PEEPING TOM Studies in Memory of Anna Massey

Image of Anna Massey in her second film role as Helen in Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)

Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear of the death yesterday of the great British actress Anna Massey at the age of 73. For many years, she rightfully cornered the cinematic and televisual markets in kindly, kooky and/or downright spooky English ladies with lots going on beneath their surface.

One of her best roles, in FSFF's humble opinion, was her BAFTA winning performance as romantic novelist Edith Hope in the 1986 BBC adaptation of Anita Brookner's novel Hotel du Lac. But her most studied and written about cinematic appearance was her proto-'final-girl' role as Helen Stephens in Powell's Peeping Tom. So it is to the relatively sparse, but online and openly accessible studies of that film to which FSFF directly links in its little tribute to Massey's work.

• Bruce Alistair Barber, Trans/actions: Art, Film and Death, PhD Thesis, European Graduate School, August 2005
• Paul Cronly, 'Peeping Tom', Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue # 3 (November 2007)
• Michelle Devereaux, 'Death and Desire in Swinging London Film', Forum, Issue 6, 2008
• Margaret Gibson, 'Death Scenes: ethics of the face and cinematic deaths', Mortality, 6 (3): 306-320, 2001
• Barry Keith Grant 'Screams on Screens: Paradigms of Horror', Loading..., Vol 4, No 6 (2010)
• Catherine Grant, 'True likeness: Peeping Tom and Code inconnu/Code Unknown ', Filmanalytical, June 26, 2010
• Jeremy Hawthorn, 'Morality, voyeurism, and 'point of view': Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (I960', Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 2 No. 2 , 2009
• Keith Hennessy Brown, 'Palimpsest, Pasolini, Poe and Poetics, or the phantoms haunting Dario Argento’s Opera (1987)', Forum, Issue 7, 2008
• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, 51, 2009
• Martin Scorsese, '[Interviewed by Mark Kermode] On Michael Powell movies [Video 22.04]', The Guardian, November 19, 2010
• Robert Yanal, ' Two Monsters in Search of a Concept', Contemporary Aesthetics, 1, 2003

This is a FILMANALYTICAL / FILM STUDIES FOR FREE video essay by Catherine Grant. It explores some of the obvious, as well as the more obscure, similarities between two films: PEEPING TOM (Michael Powell, 1960) and CODE INCONNU / CODE UNKNOWN (Michael Haneke, 2000). It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License in June 2010.