United Kingdom, 1960
Directed by Michael Powell
With Karlheinz Böhm (Mark Lewis), Anna Massey (Helen Stephens), Maxine Audley (Mrs. Stephens), Jack Watson (Chief Inspector Gregg)
Like his namesake who featured in the English legend of Lady Godiva, this modern-day Peeping Tom stares at a woman when he should not and that ends badly for him. But unlike the namesake, Mark Lewis actually longs to do it and is unconcerned with the appeal of a whole feminine body. What he wants to watch is the utmost fear any human being would experience coming over a face, and more dreadfully, he wants to capture it on a film.
Mark Lewis works on films all day long. He is a focus puller in a film studio most of the day and on his free time an amateur photographer employed by a newsagent selling on the side soft porn pics of young ladies, shot above his shop, as well as an amateur cineaste. When he tells his personal story to Helen Stephens, the daughter of his new tenant, Mrs. Stephens, he explains he has been living with cameras from his childhood. His father was a biologist with an interest on the actual development of human emotions, in particular fear. Mark Lewis spent most of his youth under the lens of Professor Lewis’ camera as he took upsetting images of his son while he was deliberately faced with disgusting or distressing events so as to record his feeling of fear, a shocking case of insensitiveness from a father and a disturbing transformation of the magical camera lens into a cold microscope lens.
The film has actually begun with an even more disturbing visual trick. The first pictures are what they appear through a viewfinder, which means that director Michael Powell puts his camera at the place of Mark Lewis and shows what his fictional character sees through his own device which he always holds. Mark Lewis’ vision is ours. And so is his crime.
The attitudes and the lines captured throughout the film, including his dialogue with Helen Stephens, follow suit with this startling stylistic choice and keen attention. The story is fully told from Mark Lewis’ viewpoint, taking into account his life experience without much reservations or criticism, till his grandiloquent suicide. Powell’s move was bold. And it set off furor. Espousing his lead character’s insanity in such an emphatic an empathetic manner was in 1960 ruled as tantamount to excuse a madman while giving in to easy sensationalism for a few more sterling pounds.
What annoys is rather the ponderous explanation of Mark Lewis’ case, which feels like a simplistic and clumsy incursion in the realm of psychology. The other main consequence of the harsh and insecure life he had – next to the murderous bent – is not tackled with the same clear-cut, and cutting, vision but remains vital to the character’s profile: this is Mark Lewis’ impossibility to have normal relations with women. Sex is his own utmost fear lurking below his blank face.
This shapes the other part of the narrative, next to the detective story triggered by his crimes, that is, his desperate fight to see Helen Stephens as a possible, inspiring and trustful, love partner, and most of the dramatic development tracks their doomed attempt to be together. Ironically, the tension that increasingly torments Mark Lewis is partly fueled by the very cautious and defiant attitude that Mrs. Stephens has towards him; she is suspicious even if she cannot see why – literally as she is blind. This inability to watch sustains a suspicion that is eluding other people, including a psychiatrist hired in the course of the police investigation led by Chief Inspector Gregg, in a stunning reversal of both Mark Lewis’ ambition and the goal of many directors, since both claim to capture the ultimate truth (although, of course, the latter would certainly not aspire to what the former looks for).
The film is a blunt but challenging reflection on what filming and watching imply, how far we can go on watching any picture without giving thought about it and how far cinema can shoot freely. The blue pictures Mark Lewis and others exchange raise a first set of questions about men’s hypocritical and lecherous attitudes and women’s exploitation; this contentious use of the camera is a chartered territory to begin arguments; it illustrates to many the very definition of a voyeur. The incredible, and contrived, madness of the lead character raises then a more difficult and emotional question that the director’s choice of viewpoints makes even more daunting to deal with.
As the voyeur turns his attention away from Eros and right to Thanatos (and back again), the representation of violence and death enters an uncharted territory; beyond the sickening peculiar quest of Mark Lewis, we must consider how far cinema can go to depict a full horror and whether the audience can accept it. A knee-jerk, dismissive, reaction to Mark Lewis belies the malaise Powell creates from the first, disturbing, sequence and keeps on exploring. A camera can record everything his operator wants but is this acceptable? In this case, madness can be an excuse but what if there is none – and Mark Lewis’ father was obviously not insane. We relish great shots but what if the filmmaker make objectionable images?
The fact that Mark Lewis’ troubling dad is played by Powell himself in a brief appearance amid all the old footage the father left to his son, tells a lot about the self-critical approach the cineaste is taking to his art with this audacious and disturbing flick; it is as unsettling as the words of Mrs. Stephens claiming that “All this filming isn’t healthy”. Are we ready to watch all the consequences (a more than relevant point for our times, which have been shaped for the last two decades by a seemingly insatiable and uncritical consumption of TV reality shows)? And then there is the topic of fear; not only its on-screen depiction but its origins; confronted by its utmost expression, are we ready to look for the cause and delve into our deepest feelings and vital instincts?