TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Before playing the role of this eyewitness, the actress Nieves Navarro had herself been spied upon through an astronomical telescope in Luciano Ercoli’s Death Walks on High Heels (La morte cammina con i tacchi alti, 1971) by a voyeur who in the end witnesses her murder in a manner repeated in Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984). The choice of a more compact telescope, a Cassegrain, which makes it possible for the film’s protagonist to observe his neighbour’s erotic dancing every evening, provides De Palma with the opportunity to frame together, frontally, the lens and the observer aiming it from the top of the device – and not from one of its ends, as is the case with an astronomical telescope, or from one of its sides, as with a classical telescope – thereby showing his facial expressions (curiosity, shame, arousal) and making it possible to identify with him. Contrarily, the killer in John Carpenter’s Someone’s Watching Me! (1978), whose identity must remain secret for dramatic reasons, absurdly stays behind his telescope rather than keeping his eye glued to the lateral eyepiece. Shown in a short focal length by a dolly-back movement of the camera, his monocular optical instrument finds itself compared to a gun barrel… or to an erect member, against which the telescope purchased by the heroine will not stand up.