It may be literary blasphemy to hi-jack and invert (pervert?) the sentiment of Fitzgerald’s “privileged glimspses,” but when mulling over the theme for this next issue of Maker, those words and that first chapter of Gatsby are what immediately come to mind. I love, too, the line that tells of poor Nick Carraway’s unfortunate susceptibility to ”the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.”
It’s not entirely fitting to invoke this chapter, I know. Nick never asked for nor wanted so much nakedness. And Voyeurism according to the DSM-IV would not count the thrill of observing an emotional disrobing. What I’m after is a much broader, and perhaps deeper, interpretation.
A voyeur, unlike Nick Carraway, is never privy to the intimacy she sees. The moments are stolen, not yeilded unbidden. What I hope to gather, from all friends and strangers alike, are stories and poetries of exquisitely uncomfortable moments of witness.
To inspire you–a few images–
Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock's 'Rear Window'
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Perhaps a poem about Ms. Lonelyhearts? She was one of my favourite parts about that movie. It was such a heartbreakingly intimate moment–when Jimmy Stewart sees her through his window having dinner alone and toasting her glass to a ghost.
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- Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’. Another movie with a photographer, but…. um… very different.
Movie info from Amazon.com:
Michael Powell lays bare the cinema’s dark voyeuristic underside in this disturbing 1960 psychodrama thriller. Handsome young Carl Boehm is Mark Lewis, a shy, socially clumsy young man shaped by the psychic scars of an emotionally abusive parent, in this case a psychologist father (Michael Powell in a perverse cameo) who subjected his son to nightmarish experiments in fear and recorded every interaction with a movie camera. Now Mark continues his father’s work, sadistically killing young women with a phallic-like blade attached to his movie camera and filming their final, terrified moments for his definitive documentary on fear. Set in contemporary London, which Powell evokes in a lush, colorful seediness, this film presents Mark as much victim as villain and implicates the audience in his scopophilic activities as we become the spectators to his snuff film screenings. Comparisons to Hitchcock’s Psycho, released the same year, are inevitable. Powell’s film was reviled upon release, and it practically destroyed his career, ironic in light of the acclaim and success that greeted Psycho, but Powell’s picture hit a little too close to home with its urban setting, full color photography, documentary techniques, and especially its uneasy connections between sex, violence, and the cinema. We can thank Martin Scorsese for sponsoring its 1979 rerelease, which presented the complete, uncut version to appreciative American audiences for the first time. This powerfully perverse film was years ahead of its time and remains one of the most disturbing and psychologically complex horror films ever made. –Sean Axmaker
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Marcel Duchamp’s Ètant Donnes:
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