PEEPING TOM Studies in Memory of Anna Massey

Image of Anna Massey in her second film role as Helen in Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)

Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear of the death yesterday of the great British actress Anna Massey at the age of 73. For many years, she rightfully cornered the cinematic and televisual markets in kindly, kooky and/or downright spooky English ladies with lots going on beneath their surface.

One of her best roles, in FSFF's humble opinion, was her BAFTA winning performance as romantic novelist Edith Hope in the 1986 BBC adaptation of Anita Brookner's novel Hotel du Lac. But her most studied and written about cinematic appearance was her proto-'final-girl' role as Helen Stephens in Powell's Peeping Tom. So it is to the relatively sparse, but online and openly accessible studies of that film to which FSFF directly links in its little tribute to Massey's work.

• Bruce Alistair Barber, Trans/actions: Art, Film and Death, PhD Thesis, European Graduate School, August 2005
• Paul Cronly, 'Peeping Tom', Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue # 3 (November 2007)
• Michelle Devereaux, 'Death and Desire in Swinging London Film', Forum, Issue 6, 2008
• Margaret Gibson, 'Death Scenes: ethics of the face and cinematic deaths', Mortality, 6 (3): 306-320, 2001
• Barry Keith Grant 'Screams on Screens: Paradigms of Horror', Loading..., Vol 4, No 6 (2010)
• Catherine Grant, 'True likeness: Peeping Tom and Code inconnu/Code Unknown ', Filmanalytical, June 26, 2010
• Jeremy Hawthorn, 'Morality, voyeurism, and 'point of view': Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (I960', Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 2 No. 2 , 2009
• Keith Hennessy Brown, 'Palimpsest, Pasolini, Poe and Poetics, or the phantoms haunting Dario Argento’s Opera (1987)', Forum, Issue 7, 2008
• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, 51, 2009
• Martin Scorsese, '[Interviewed by Mark Kermode] On Michael Powell movies [Video 22.04]', The Guardian, November 19, 2010
• Robert Yanal, ' Two Monsters in Search of a Concept', Contemporary Aesthetics, 1, 2003

This is a FILMANALYTICAL / FILM STUDIES FOR FREE video essay by Catherine Grant. It explores some of the obvious, as well as the more obscure, similarities between two films: PEEPING TOM (Michael Powell, 1960) and CODE INCONNU / CODE UNKNOWN (Michael Haneke, 2000). It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License in June 2010.

Black Narcissus: the Colours of Desire

Updated October 28, 2010

Image from Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947)

[Black Narcissus]’s trauma-tale is inseparable from the doomed project [of Imperialism]: it is predicated on the vertiginous nature of culture shock. The lofty palace-convent perched on the edge of a mountain precipice [...] seems a visual metonym. Sister Clodagh may want to heal and enlighten “a primitive people”, but, when she looks up and then looks down from the bell tower, she is completely lost. Powell and Pressburger have transposed the ‘edge of the world’ from Foula at the tip of the Shetlands in Powell’s 1937 Scottish picture (The Edge of the World) to India’s border with the high Himalayas; from the edge of the Roman Empire to the edge of the British Empire. The former, of course, was long gone; the latter was about to expire. The end of empire is literally vertiginous, its trauma doubly embedded, or embodied, in the figures of Clodagh and sickly Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron). Ruth cannot hack the chasm of culture that confronts her and wants out; Clodagh, disillusioned after a romance in Ireland has ended when her boyfriend leaves for America without her, seeks solace in the Order. Flashback shows us the rural idyll of Irish sweethearts fishing and riding amidst fields and hills of emerald Technicolor, the flame-haired Clodagh slim, free-spirited and ravishing, like a figure from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. The long auburn hair now concealed under the all-embracing convent habit is never to reappear. As the fragile Order starts to crumble after the unfortunate death of a local child, the febrile Sister Ruth sheds her habit to reappear in scarlet lipstick and a lush crimson dress; for the shocked Clodagh, perhaps a melodramatic return of the repressed – the erotic red of the painted lips matched by the sensual velvet that highlights the shape of the female figure rather than burying it under a mountain of white cloth. [John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009]

Filled with the joys of Open Access Week 2010, Film Studies For Free brings you a small but perfectly formed 'study of a single film' resource: a little list of openly accessible online articles on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1947 film Black Narcissus.

• Geraldine Biddle-Perry and Janice Miller, 'If Looks Could Kill: Making Up the Face of Evil', The Wicked Heart: Studies in the Phenomenology of Evil, eds Sorcha Ni Fhlainn and William Andrew Myers (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2006), scroll to p. 235
• Mary Bowen, 'Blue Nun/Red Desire: The Palette of Piety, Passion, and Monstrosity in Black Narcissus', Powell and Pressburger.org, 2004
• Peter Coyne, 'Black Narcissus', Scope, Issue 11, June 2008
• Robert Cross, 'Black Narcissus: A Post-colonial Empire Film?', Doshisha Studies in Language and Culture, 9(4), 2007: 593 – 611
• Kelly Davidson and John Hill, '‘Under control’?: Black Narcissus and the Imagining of India', Film Studies, Issue 6, Summer 2005
• Raymond Durgnat, 'Retrospective: Black Narcissus', Monthly Film Bulletin, 1947
• Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, ‘Seeing white: female whiteness and the purity of children in Australian, British and Chinese visual culture’, Social Semiotics, 10:2, 2000, 157-171
• Anh Hua, 'Primitive Spectacle in Black Narcissus', j_spot, 1.2, 2000
• Kent Jones, 'Empire of the Senses', Criterion Collection, July 20, 2010
• Dave Kehr, 'Black Narcissus', Criterion Collection, January 29, 2001
• Karli Lukas, 'Black Narcissus', Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009
• Alton Jerome McFarland, 'Madness through Music: An Analysis of Sound in Black Narcissus', Powell and Pressburger.org (date unknown)
• Gary Morris, 'Black Narcissus', Images Journal, Issue 10
• Gary Morris, 'Black Narcissus, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 33, July 2001
• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009
• Michael Walker, 'Black Narcissus', From Framework 9, Winter 1978/79

More great Film Studies podcasts: Pinewood Dialogues

I just came across another great, free source of podcasts of film scholarly note, via the wonderful Museum of the Moving Image's  Moving Image Source website, where I was checking out a girish recommendation for the publication of September articles.

The podcasts are accessible via a Moving Image Source page called Pinewood Dialogues ('Selected Conversations with Innovative and Influential Creative Figures in Film, TV, and Digital Media'). There are some 73 podcasts currently posted, of interviews with, and dialogues between, filmmakers and other creative folk, including the likes of Werner Herzog and Jonathan Demme, Stan Brakhage, Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker, Michael Powell, Patricia Rozema, George A. Romero, Fernando Meirelles and Rachel Weisz,  and François Ozon, among many others.