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Why we had to just watch films instead
Of all the Archers films I have seen since A Canterbury Tale (1944), it is frankly ridiculous that the one I never got around to posting about was Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), which Eric and I watched a year ago in March. I was recommending it to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks this afternoon; a few nights ago I thumbnail-sketched it for ron_drummond. Somehow it appears to have become one of my critical films. But as much I would like to promise a substantive discussion in future, what you may find below is the sketch: I am tired of leaving placeholders for posts that are never followed up on, one-liners that eventually dissociate from whatever allusions they were intended to remind me of. At least here is something a reader might remember. I do care that people know about Peeping Tom:
It destroyed Powell's career and it should have—like Psycho for Hitchcock, barely a month later—ensured his immortality in his lifetime. I do not bear it the same instinctive love as A Canterbury Tale, but I suspect it is the kind of film that can furnish entire dissertations, at once the procedural of a compulsive killer and a love story and a caprice of the sleep of reason, and on top of all that a frankly intellectual examination of the nature of film: the relationship not only of watcher and watched, but also the one who sets them up to be watched. Voyeurism, both the kind we all know about and the kind we never consider. 1950's British porn. The complex and delicate boundaries between eroticism and terror. Anna Massey, in nearly her first film role; and Karlheinz Böhm, whose German accent is so soft, all it triggers at first is a subliminal sense of not one of us and perhaps Peter Lorre. The script is by the cryptographer Leo Marks, but today it would probably belong to Elizabeth Hand. And I can see why the critics savaged it, but they were idiots: if art is meant to hold a mirror up to life, then at least you can have the good grace to look at what it reflects, be that a shy courtship or the last memory imprinted in a corpse's eye. Anyway, watch it. It is not a nice film. It is intelligent, which is infinitely better. There is a very nice DVD out from Criterion, which someday I will have the money to own.
Before then, however, I should sleep; I have to get up tomorrow at sleepless o'clock and make phone calls. (This was not in the sketch.) Between me and my brother, it is agreed that our present healthcare system should please die in a fire. And preferably be reborn as something that works, but in the meantime we'll settle for agonizing immolation.
rushthatspeaks this afternoon; a few nights ago I thumbnail-sketched it for ron_drummond. Somehow it appears to have become one of my critical films. But as much I would like to promise a substantive discussion in future, what you may find below is the sketch: I am tired of leaving placeholders for posts that are never followed up on, one-liners that eventually dissociate from whatever allusions they were intended to remind me of. At least here is something a reader might remember. I do care that people know about Peeping Tom:It destroyed Powell's career and it should have—like Psycho for Hitchcock, barely a month later—ensured his immortality in his lifetime. I do not bear it the same instinctive love as A Canterbury Tale, but I suspect it is the kind of film that can furnish entire dissertations, at once the procedural of a compulsive killer and a love story and a caprice of the sleep of reason, and on top of all that a frankly intellectual examination of the nature of film: the relationship not only of watcher and watched, but also the one who sets them up to be watched. Voyeurism, both the kind we all know about and the kind we never consider. 1950's British porn. The complex and delicate boundaries between eroticism and terror. Anna Massey, in nearly her first film role; and Karlheinz Böhm, whose German accent is so soft, all it triggers at first is a subliminal sense of not one of us and perhaps Peter Lorre. The script is by the cryptographer Leo Marks, but today it would probably belong to Elizabeth Hand. And I can see why the critics savaged it, but they were idiots: if art is meant to hold a mirror up to life, then at least you can have the good grace to look at what it reflects, be that a shy courtship or the last memory imprinted in a corpse's eye. Anyway, watch it. It is not a nice film. It is intelligent, which is infinitely better. There is a very nice DVD out from Criterion, which someday I will have the money to own.
Before then, however, I should sleep; I have to get up tomorrow at sleepless o'clock and make phone calls. (This was not in the sketch.) Between me and my brother, it is agreed that our present healthcare system should please die in a fire. And preferably be reborn as something that works, but in the meantime we'll settle for agonizing immolation.
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I love Anna Massey.
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What is the kind we never consider?
eroticism and terror ---it sounds intriguing, fascinating.
Why did the critics savage it?
Good luck today with the phone calls.
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Peeping Tom was a strange experience for me: it's so clearly brilliant, and so very alien to how I think and feel.
Nine
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Between me and my brother, it is agreed that our present healthcare system should please die in a fire. And preferably be reborn as something that works ...
Hopefully our system can inspire confidence in the doubters down your way. I know your new wonderful President is trying (despite those who would kill his bill in the cradle), and trying hard. Best of luck from north of the border.
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I'm sorry to hear about the need for phone calls. I wish you much luck with them, and I hope you've slept as much and as well as you were able. I agree with you and your brother about the healthcare system.
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No—I take it you recommend?
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I read it for a piece I just recently finished in draft--another part of the Novel. Since I can definitely get my geek on about the subject matter I may not be the most objective person to recommend it. It's got enough about some of the major players in Marks' section to have been required reading in my case. His writing style is very personal and more than a little breathless, but it does give you a real sense of the man and of You Are There.
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That is a recommendation by me.
Thank you!
It's certainly better than "Charlotte Gray," anyway. I can't forgive Faulks for that novel.
Didn't that win for Bad Sex in Fiction?
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If you are an SOE geek too you will love Marks' memoir. There is a lot about Forest "Tommy" Yeo-Thomas (the probable model for Bigwig in "Watership Down," I think, among other things--what a man...).
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Your comments on Peeping Tom shed a new light on the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski for me -- I hadn't fully realized before how much of Kieślowski's work is devoted to nuanced explorations of the invasive cinematic eye (most insistently in Camera Buff, 1979) and various forms of voyeurism: auditory, in Red (1994); visual, in A Short Film About Love (1988); and anonymous intervention in a stranger's life, in The Double Life of Veronique (1991), among others. In all of those films he makes of the audience a collective voyeur, never more intensely than in A Short Film About Killing (1988).
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Thank you. I wanted it not to disappear in the detritus of the internet.
I hadn't fully realized before how much of Kieślowski's work is devoted to nuanced explorations of the invasive cinematic eye (most insistently in Camera Buff, 1979) and various forms of voyeurism: auditory, in Red (1994); visual, in A Short Film About Love (1988); and anonymous intervention in a stranger's life, in The Double Life of Veronique (1991), among others. In all of those films he makes of the audience a collective voyeur, never more intensely than in A Short Film About Killing (1988).
This sounds like the seed of an essay.