Thursday, October 8 at 7:00 PM – Music Box Theatre – 3733 N Southport Ave
Tickets: $13 at the door or purchase in advance
PEEPING TOM
Directed by Michael Powell • 1960
Steeped in voyeurism and anxiety, Peeping Tom is as unsettling today as it was in 1960. Carl Boehm delivers a haunting performance as Mark Lewis, a painfully withdrawn photographer and aspiring filmmaker whose childhood was shaped by psychological experimentation at the hands of his father. Mark channels his obsession with the camera into photographing pin-up models — and documenting their murders on 16mm as quasi-scientific snuff films. Powell crafted a film that forces viewers to confront the uneasy relationship between cinema, desire, and violence, but upon release, it was met with critical outrage. (In 1960, Dilys Powell excoriated its “vulgar squalor” and dismissed it as “essentially vicious” in the The Sunday Times, though she would recant decades later and proclaim it a “masterpiece.”) The backlash fully derailed Powell’s career, despite his earlier stature as one of Britain’s most celebrated filmmakers. Today Peeping Tom is recognized as a thrilling, disturbing, and beautiful landmark of psychological horror, a film that implicates its viewers as accessories to death-by-cinema. (TV)
101 min • Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors • 35mm from Rialto Pictures
Preceded by: “The Miracle of Change” (J. Leighton Pierce, 1984) – 7 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema
NEXT UP: An Evening with Jim Trainor on October 21 at 8:00 PM at Constellation