Cinematic Gaze and the Body in Michael Powells Peeping Tom (1960)

• Main Authors: Chun-Hui Su, 蘇純慧
• Other Authors: Louis Lo
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/82dgxs

碩士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 應用英文系 === 106 === This thesis explores the image of the body in cinema and examines the concept of gaze in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). The protagonist Mark Louis is haunted by the obsessive behavior of watching the terrified face, which drives him to film/kill women in order to catch the image of death. He chases after his victims by filming until he makes himself filmed and killed under the gaze of his own camera. Louis’s camera coincides with the cinematic point of view of the audience. Through the interchanging of the object and the personal points of view, the audience is no longer an onlooker but part of the crime and the act of peeping. With the magic function of film screen, viewers experience the illusory reality where they believe they can dominate the spectacle through the eye. However, the spectator’s imaginary mastery comes from his body. Freud’s psychoanalytic criticism, Lacan’s conception of the gaze, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of vision are applied in this paper to explain the reversible relationship between the body and the sensible world, and Mark Louis fails to be an all-present perceiver of death due to the limitation of his body (eyes).