Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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recognised as a risk-all masterpiece from a great filmmaker.” (44) Many elements of
the film lend themselves to such a conclusion as it is a rather detailed and intricately
designed piece of cinema. A great deal of writing has been committed to Peeping
Tom’s approach to seeing, sight and voyeurism. Leading film scholars such as
Laura Mulvey (1999), Raymond Lefevre (1968), Catherine Zimmer (2004) and
Carol Clover represent a fraction of the critics and academics who have written
about Peeping Tom in this manner. These scholars have reclaimed Peeping Tom,
bringing it to a level of greater prominence, and filmmaker Martin Scorsese
famously promoted and re-released the film for Powell, because of Scorsese’s
personal appreciation for it. Scorsese says, “I have always felt that Peeping Tom and
8½ say everything that can be said about film-making, about the process of dealing
with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it and the confusion between the two.”
(in Thompson and Christie [eds.], 1996; 20) As voyeurism is the basic theme of the
film, it is unavoidable that so much analysis would go into this subject. The
approach that Peeping Tom takes toward the eye/camera model of viewer-cameracharacter
relationship is particularly dense and complex, with multiple varieties and
models attributed to a single shot.
Catherine Zimmer pinpoints the central convergence between theory and
practice when critiquing Clover’s analysis of the film. Zimmer writes “While
Clover’s analysis of the film is extremely illuminating, the fact remains that in her
analysis, as well as the great majority of analyses of the cinematic gaze, there is little
distinction made between the process of looking, and the process of looking through
a camera.” (35) [emphasis in the original]
Initially, it could be viewed as an extremely early example of the victimcamera
film, replacing the victim with the perpetrator. In the opening sequence, the