Michael Powell
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Connections, in both directions
Though Michael Powell's Peeping Tom does turn out to have a connection here, not once is one of modern horror's new standards ever given its due.
With references to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and even Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (the first movie "to show the killer's point of view," we're told), Scream 4 is like a perpetual film studies course, a reboot with a lesson plan.
Fun, fancy window dressing that occasionally hits the right note – name-checking the great but often unheralded Peeping Tom as the first true slasher movie will undoubtedly give film buffs a warm glow – but also slightly detracts from Scream 4’s true purpose: taut setpieces of bloody carnage.
Despite the surveillance/found footage trend of presenting deaths as supposedly being caught on amateur camera – either by accident or filmed Peeping Tom style by the voyeuristic killer – this theme only gets paid lip service.
Last Night in Soho (2021)
Directed by Edgar Wright
influenced by Peeping Tom (1960), The Red Shoes (1948)
Visuals Themes
Wright throws in references to Michael Powell’s notorious thriller Peeping Tom and to Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy among other films.
The color schemes and decors evoke Powell-Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes” (1948) and Michael Powell’s London terror “Peeping Tom” (1960): so much movie madness in the Big Smoke.
It’s billed as a Swinging Sixties-influenced psychological horror in the vein of Repulsion, Peeping Tom and Vertigo, but don’t let that fool you.
Now, he satiates his appetite for British thrillers like Peeping Tom and 70’s Italian Giallo films with his most audacious project yet.
Later on, he also imitates the lush look of Hammer Studios’ horror films as well as the seediness of that all-time great serial killer flick, Peeping Tom .
En esta reflexión sobre la lascividad de la mirada hegemónica, sobre la construcción de los personajes femeninos en el cine de horror, sobre lo que separa a víctimas de victimarios, Wright regresa a los viejos problemas planteados por Peeping Tom (1960) de Michael Powell y, sesenta años después, les da un contexto dolorosamente contemporáneo.
The Red Shoes is in here too, in fact most of the Powell and Pressburger oeuvre…
…one evoking an unholy mixture of Under the Skin and The Red Shoes…
Only by the end does he make his inspiration clear: this is his postmodern riff on Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes. Both films concern themselves with the madness and physical toll that comes with great performance, and how transcendence is its own reward.
Mother Mary’s flashes of lurid red and artistic obsession evoke The Red Shoes…
Production and costume design is tactile and textured, the sensuous, balletic chiffon-spirit itself calling to mind several cultural touchstones from Peter Strickland’s In Fabric to Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of A Lady On Fire and even Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.
This is most beautifully detailed in a sequence that recalls the dream ballet in Powell and Pressburger’s artistic portrait, The Red Shoes.
Black Swan (2010)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
influenced by The Red Shoes (1948)
Plot Visuals Themes
Inspired by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 film, The Red Shoes (which, in turn, was inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fable), Black Swan focuses on shy and serious Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a ballet dancer with extraordinary technical ability, but little passion.
The Red Shoes and its theme of losing one’s self to a part is an obvious influence, but it’s another Powell and Pressburger film, Black Narcissus, with its sex-starved nuns, that hits closer to home.
Stark cinematography only emphasizes this to the point where it feels like Black Swan must be consciously attempting to counter the lurid but astounding palette of the original tragic ballerina film, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger’s masterpiece The Red Shoes.
The mere prospect of a film that in many senses crosses Powell and Pressburger 's " The Red Shoes " with Roman Polanski 's " The Tenant " is certainly enough to raise an eyebrow, as the very notion screams potential camp classic in this day and age.
If Roman Polanski had made The Red Shoes (1948), the results might have been something like Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.
No backstage ballet story can be seen without " The Red Shoes " (1948) coming into mind.
No longer a passive spectator to her life, it becomes an active participant in it, recalling the vicious killer-camera used by the Peeping Tom in Michael Powell’s 1960 horror classic.
Invoking the classic serial-killer POV of Peeping Tom , the camera stalks Cecilia with long shots and from behind doorways, creating menace with negative space to the point where the frame itself becomes the villain.
Bloom is more akin to the sociopaths in Taxi Driver and Peeping Tom.
But while “Nightcrawler” plays first and foremost as a lurid, borderline-satirical thriller about a disturbed individual who pushes the disturbed logic of 21st-century media to its ultimate conclusion, Gilroy clearly has some larger questions in view, along with a cinematic legacy that includes “Taxi Driver,” “Network” and Michael Powell’s 1960 shocker “Peeping Tom,” a movie whose influence only continues to grow.
