Peeping Through the Screen: The Voyeuristic Thriller (Cinema Programme)

(A mock film season at a local cinema, written Spring 2018)

(Still from 'Peeping Tom')

Why do we watch film? This season of films at the Showroom Cinema explores the very nature of our film experience by delving deep into our desire to look without being seen, our wish to be voyeurs in darkness. With a collection of films spanning five decades, we will look at how filmmakers throughout history have questioned and analysed scopophilia, and how this theme has been an integral part of the evolution of the 'thriller' genre. Beginning with the 'Master of Suspense' Alfred Hitchcock, this season surveys the impressions of Michael Powell, Francis Ford Coppola, David Lynch, and Michael Haneke.

Rear Window (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1954, 112 mins.) Set in the midst of a sweltering New York summer, Hitchcock presents with impeccable craft and self-reflexivity a gripping tale of conspiracy and murder, wrapped in an atmosphere of paranoia and classic Hitchcockian gallows humour. Starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, and Thelma Ritter, Hitchcock questions our roles as 'peeping toms' in modern society, revelling in the fact that the acquisition of knowledge sometimes comes at the expense of virtue. Peeping Tom (dir. Michael Powell, UK, 1960, 101 mins.) Famous as the film that killed a career, the critical backlash in 1960 to Peeping Tom cast Powell into oblivion. Lambasted as vulgar and sadistic, Powell held a mirror up to the audience questioning their role as voyeurs in the brutal, on-screen murders. Mark Lewis (Carl Bohm) is a part time focus puller on a film crew, and a part time serial killer, unleashing his repressed mind by filming the gruesome fates of his victims and watching them in his leisure. It was not until the 1980s that this dark thriller was re-evaluated as a masterpiece, thanks to the determination of curators such as Martin Scorsese.

The Conversation (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, US, 1974, 113 mins.) Winner of the Palme d'or, and directed between the first two Godfather films, this film sits as a rather quiet masterpiece in Coppola's oeuvre. Surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) stumbles upon a potential murder and, faced with a moral crisis, begins to lose control over his well-guarded existence. Poignant at the time with its parallels to the Watergate scandal, and prescient today in the age of Edward Snowden and the 'snooper's charter', The Conversation raises important ethical questions about voyeuristic surveillance.

Blue Velvet (dir. David Lynch, US, 1986, 120 mins.) Inspired by Rear Window amongst other films, Lynch's disturbing tale about the dark, Freudian undercurrents of a small American town positions us again as a curious voyeur snooping where one should not. After college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle McLachlan) discovers a severed ear whilst walking home, he and neighbour Sandy Williams (Laura Dern) investigate this strange mystery. Also starring Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini, and supplemented by an iconic soundtrack including the songs of Roy Orbison and Bobby Vinton, Blue Velvet is an intense study of the dark desires of human nature.

Hidden (Caché, dir. Michael Haneke, France/Germany 2005, 118 mins.) A quiet and affluent Parisian family is thrown into a state of paranoia and mistrust when a mysterious video tape of their home's exterior is coldly left on their doorstep. Haneke tactfully uses the act of voyeurism to both chip-away at the family exposing their corrosive guilt, as well as implicate the viewer as voyeur through distressing point-of-view shots. Hidden is a perfect example of how the thriller genre turns the simple act of watching someone into a truly unsettling and horrifying act.