Michael Powell's Film, Peeping Tom

Alfred Hitchcock, in his critically acclaimed horror movie “ The Birds “, uses his camera shots metaphorically as a person rather than a weapon, in a way to add suspense, inner themes of the film, and to express the character’s emotions or intensity.

Typical films following the classic structure rely on continuity editing, which establishes a logical timeline between shots, but art films provide a break from the norms of Hollywood editing and establish editor creativity. Films, such as Peeping Tom, also shift away from traditional camerawork practices, and these differences all contribute to the new subject matter seen in art cinema. The opening shot of Peeping Tom shows an extreme close up of a women’s eye, and as the shot progresses, the remainder of the first scene is from the perspective of Mark’s camera. This creates a sense of discontinuity for the audience, as they ponder the reality of the scene from the perspective of Mark’s camera. As the viewers realize the symbol of the camera, long silences are also used during the shots including Mark’s camera that further enhance any mental discomfort from the audience. The disturbing silence before Mark’s second murder on the movie set heightens suspense, and throughout the film, long silences are paired with the camera’s perspective to these moments of peril. Peeping Tom continues art cinema editing styles with the use of low-key lighting, which creates a dark tone across the film. Later on, low-key lighting is used as Helen discovers Mark’s disturbing films. As a result of the dim-lit shot, the viewers are unaware of the surroundings and feel suspense due to the possibility of Mark’s arrival at any moment. Through Powell’s use of unconventional editing and camerawork, Peeping Tom reaches a level of fright that eventually contributes to the viewers placing blame on technology, specifically, the camera. The film’s perspective from Mark’s camera associates the murders with technology, thereby, shifting the blame away from the human. Mark’s disturbing lifestyle is simply a product of his childhood under the lens of his father’s psychological film studies, and the

The classic femme fatale in forced to resort to murder to free herself from an unbearable relationship with a man who would try to possess and control her, as if she were a piece of property or a pet. According to Sylvia Harvey, author of Women's place: The absent family, the women of film noir are "presented as prizes, desirable objects" for the leading men of these films. The femme fatale's unique power is her brazen willingness and ability to express herself in sexual terms. By this the femme fatale threatens the status quo, and the hero, because she controls her own sexuality outside of marriage. She uses sex for pleasure and as a weapon or a tool to control men, not merely in the culturally acceptable capacity of procreation within marriage. Her sexual emancipation commands the gaze of the hero, the audience, and the camera in a way that cannot be erased by her final punishment. Attempts to neutralise the power and blatant sexuality of the femme fatale by destroying her at the end are usually unsuccessful, because her power extends beyond death. Noir films immediately convey the intense sexual presence of the femme fatale by introducing her as a fully established object of the hero's obsession. Since the camera often represents the hero's subjective memory, revealed

There is great focus on the laboratory scene of creating the monster, as most films tend to do; as

Many feminists claim this movie to be a feminist movie because it did not shy away from the graphic content. In one scene, the survivor of the rape castrates one of her perpetrators in a bathtub and watches him bleed out on the floor beside her. Carol Clover, an analysist of horror movies and author, interviewed two of the movie goers, one man and one woman. The woman “[…] went so far as to call it a radical feminist film” and the man “found it such a devastating commentary on male rape fantasies and also on the way male group dynamics engender violence that he thought it should be compulsory viewing for high school boys” (Clover 115-116). Because of Clover’s interview, it is apparent that

In the stereotypical horror movie, women are often portrayed as passive victims of violence, such as Janet Leigh in the famous shower scene of Psycho. These victimized characters are often the objects of what has been termed “the male gaze,” a term used in film and gender studies to describe the heterosexual male perspective through which women are portrayed in media. The male gaze is so ubiquitous that it is often considered the norm and therefore goes unnoticed. However, rather than portraying this stereotypical female character, Charles Burns’ Black Hole uses elements of the horror genre to draw attention to the male gaze and its symbolic violence against women. In his representation of Eliza’s rape, in particular, Burns uses horror cinematography

The human eye is a funny thing. It gives us an accurate depiction of the world, informing us as to how we inhabit space and as to what we can learn from the space around us. To put it shortly, our eyes tell us about life. Vision can be remarkably narrow, in the sense that we are confined to it, but cinema can be eye opening - even life changing. Cameras and lenses allow us to alter this fixed view. When we are successfully able to alter our fixed perception of the world, we can get some miraculous, powerful, meaningful results. Alfred Hitchcock was very aware of the power of directing an eye. Through lens and camera, Hitchcock oh so naturally and subtly directs the viewer - directs us. One important case study into Hitchcock’s use of the

To begin with, Maggie Greenwald’s Josephine Monaghan is the classical oppressed woman in western films. She is kicked out by her own family for having an illegitimate child with her family’s photographer and labelled a ‘whore’ by her own father. This reflects the traditional gender roles assigned to females since birth. After the attempt of prostitution by strangers in which she miraculously escapes from, Josephine’s goal is to simply survive. The decision Josephine makes after the series of unfortunate gender-based experiences reinforces the idea that even for a manly woman, Hollywood’s classical representation of women is still relevant.