It gets a bit outlandish—something of an ill-advised attempt to mimic the “Ballet of the Red Shoes” sequence in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger ‘s The Red Shoes—but there is no denying that the way the sequence begins, with Sebastian gently lifting Mia into the air when he realizes gravity no longer holds them, is pure magic.
See: The Red Shoes, every version of A Star Is Born; writer/director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) definitely has.
In Whiplash, the attitude toward music is akin to that toward dance in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948).
A director who mutters stage directions like, “use the sickness that’s always been inside your,” approaching his muse while channeling Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom .
It’s a clean break, not unlike the sea change that occurred with Michael Powell when he made Peeping Tom , or Alfred Hitchcock, with Frenzy .
He was an uncredited writer on Hitchcock's "Blackmail" (1929), and the two remained friends through their lives.
The slasher film as we know it traces back to 1960, when Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” first shook unsuspecting moviegoers.
Although older films like Peeping Tom and Psycho laid the groundwork for the slasher, its golden age was between 1978 and 1984, which saw the release of classics like Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
The single most punishing moment of Strange Days owes a specific debt to Michael Powell�s definitive treatment of voyeuristic pleasure, Peeping Tom (1960), and I could see couples huddling closer together and others slouching lower in their seats as a true high-tech perversion played itself out onscreen.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
Directed by Rian Johnson
influenced by The Edge of the World (1937)
Visuals
This is the Michael Powell section of the film, evoking both the weird dreaminess of the great English filmmaker’s Black Narcissus and the rugged half-natural half-mystical landscape of his Hebrides love letter The Edge of the World.
Death on the Nile (2022)
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
influenced by The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Characters
It’s like the opener in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) that explained Harrison Ford’s chin scar—or perhaps more accurately, the titular character in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), who hid a facial scar behind his walrus mustache.
Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by A Canterbury Tale (1944), The Red Shoes (1948)
The duo's " The Red Shoes ," " I Know Where I'm Going! ," " A Canterbury Tale " and so many more were examples of what Powell called "the composed film," a movie in which each element was worked out to meticulously mesh with the other, a movie in which all of the art forms that inform movies -- painting, music, theater, sculpture, the whole lot -- are brought to bear with equal emphasis, a movie in which the contours of the real and the fantastic rub freely against each other to produce ... well, hopefully a kind of aesthetic alchemy.
The duo's " The Red Shoes ," " I Know Where I'm Going! ," " A Canterbury Tale " and so many more were examples of what Powell called "the composed film," a movie in which each element was worked out to meticulously mesh with the other, a movie in which all of the art forms that inform movies -- painting, music, theater, sculpture, the whole lot -- are brought to bear with equal emphasis, a movie in which the contours of the real and the fantastic rub freely against each other to produce ... well, hopefully a kind of aesthetic alchemy.
As happened to Michael Powell, whose brilliant filmmaking career came to an abrupt end decades later with “Peeping Tom,” “Freaks” is a unique horror film that was ahead of its time.
Director Tod Browning, who just the previous year had a smash hit with the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula, basically short circuited his own career (as Michael Powell would do with 1960’s Peeping Tom) by tackling a controversial movie that turned everyone off with its subject matter.
A fiercely feminist vision of Powell and Pressburger (“The Red Shoes”) collaborating with Russ Meyer (“Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”)?
The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
Directed by Joel Schumacher
influenced by The Red Shoes (1948)
Visuals
There are moments when the movie seems desperate to approach the lyric surrealism of Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell's ''The Red Shoes" and Jean Cocteau's ''Beauty and the Beast," the foulness of Dario Argento's own Faustian ''Phantom" adaptation, or, at least, the insanity of Brian De Palma's ''The Phantom of the Paradise."
Suspiria (1977)
Directed by Dario Argento
influenced by The Red Shoes (1948), Peeping Tom (1960)
Themes
Influenced as much by The Red Shoes (1948) as by Rosemary’s Baby (1968), it tells the story of Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper), a young American ballet student who comes to a German dance academy directed by the kindly-seeming Mme Blanc (Joan Bennett) – where mysterious disappearances and murders are the order of the day (and more particularly the night).
Essentially, most noir novels or films from any country are considered giallo ( Peeping Tom , UK, Vertigo , US, Mannequin in Red , Sweden).