Утром закончила эссе, успела принять ванну, выбежала из дома под сигналы озабоченных машин, успела вовремя, отслушала глупую лекцию, внезапно случилось что-то приятное - Каролина сама договорилась насчет моей презентации со своим однокурсником, хотя я ей сказала об этом вскользь три недели назад. Для меня нет ничего приятнее и удивительнее, чем люди, которые так банально держат обещание и не подводят.
Это сэкономило мне кучу времени, я даже успела поболтать с Шаз, а на семинаре впервые за восемь недель открыла рот. Я успела распечатать эссе и сдать его в офис, и была на пикадилли в половину шестого. Пока я шла из универа до метро, шел проливной дождь, а я утром была такой зомби, что зонтик взяла, а вот вместо адекватных сапог напялила балетки как тяйести лохпидр. Промокла как дубинушка.
Лёшин одноклассник Ян и его девушка (похожая на Меган Фокс, зачет) подползли к шести, и я повела их по Лондону. Если учесть, что уже из универа я выползала никакая, было сложно представить, как я буду с ними гулять. В итоге мы были везде, очень весело провели время, а на кингс кроссе какая-то пара англичан просто так отдала нам два проездных билета, что очень сэкономило Яну и Эле деньги. Готта лав ингланд.
Когда я проводила туристов до их станции, сама села на поезд и вспомнила, что забыла поесть. Купила на юстоне тэйк-эвей в нандос и поехала домой.

Ужас в том, что несмотря на то, что я по жизни нахожусь в состоянии зомби, сегодня я была просто зомби всея зомбиленда. И я поняла, что это чудесное состояние, которое оставляет в покое мой мозг и расслабляет настолько, что я совершенно забываю о всех своих психозах пингвина-социофоба.

зыс уик из гонна би леджен дэээриии

эссеWhat were the consequences of the critical hostility to Peeping Tom (1960) on its release?
Discuss through in-depth analysis of the film.

Made in 1960, Peeping Tom has become a pivotal masterwork for the British director Michael Powell. The film was released just months before Psycho, a famous Hitchcock movie that the audiences instantly fell in love with, the movie that earned several Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe award.
Psycho shared many similarities with Powell’s film, and was a boost for Hitchcock’s career (Sterritt, 2008, p. 61), but Peeping Tom had a more complicated journey. As a result, Michael Powell’s career has become one of those sad stories about an unappreciated genius. So what happened?

Peeping Tom is a psychological thriller about a killer who films his victims as they are dying. It does not sound any more terrifying than a psycho who kills a naked woman in her shower. But the film was so loathed on its first release that it was pulled from the theatres and immediately ended the career of one of the greatest British directors (Sterritt, 2008, p. 59). Powell himself later remarked: “No wonder that when the critics got me alone and out on a limb with Peeping Tom, they gleefully sawed off the limb and jumped up and down on the corpse” (Ashby, Higson, 2000, p. 230).
Certainly, Peeping Tom is a violent film, but it is not even a particularly graphic one – even by the standards of 1960. It did not expose more female flesh than any other horror movie, did not show more blood or violence than any other film (Kehr, 2011, p. 215). The moral panics of the 1950s, mostly about the troubled youth, perversion, and pornography, saw horror films as a socially threatening and despicable monstrosity (Pirie, 1973, p. 99). But somehow, Peeping Tom has particularly gotten under everyone’s skin. It affected the audiences so deeply and in such a terrible way that it took two decades for film critics and audiences to recover and finally re-evaluate the significance of Michael Powell’s work.

The main questions remain: why was Peeping Tom special? Why did it frighten the viewers so deeply, and manage to get such extremely harsh reception?

First of all, Peeping Tom is a film about looking. Its main character is a focus puller at a British movie studio, but his secret life involves filming women with a camera that has a knife hidden in a leg of its tripod. He films his victims, focusing on their frightened faces and eyes full of fear, as they realise their fate. Then, he watches the footage over and over again (Sterritt, 2008, p. 60).
One of the most groundbreaking elements of the movie is the fact that it opens with the sequence shot by the character. The audience do not see his face, but the man’s eyes become the audience’s eyes, and this immediate identification leads to a shattering experience, as the viewers observe the first murder from the character’s point of view. The next sequence, where the titles appear, once again plays the same scene of the murder, now watched by the unseen main character in the dark room. Right after the “directed by Michael Powell” title, the new scene is again shown through the lens of the man’s camera, he is now on the crime scene, shooting the policemen carrying the body of a murdered prostitute (whose suffering the viewers have already seen twice). Finally, the man switches his camera off, and the viewers see the evil villain who made them feel the suspense and watch the murders. The evil protagonist is Mark Lewis – a young blond man, who is surprisingly shy, polite, and sensitive. Not only this kind of a villain might have confused the viewers, but also the fact that they were forced to be this villain, see through his eyes and do what he does.
Film does not allow the viewers the luxury of lurking anonymously in the dark of the movie theatre. Michael Powell simply takes away this protective darkness and leaves the viewers with their own dark motives - the desire to see and not be seen. Powell exposes the viewers, as if saying “you are the Peeping Toms”. Mark, the man behind the camera in the film, represents both Powell and the viewer – voyeur and exhibitionist (Kehr, 2011, p. 216).

