mark Lewis suffered traumatic experience as a child when his father, a psychologist, had him involved in some gruesome tests on human fear. Now all grown up Mark works as a focus puller by day, is a girlie photographer in the evening and after dark he is a SERIAL KILLER.

Though this film is today considered a Britsh masterpiece it was buried by critics when it came out in 1960. What upset critics the most then was the inventive use of camerawork which incriminated the viewer with the morbid desire to watch (scoptophilia). The film also examinates film-making as Mark documents all his with his handheld camera. To put another demension to the film examenation the director Michael Powell casts himself as the father. The film is released two months before Pshyco and that’s intersting because both of them present its madman as a sympathetic but not admirable character.

Michael Powell might be better known for his work with Emeric Pressburger as they made a wide selection of films in many genres. Their most famous movies might be The Thief of Bagdad, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death (the last one mentioned is also being shown later in our program). Powell was written of as an eccentric decorator of fantasies and was later rediscovered by other director such as Martin Scorsese who is one of Powells fans (Powell later married Thelma Schoomaker, who is the editor of most of Scorseses movies).

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