GME Unearths Jon Gartenberg's 1990 Article on Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM, Now Screening at MoMA

CARL BOEHM AND ANNA MASSEY IN MICHAEL POWELL’S 1960 THRILLER PEEPING TOM. SOURCE: FILM FORUM.

On Wednesday, July 10th at 7pm, and Sunday, July 28th at 4pm, Michael Powell’s classic 1960 thriller PEEPING TOM will screen at The Museum of Modern Art as part of their month-long retrospective Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger. As noted in MoMA’s program notes:

True cinematic visionaries and innovators, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger worked together on 24 films from between 1939 and 1972, with Powell handling direction and Pressburger responsible for the scripts—though their duties blended often enough… Creators of such classic films as THE RED SHOES, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, and BLACK NARCISSUS… this series, the largest and most wide-ranging exploration of their work ever undertaken, celebrates Powell and Pressburger’s cultural legacy and enduring influence.

On the occasion of this celebration of Powell and Pressburger’s collaborations (and of Powell’s PEEPING TOM specifically — a controversial solo effort that horrified British audiences and film censors), GME has unearthed an archival gem from Jon Gartenberg’s papers pertaining to Powell’s still-shocking thriller. For the Spring 1990 issue of MoMA’s Members Quarterly, Gartenberg wrote an article that explores the psychological and voyeuristic capacities of the cinematic and photographic mediums as conveyed in both Powell’s PEEPING TOM and Alfred Hitchcock’s beloved 1954 thriller REAR WINDOW. This piece was published as part of a larger exhibition, The Photographer’s Image in Motion Pictures, which was a collaboration between Gartenberg, curator for MoMA’s film department, and Susan Kismaric, curator for MoMA’s photography department. In the article, Gartenberg writes:

If Alfred Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW is a quintessential film about voyeurism from the point of view of the photojournalist, voyeurism permeates PEEPING TOM (1960). Nearly every character is involved and it is seen in the structuring of the visual imagery; and through the omnipresence of both still and motion picture cameras in virtually every scene. In short, PEEPING TOM affirms a view of life itself as a voyeuristic activity… [the protagonist] Mark manages to negotiate the world only through the lenses of his camera… PEEPING TOM expresses our deepest fear of photography’s destructive potential. When killing his victims, Mark shines a light on their faces and uses a mirror on the camera so that they can see their panic as they watch the knife at the end of his tripod plunge towards them… Voyeurism through photography in PEEPING TOM results in the main character’s self-immolation, which he records for posterity in sound and image.

The entire section of Gartenberg’s article devoted to Powell’s PEEPING TOM can be viewed below, and a higher-resolution PDF file of the article in its entirety can be downloaded and read by clicking here.