concept

The camera as voyeur

The argument that narrative cinema's default camera position is a watcher who wasn't invited.

camerawork
film-language
theory

A sub-concept of Camerawork, and the theory-side version of its central claim. Camerawork asks where the camera stands; this note asks what kind of watcher that position makes of the audience. The strong form, from Mulvey, is that mainstream cinema runs on pleasure in looking, that the looking is gendered male, and that the camera's habitual place is that of a watcher nobody on screen admitted. The weak form is a convention: actors do not look at the lens, so the audience is always overhearing. Most films earn only the weak one. Psycho (1960) stages the strong one on purpose.

Structure or convention

Hayward treats voyeurism as a fact about the apparatus. Viewers "are positioned as voyeurs" the moment they sit down, the camera "is also, technically speaking, a 'voyeur'", and the position is where the pleasure comes from. Mulvey, quoted in Media & Society, adds the gender: looking is "split between active/male and passive/female", and editing and camera position stitch the viewer into the male character's point of view. On this account the camera cannot help being a voyeur.

Giannetti describes the same fact and declines the theory. Actors "almost never look into the camera", so "we are merely allowed to be voyeurs while they studiously ignore our existence". For him this is a staging convention, and Hitchcock's use of it a casting trick: Stewart in Rear Window is "literally a voyeur" and forgiven because he is Jimmy Stewart. Film Art barely uses the word; its reading of the Psycho opening is formal, a motif of inward movement, with no watcher implied.

The difference is whether the voyeur is in the seat or on the screen. The classroom test is simple. If a film keeps making its audience notice that they are looking, the strong theory describes something the film built. If not, it adds little.

On the bench

Psycho — the opening states the thesis before a word of dialogue: a skyline, a window chosen from among many, and the camera slipping under the blind. Psycho — the parlour scene then hands the position to a character. Norman's peephole makes the audience's look into his, and the shower that follows is shot from positions nobody innocent could occupy.

Taxi Driver (1976) runs the same argument through a windscreen and a rear-view mirror. Bickle sees through glass records that Travis is a viewer before he is an actor, and that the film shows only the passengers who feed his watching. The camera shares his aperture and leaves it twice, in Taxi Driver — the phone call and Taxi Driver — the shoot-out, both times to look at the space around him rather than through him.

What to look for

Does anyone in the film watch someone who does not know it, and does the camera share that look?
Who is displayed for looking and who does the looking, and does the film ever swap them?
Does the film make you notice that you are watching, and at what moment?

In the books

We pay to go to the movies, but once we are sat before the screen we are positioned as voyeurs, as spectating subject watching the goings-on of the people on-screen who are 'unaware' that we are watching them.

— Hayward, ckc 412

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure, which is styled accordingly.

— Mulvey, quoted in Media & Society, mas 247

Of course, during the movie itself, actors almost never look into the camera. We are merely allowed to be voyeurs while they studiously ignore our existence.

— Giannetti, um 79

Go on, then

source Mulvey — Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) The essay that named the male gaze. Sixteen pages that reorganised film theory.
scene After Hours — back at work A plaster statue falls out of a burglars' van at dawn, cracks open, and the man inside walks through the gates of his office and sits down at his terminal. Rescue or sentence? The film was shot without an ending, and it shows the seams on purpose.
scene After Hours — the diner A man alone with a Henry Miller paperback, a woman at the next table who knows the book, and a camera that pounces. Ten minutes that set up the whole night, and borrowed more than anyone admitted at the time.
scene After Hours — the keys A cab ride in fast motion that eats Paul's only $20, then a set of keys dropped from a loft window with the camera riding them down at his face. The point-of-view shot as a joke, a threat and a stunt that nearly went wrong.
film After Hours (1985) A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.
idea Bresson's hands, Travis's guns The gun-handling sequences copy the pickpocketing in Bresson's Pickpocket. The debt is Schrader's; Scorsese admits he finds Bresson hard to watch.