Released in 1960, causing a scandal as he destroyed the career of the immense filmmaker that was Michael Powell, “the voyeur” remains of incredible modernity. A masterpiece rediscovered thanks to the most cinephile of directors: Martin Scorsese.
Authentic iconoclast and esthete as refined as Intrusing, Michael Powell was undoubtedly one of the most original and eclectic creators in British cinema. Throughout a work under the sign of a passionate formal research, he knew how to express this contradictory mixture of neuroses and obsessions, impulses and imagination.
His films are read as a true manifesto of non-conformism and artistic independence. A fiercely defended independence, carried up to a point of incandescent as it will end up destroying it …
“An extraordinary cinematographic experience”: released 76 years ago, this absolute masterpiece was crowned best English film of the century in 2024
Marked by his collaboration with his scriptwriter Emeric Pressburger, started in 1939 and who will give birth to many absolute masterpieces such as the Black Narcissus, Colonel Blimp, Les Rouge Rouge or even Hoffmann tales, Michael Powell will go a horseman alone from 1957. After a disappointing exotic adventure in Spain (honeymoon) 1959 on a new project.
While he was considering devoting a film to Sigmund Freud, he finally renounced it by discovering that John Huston had a similar project with Montgomery Clift in the main role. Powell was then captivated by the history of Leo Marks, a former cryptographer of British secret services who has become a screenwriter. A story built around a camera operator prey to a scopic drive, which pushes him to murder his victims while capturing the dread and the horror of their last moments on their faces.
“There is nothing more frightening than a camera”
“From Hg Wells, Arthur Clarke and Ray Bradbury, they all try to imagine scary machines, but it's very difficult to manufacture” told Powell to Bertrand Tavernier, in an interview with the Fantastic Midi-Minuit Review, in 1968. Adding: “I think there is nothing more frightening than a camera, a camera that turns and observes you”. Considerations which also find a strange and disturbing current resonance, in a society now largely under mass monitoring of cameras planted at all streets …
Red slippers evoked the desperate research of perfection, while being a celebration – allegedly – anyway – of the artist's isolation in this same quest. The voyeur still digs this vein. But the quest led by Mark Lewis, the main protagonist, is of brutality and violence incommensurate. To say that his interpreter, Karl Heinz Böhm, is light years from the role that had revealed him in the saga of the Sissi, is still an understatement. A huge risk -taking.
Studiocanal
Classified by British censorship
“Michael did not want to make the voyeur a classic horror film. He was looking for a different way of approaching the subject. And I think he immediately felt that Mark Lewis, who was tortured by his father and exposed to twisted, sadistic and terrifying experiences, was someone deeply ravaged” said Thelma Schoonmaker, widow of Michael Powell and Fethe Monteuse by Martin Scorsese, in an interview in 2007.
She adds: “Michael wanted to explore this aspect of the character. Consequently, Karl and he rushed to him a surprising way of presenting Mark Lewis in the film. At the time, it was very shocking to want to present this character as a friendly, sweet and kind person, while being completely crazy”.
The filmmaker will pay dearly this audacity. Already, the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), the English cinema censorship office, gets involved. The scenes of nudity and the references to the domestic violence that Powell wanted to show in the film were cut at the request of the organization, which also required changes in the sequences of the murders of Dora the prostitute (Brenda Bruce), and that of Vivian, the platform lining (embodied by Moira Shearer), before attributing the film a classification X.
Studiocanal
“A stunning ferocity”
The press screening of the film, which Powell and Karl Heinz Böhm attended, was an absolute ordeal for them. “The reaction of criticisms in England was really shocking. Michael even deliberately published them in full in his autobiography. Their ferocity is stunning. And Michael has always thought that the reason they reacted so violently was that they could not bear the idea of feeling sympathy for Mark Lewis in the film. tells Thelma Schoonmaker.
Reading some of these criticisms indeed gives a good idea of the incredible violence of this dam shot. While the Monthly Film Bulletin sees the filmmaker as well as the new Marquis de Sade, the Daily Express critic, Leonard Mosley, balances this uppercut:
“For the past three months, I have been carrying out, I who are used to traveling, in the most repugnant and dirty slum in Asia. But nothing, absolutely nothing, -ni the camps of leper, desolate, in eastern Pakistan, nor the alleys of Bombay, nor the slums of Calcutta, – only provoked such a feeling of nausea and the new film, The voyeur, which I discovered this week “.
The estocade is carried by Derek Hill, critic of the newspaper La Tribune: “The only really effective way to get rid of the voyeur would be to rush it into the sewers.”
Years later, in 1986, Powell will say at the microphone of Time Out how much he was amazed by the violence of the attacks and the outcry caused by his film: “I was not injured. I only had the feeling that they were wrong and that I was right. But I did not understand why the film had triggered such violent reactions. People cannot be so naive, right?”
Studiocanal
“A risk taking could easily lead to your loss”
Currently taken by the violence of the reactions, the British distributor film withdrew the copies in circulation, and sold the rights to Astor Pictures in the United States. Alfred Hitchcock, who witnessed what had happened to the voyeur, refused to show psychosis to the press. If his film has wiped criticism, not enough to keep him from continuing to turn. And above all to have a huge success with this film.
Quite the opposite of his colleague Michael Powell. “A risk taking could easily lead to your loss. Michael understood that it was an inherent risk. If you want to be an artist at the forefront, you have to expect your career to be destroyed by your works, which has unfortunately been the case for Michael” Comments Thema Schoonmaker in his video interview in 2007.
The voyeur destroyed his career in England. He could only work in Australia. Later, he made a children's film in England, but for the most part, his career was over. At that time, he was then younger than Martin Scorsese today, do you realize? ” She adds :: “For years, he has tried to raise funds in Europe, unable to do it in Angeleterre. But he did not succeed, except for some small eccentric films that he was able to make.”
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“A unique film in the history of cinema”
It was thanks to Martin Scorsese, director of legendary cinephilia, that the voyeur was able to be rediscovered in the 1970s. He even personally invested his money to buy a copy, screened at the New York Film Festival in 1979. It was a very big success.
“The voyeur is a unique film in the history of cinema. It is of sparkling beauty, like all the great films of Michael. It is a frightening, but also thrilling experience, which approaches as closely as possible and plunges into the heart of the cinematographic impulse. Capturing the image of someone is a very strong act. We tend to forget it, in this western world flooded with images” Stepped Scorsese, when the film had just benefited from a sumptuous restoration in 2023.
And add: “Powell did what nobody had dared to do. He showed us how much films could graze madness, being able to consume you. He explored an extremely uncomfortable truth, that no one really wanted to see.”
It is now up to you to discover this absolute masterpiece, which remains, 65 years after its release, of an insolent and staggering modernity.
