ABSTRACT
The activity of watching moving image material can involve as many uncomfortable and ambivalent feelings as that of being filmed or photographed. The word ‘voyeuristic’ is often used to summarise these feeling of discomfort. However, the reality of the process of watching footage, particularly non-fiction footage, is altogether more difficult to describe than the term ‘voyeurism’ will allow. As it is commonly used, voyeurism implies watching without the explicit consent of the watched other, as in the activity of a peeping tom. 1 In fact, there is an implied permission in the circulation of images and recordings in public and within films and television programmes. These recordings have been used, so someone, somewhere, has decided that they can be looked at. They are organised into texts, and the eventual viewers are addressed by them, and by the attempts at communication contained within them. The decision to bring these recordings to viewers may not have been made by the people shown within the recordings, but there is some kind of permission to watch implicit in their availability. So why is the term voyeurism used in connection with certain kinds of documentary activity? It is often the expression of wider anxieties caused by the footage itself, rather than the act of watching. It is the result of feelings stirred up by the difficult nature of what is being shown, and how it offends our feelings of appropriateness.
