PEEPING TOM (101’)
by Michael Powell
cast: Carl Böhm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey
UK, 1969
Restoration curated by The British Film Institute
Introduced by Marco Contino
“If there is a film that deserves the “dark masterpiece” tag, this does: Carl Böhm plays Mark, a focus-puller at a movie studio, part-time porn photographer and compulsive amateur filmmaker, who has amassed a huge snuff-porn collection of black-and-white footage showing him murdering prostitutes – with a still more horrendous refinement, not revealed until the very end. […] There’s hardly anything more extraordinary in British cinema than Mark’s passion in the seedy photo studio, seeing his new model has an ugly deformity: “They said you needn’t photograph my face,” she sneers with poignantly empty bravado. “I vant to… I vant to!” he gasps. An intimately disturbing experience.” (Peter Bradshaw)
“Peeping Tom synthesises the relationship between horror, pornography, sadomasochism, sexuality and the simple act of looking and filmmaking.” (Emanuela Martini)
“This is a horrific, extreme film that is disturbing. Repressed (in every sense) at its release, it soon became a classic. That works on the saturation of genre codes, as highly intellectualised horror, that is provocative in understated guise. In its erotic-aesthetic climax, it is the boldest mise en abîme of cinema as vampirism and interpretation of the unconscious”. (Gianni Volpi)
