To-be-looked-at-ness / Phallocentrism

This essay film explores the camera as an extension of the human gaze, tracing the shifting relationship between the act of looking, the spectator, and the figure behind the lens. Moving through and between Blow-Up and Peeping Tom, the film observes how photographing, filming, and enlarging images become gestures of desire, control, and uncertainty. By revisiting these modernist works, the essay reflects on the psychological dimensions of image-making and the fragile boundary between observer and observed, opening a path toward a meditation on cinema’s power to question its own gaze.

Cast

Karlheinz Böhm

David Hemmings