Catherine Breillat uses pornography or the very explicit viewing of sex as a form of liberation for women from the shame and views imposed by a patriarchal society on female sexuality. In her film, Anatomy of Hell, the woman moves past objectification through the use of purposeful objectification by controlling the way in which a man views and sees her. In taking control of the situations under which people look at you, it creates a transformation within that makes them view women in a different way and leads to new way

Even as the decades pass on and society is deemed by the public as becoming more progressive in it’s understanding of the Other, violence related to sexuality is a topic that continues to permeate horror films. The subject of the horror/slasher genre begins to shift by the late eighties and early nineties on the image of the serial killer. This shift changed the monster of the horror movie from a masked killer wielding a phallic weapon to a representation of, as Mark Seltzer describes it, “the monster among us.” It is through this shift that the Final Girl character is evolved as well, especially in terms of Jonathan Demme’s film The Silence of the Lambs. Clarice Starling in Silence can be classified as a Final Girl due to her survival at the

Since the emergence of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks franchise,the notion of self-conscious narrative first popularized by postmodernist writers like Gaddis, Gass, Pynchon and DeLillo has enjoyed the privilege of being a fully-formed filmic object for viewer review. Its logic is that of the quixotic hero and its desired Other, whether it be a lost love, unfaithful wife or husband, moribund career, or the realization that oneself has lost all significant connection to the world, that the ironic hero is ironic because his or her role in the world has become otiose; the point in this self-conscious aesthetic is that the plot signifies an element in the story long enough for the protagonist’s gaze to create both linguistic and visual alienation. Repeat a word enough times and it becomes unfamiliar, Other: jamais vu. The lover of cinema feels her gaze returned, as if film is conscious of the viewer’s entry into its narrative—the diegesis.

All of the shots were filmed from an omniscient point of view except for shot 5, which was from the single character point of view of Mark. Since the only shot from Mark’s point of view was the repeated image of one of his tortured victims, it portrays how his overwhelming urge to fetishsize female terror through his voyeurism. The other shots filmed from an omniscient point of view are able to track Mark’s actions and reactions to other on-screen actions. Most of these shots in the series are taken from an eye level angle also as a method to track Mark. However, shot 4 is taken from a low angle which emphasizes his power and foreshadows his entrance to his fear workshop upstairs. On the other hand, the film strip of the woman being murdered in shot 5 is taken from an extreme high angle, which emphasizes the sense of terror. Mark’s harm towards women is also emphasized through the shot types. With a close up in shot 3, the camera zooms in order to focus on his inner intentions. In shot 4, the medium long shot shows more of his body in order to

As an advanced representation system the cinema possesses questions of the ways the unconscious structure ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. Feminists have been using Freud’s psychoanalytical theory as a political weapon in order to deconstruct popular Hollywood cinema and how it stimulates the patriarchal culture. Even though we are more conscious about these structures nowadays, Hollywood cinema still uses the Male Gaze in order to control the identification processes of the spectator. A recent example is the thriller Disturbia (2007) by D.J. Caruso, seen as a modern interpretation of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. It’s a movie about a grounded teenager who starts spying on his neighbours

In Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, she presents a number of very interesting facts regarding the ways that the sexual imagery of men and women respectively are used in the world of film. One such fact is that of the man as the looker and the female as the looked upon, she argues that the woman is always the object of reifying gaze, not the bearer if it. And “[t]he determining

The editing, use of frame and shot sizes in this sequence clearly establish the idea that every part of the aesthetics in Geman Expressionist films are important. This movement of film borrows some conventions from the films of the United States at this time, they use continuity editing to establish a clearly defined narrative. Similarily, the camerawork is “typically functional rather than spectacular”. This continuity style of editing emphasises the importance of story in this sequence, first the audience is shown a murder followed by the subsequent reaction, the narrative is clear cut and establishes the intended horror, common in German Exprassionist films. The camera work coupled with the editing style in this sequence highlight the other elements of the sequence including set, actors and lighting as well as emphasising the horror of the narrative to ensure that the audience is drawn into the terryfying world of Dr. Calligari. The realative normality of the editing and camerawork is used to highlight the unreality of the other visuals thus each technique is coordinated creating what Rotho would term “studio constructivism and a sense of completeness” that was produced across German Expressionist films (Kracauer 194). However, camera and editing can be and is used in this case both naturally and unaturally to create more horror. During the murder, the camera remains still and at eye-level but the victim is placed at the bottom of the frame to make him appear small and