Touch Me With Your Eyes

Scopophilia, the affliction that drives Carl Boehm’s freaky focus puller to perform atrocious acts in Michael Powell’s 1960 Peeping Tom, is defined in that film as “the morbid urge to gaze”—a prerequisite, one might say, for cinephilia itself. In Touch Me with Your Eyes, we look at movies in which the act of looking is itself charged with a suggestion of trespass, in which casual curiosity tilts into insalubrious and sometimes slavering surveillance. With visits to the backlot-built Greenwich Village courtyard of Rear Window, the snoop-friendly closet of Dorothy Beaumont in Blue Velvet, as well as quite a few other illicit vantage points and hidey-holes, a series for everyone who likes to watch.