Monday, September 12, 2011

Response to Dorsky

Reading the Dorsky article I was constantly reminded of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960). It's a silly Hitchcockian murder drama that tells the story of Mark, who kills women by stabbing them with a little blade the end of his tripod. He films the murders as they happen in order to document his victims' fear, giving the audience a voyeuristic view of his psychopathic tendencies. The clip below is near the end, when his blind neighbor approaches Mark in the darkness as he begins to review a strip of film.The neighbor is protected by her disability. She cannot see the film, so she cannot be afraid of it.
Dorsky says, "We sit in darkness and watch an illuminated world, the world of the screen. This situation is a metaphor for the nature of our own vision. In the very process of seeing, our own skull is like a dark theater, and the world we see in front of us is in a sense a screen."

Start at 2:42

On a slightly unrelated note, this film trashed Michael Powell's career because critics and audiences thought the content was atrocious. It's a pretty goofy movie that later got a decent cult following, but Powell had a hard time working in Hollywood again.

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