The Watchers

[For Educational Purposes Only]

I have created a film collage that explores the themes of voyeurism and surveillance that are present in many Hollywood cinema narratives. Laura Mulvey claims that ‘Hollywood eroticized the pleasure of looking, inscribing a sanitized voyeurism into its style and narrative conventions’. The aim of my film is to subvert and unsettle ‘the accepted meaning’ of these common visual narratives using appropriated footage.

Research
Found footage cinema involves reimagining the context of preexisting film footage. It is an exploration of how visual (and audio) media shape meaning while challenging the frameworks they are placed in. Danks discusses the connection of found footage film to art movements such as Surrealism and Dada. The editing techniques associated with Soviet filmmakers as seen in their montage experiments have also had an influence in found footage films. According to Danks, ‘two key aesthetic characteristics of the found footage film are…rapid-fire editing that simulates the distracted viewing encouraged by the television remote control …and the radical slowing down and repetition of images which explore the visual subtexts of found scenes and snippets of footage.’ Here Danks quotes filmmaker Keith Sanborn ‘…there were too many films already, and that what was needed wasn’t new films or formal innovation…but rather a better understanding of what was already out there’. Sanborn’s work includes Mirror (1999) containing clips from The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).
In ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Mulvey notes that women on screen are often depicted as objects of desire for both the characters within the story and the spectators in the audience. In one clip I present a scene from the Flight of the Navigator (1986) where a young boy is caught by his father peeping through a telescope. Embarrassed, the boy says he is looking at some boats. The father then peers through the telescope only to see a girl of a similar age to his son. Being a family film, the scene might be considered benign, but it still serves as an example of a female being made an object of desire. This however stands in stark contrast to Norman Bates peeping through a hole in the wall at Marion undressing in her motel room in both versions of Psycho (1960 and 1995). There would be little doubt for most viewers that what Norman is doing is both creepy and an invasion of Marion’s privacy. Mulvey suggests voyeuristic pleasure can be disrupted by freeing the camera's gaze. This enables viewers to engage with films critically because it ‘destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the ' invisible guest', and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms’.