Mark Lewis: Peeping Tom, film still and installation shots; courtesy Film and Video Umbrella

Some years ago, I recall visiting an exhibition of video art that was showing in a local gallery. I've forgotten most of the films, but there was one which stands out in my memory (although I couldn't tell you the title or the artist). I had it in my head that an honest, truly subjective response to art would involve contemplating the imagery first, before going back to read the statement of intent. Even in resolutely conceptual work like this, the idea of approaching a piece with a priori determinations already in place would affect, even diminish, the subjective value of my reaction.

This particular film involved a static camera placed head-on to the artist, with a flickering strobe light positioned behind the lens. It was out of view but the staccato repetition of the flash was evident, without blackening out the image. Also evident, from fairly early on, was that this unfortunately-situated subject suffered from mild epilepsy, aggravated by the flashing strobe. Like him, I sat for a duration of some twenty minutes, on the other side of the viewfinder. It's a strange experience and a strange sight; a seemingly endless succession of twitches and discomfort, steadily illuminated by the rhythm of a bleaching overexposure. He would force his focus to remain on the lens with some difficulty, his body shifting and perspiring - a self-inflicted torture for art's sake.

As a passive viewer, one expects to regard this with detachment, an objectifying gaze. But I found myself implicated in the experiment, uneasily trying to get comfortable in my chair, squinting against the lights, sweating out the length of the videotape. With no tangible sense of my external surroundings, I was in the position of both viewer and subject.The dichotomy between the observing audience and the participating artist disintegrated and my gestures and responses took on the quality of the other (locked away in his TV monitor, years and miles away). With an audible click the light stopped and automatically the tape recording followed suit. No shots of his relief, although mine was welcome enough. I unsteadily returned to the present and gradually made my way over to the written statement accompanying the piece. I can't remember the ideas (I was still quite moved and disoriented) but I recall the bottom line: Due to the nature of this work, we advise that it only be watched for a period of 2-3 minutes.

In Mark Lewis' Peeping Tom at the Triskel, these questions of viewer/artist relationship resurface. It is a compacted, highly-edited (down to five-and-a-half minutes) détournement of Michael Powell's feature-length psychological thriller. All the hallmarks of narrative cinema are stripped away; sound, character development, plot, dialogue, the theatre setting. In a sense it could be the final documentary of Powell's filmmaker-murderer protagonist (also named Mark Lewis). Yet this film is more than a mere addendum to the original. Its re-filming of scenes (including ones that were never actually in the movie) transfers the film diary of the fictitious Mark Lewis to the vision of the real Mark Lewis. The coincidence of names is no accident. Lewis finds in the protagonist his alter-ego; the artist using the camera as a psychological exploration.

It is hard to tell where the film begins. It is only when a scene fades to black and text appears along the top of the screen (Start Chapter) that you realise that this is, in a way, the opening credits. There are alternating paces of editing; a long close-up of a young woman with a disconcerting scar drawn from her nose to the edge of her mouth, then quick cuts of an ensemble of figures, a bird's-eye view of a man on a street corner appreciatively watching two women walk past, an ambulance, a man impaling his throat on a blade attached to the camera - this we see as if it is through the deadly camera itself, a woman dancing (to what?). There is no sound, no coherent story-line, although these fragments add up to a certain loose theme. Images made to be watched, to be seen for their sheer spectacular appeal. Violent imagery and a subdued sexuality permeate every vignette. A prostitute leads us up the stairs, our gaze fixated on her ass, her legs, as the camera follows. She casually undresses and the gaze sweeps to the floor briefly before resuming its attention, with a light now shining onto the woman. The light of the camera. A sudden awareness of its presence, and of the sinister intentions of its holder shows on her face before the scene cuts to another image. The violence is only implied but it is there and it is linked to the threat of the camera. The viewer is not only put in the place of the protagonist, but is literally put behind the camera (of the murderer and the filmmaker).

It is an extension of the scopophiliac impulse, the desire to dominate the site of visibility. The spectacular film, the montage of images without meaning, feeds this impulse through constant gratification. It is shock footage without a place in the narrative. Without sound even the clues of dialogue are removed. The viewer is at once implicated into the film-space yet denied the presence of an active participant. They enter the frame only as a voyeur.

A past collaborator with Lewis, Laura Mulvey's investigation of the female character, the femme fatale, as the filmic personification of spectacular desire (pure surface and object of the voyeuristic gaze) is of some note here. Less concerned with the content of this figure, the women in Peeping Tom similarly inhabit a space of surface illusion. They have as much meaning to a narrative as the flickering of channels on a television set. It is pure image only.

"Hollywood movies gave a respectable veneer to the sexualised image of woman as signifier of the erotic and as a 'trademark' for the seductive potential of the cinema itself." ¹ The desire for mere surface, in film and sexual attraction, is pushed to abject extremity; violent sex as visual appeal. The view of the filmmaker and murderer is placed over our own gaze, making the viewer an accessory to the physical murder of the fetishised object. As the image is technically slick and surface-oriented, the content is exposed as the object-desire of the audience. This extremism, in turn, provokes a subjective response in the viewer as an awareness of participation, a revelation of identification (whether we like it or not).

A heightening of spectacle is an isolation of the visual image at the expense of the narrative. There is only looking left after the other components have been removed, and Peeping Tom gears itself to this position, framing shots from the camera perspective. Even when the filmmaker character impales himself before the camera, the shot remains. The eye of the camera is killed but our vision holds in place. It is always the camera that we see through, not the fictional director. As if to further illustrate this point, this scene occurs only midway through the film. We are left watching well after the main identity figure is struck down. This displacement of traditional narrative also serves to emphasise the surface importance of the film. We are not involved in an external story-line. It is only one scene of violence among others.

Yet Lewis' film makes a point of incorporating the viewer's awareness of the voyeuristic tendency into the work. As our gaze is the camera, the passive scopophiliac tendency is also frustrated when we become observed. While watching an ambulance tend to one of the victims (and the assorted spectators in thrall to this sight), a lone figure advances toward the camera, staring right back at the viewer. The pleasure of the voyeur is here disrupted; we are caught between being there and not-there. The place of the spectator sits precariously between the passive observer and the involved participant. This figure suddenly acknowledges the audience presence, as if we are actually being watched right back. His mouth opens to speak, but there is only silence. In a moment the role of the audience shifts back to the voyeur. There is no place for communication in the watching gaze.

To watch is to distance oneself, without reprisal or responsibility. It is the pleasure of spying while knowing that you cannot be seen. To this effect, narrative film utilises the conventions of plot and character to move beyond mere surface imagery, while also masking the voyeuristic tendencies inherent in the gaze of the spectator. The distilled Peeping Tom brings this to light, deconstructing the original version down to its base components. Instead of transferring the murderous gaze onto the typical anti-hero figure, the camera perspective overlaps that of the spectator. There results a complex dialectic of identification between audience and artist, character and director.

A documentary film by a fictional character Mark Lewis, remade by the artist of the same name; a remake of a film that was never made in the first place, a film that is premised on the murder of the subjects of another film including the suicide of the director, a director who then manages to complete post-mortem post-production; and always the fascination of the gaze, looking and being looked at in equal measure. ²