Laura Mulvey, a British film theorist, published an influential essay in 1975 on the pleasures of looking. There, she argues that there is a number of possible pleasures offered by the cinema; one of them is scopophilia – a pleasure in looking. She refers to Freud’s work on sexuality, where he analyses scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality and makes an example of voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see private and forbidden (Mulvey, 1989, p. 16). Mulvey also touches on the fact that the contrast between the darkness in the auditorium and the brilliance and brightness of lights and shades on the screen helps create an illusion of voyeuristic separation. The conditions of screening give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world (Mulvey, 1989, p. 17).
Thus, Powell has broken a serious taboo, a taboo so powerful that it cursed the film for twenty years. Peeping Tom violates the sacred pact between the audience and the filmmaker, whereby each agrees to ignore the other’s existence (Kehr, 2011, p. 215). As a result, the cinema spectator’s own voyeurism is made shockingly obvious and even more shockingly, the spectator identifies with the perverted protagonist (Mulvey, 1999). Shockingly and yet, understandably, because Mark seems shy and polite, just a nice innocent person. But when the character meets Helen, a girl living downstairs, the viewers start to wonder whether the girl will live another day. But Helen is not a sexual character, an object of the male gaze. She is genuinely concerned about Mark, and acts more like a mother figure to him. To some extent, Helen is the audience. So, when Mark shows her his secret room, the dark room behind the curtain, where he watches his films and re-lives the murders, he also shows this room to the audience, introducing the viewers to the room that represents the darkest side of a human soul and the mystery of the unconscious mind. What could probably be so terrifying and sickening for the simple-hearted viewers of the 1950s is that they were forced to identify themselves with Mark, and had to acknowledge the fact that this dark room exist in everyone’s minds. A film critic Isabel Quigly, for instance, described Peeping Tom as a film that she believes should have been talking to the “nuts” in the crowd, rather than to the “normal homely filmgoers” (Lowenstein, 2005, p. 56). That is how Michael Powell crosses the line – the film’s daring realism and straightforwardness blurs the verge between reality and fiction. Mark, a shy peeping tom who cannot leave his camera for a second, opens the door in the viewers’ minds they wish has never been opened. The result of this experience leads to the painful effect where ‘normal’ viewers recognise themselves as the ‘nuts’ they have constructed as their opposites (Lowenstein, 2005, p. 57). Michael Powell forced the audiences to sympathise with a psycho killer, he made them feel like voyeurs and peeping toms, forcing them to look through the eyes of the murderer, through the lens of his camera. Even the film’s humour (pointed jokes and references) went completely unremarked in the storm of outrage that the film was sick, perverse, morbid, and just wholly evil (Christie, 1994, p. 86). Such disturbing authenticity was unacceptable for the viewers in 1960. The term ‘scopophilia’ became widely used only in the 1970s, when cinema psychoanalysts like Laura Mulvey started publishing their work using Freud’s theories. People in 1960 were simply not ready to hear that scopophilia is a condition of our society, and, after all, before the screen we are all voyeurs (Christie, 1994, p. 87).

The re-release of Peeping Tom in 1976 revealed that, the audiences and critics needed time to digest such an experimental film. Those, who have attacked the film in 1960, now praised it to the skies (Wimmer, 2009, p. 192). Martin Scorsese was sponsoring the revivals of Peeping Tom, being one of the devoted followers of Powell’s work. Scorsese tried to rationalise his attraction to Michael Powell’s films, saying that they combined the humour of American films, the grace and beauty of Italian films, and, of course, British realism, although quite different (Scorsese, 1991). Peeping Tom was an experiment not necessarily gone wrong, just carried out at the wrong time.
As Martin Scorsese recalls, no matter how difficult it became for Powell after Peeping Tom, if he finds himself discouraged about his career or work, he always has Michael Powell’s example for encouragement (Scorsese, 1991). Sadly, Powell was ahead of his time and generation, but luckily, it also discovered the mutability of the film canon and the fact that even the smartest critics can make mistakes (perhaps because of their simple fear of a dark room Powell showed them).