Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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satisfactorily address the aesthetic and psychological implications of the device.
Fischer and Landy ultimately argue that Eyes of Laura Mars begins with a very
complex approach to addressing the first person shot, but that the film’s approach
becomes increasingly reductive until the end, revealing the film to be an inadequate
discussion of the device, due to the combined nature of the first person shot and the
flaws in the film. They continue to discuss the film’s approach to issues of vision
and seeing providing a focus on the first person camera within the film. This essay
is one of the more detailed discussions of the intricacies of the eye/camera within the
scope of voyeurism. While Fischer and Landy do not discuss aesthetics outright,
they do acknowledge that these themes and the eye/camera provide a complex and
conflicting set of emotional viewer codes. Although Fischer and Landy detail the
intricacies of the eye/camera, their argument too closely attaches the eye/camera to
voyeurism to advance my argument, which aims to move away from this attachment.
The assessment of the use of the eye/camera within horror as a voyeuristic
and/or sadistic device is not always considered negative. One significant example of
this is a quote from the back cover of a VHS release of The Burning (1981; dir.
Maylam). This is a UK video release of the film distributed by Vipco in 2000,
which features an excerpt from a review of the film in Time Out that says
“Gruesome... It’s the teenage girls who are the chief victims of both the murderers
(sic) savage cuts and the cameras (sic) leering gaze.” While the camera does linger
on titillating compositions of women within the film, the eye/camera used in the film
promotes more significant aesthetic results. The original review of the film from the
Time Out website reveals the reviewer’s initial argument: