ABSTRACT
1960, 1972: two dates which have marked the annals of writing on film and which correspond to the first public showing of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. The violent critical reaction to these two films, which, the author would suggest, can be seen as a form of collective pathology, still has lessons for us today: Charles Barr's trenchant article is as relevant now as it was in 1972. With justifiable cruelty Charles Barr points out that Sight and Sound systematically reproduced stills of A Clockwork Orange wrongly printed, reversed left-to-right, a comical lack of precision that also characterised the summaries of the plot of Straw Dogs. For if ever there existed a film which insists on the reality of film-making and film-going, implacably stripped of anything remotely phoney or artificial, then it is Peeping Tom. One film whose off-putting complexity could easily be put into the supernatural category is Lynch's Lost Highway.
