Cult Classics from the Rialto Collection
Friday, October 28 | 5:30 pm
A potent excavation of cinema’s dark unconscious, Peeping Tom chronicles the double life of an aspiring filmmaker. Shy studio focus-puller Mark Lewis moonlights as a soft-core photographer. Consumed by repressed desires and tormented by the psychological torture he endured at the hands of his sadistic father, an expert on the neurological effects of extreme fear, Mark transforms his camera into a killing machine. Literalizing the psychoanalytic connection between voyeurism and sexual violence, Peeping Tom makes the spectator uncomfortably complicit in the literal and symbolic acts of exploitation and objectification that unfold onscreen. Banned or censored in several countries and reviled by contemporary critics for its clear-eyed, analytical treatment of disturbing subject-matter, Peeping Tom all but derailed the career of respected director Michael Powell (The Red Shoes) before being rediscovered by new generations of critics, scholars, and filmmakers—particularly, Martin Scorsese—and enshrined as an essential masterwork in the cinematic cannon.
Director Michael Powell 1960 UK 101 minutes NR DCP
