For a man with his culinary tastes, you’d expect the most terrifying feature of Dr Hannibal Lecter to be his teeth. But on the poster for Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, they are discreetly sheathed behind Anthony Hopkins’s benign smile. What arrests you instead is his eye - just the one - deep crimson, gleaming out at you with malevolent scrutiny. Part of Dr Lecter’s power, as we know, is his perspicacity as a psychologist - his ability to see into his victims’ souls and suck out their spiritual marrow.
But what the poster shows is not simply the gaze of the vampire - that ghoulish red is suggestive less of blood than of the chianti that the doctor is notoriously partial to. This is the eye of the killer as epicure.
Cinema’s history is full of eyes looking out at us from the screen, when we might expect to be the only ones looking. The returned gaze is hardly a novelty of cinema: in painting, there is a long history of ambivalent stares freezing viewers in their tracks. But what distinguishes the eye in cinema from the eye in painting is that a mechanical eye, the camera itself, is added to the equation, standing between viewer and object. And whenever a film reminds us of the eye, it invariably reminds us of the camera itself - reminds us, too, that while our own stare may sometimes be equivalent to the camera’s, it is always dependent on it.
The viewer’s eye can easily be displaced, dominated, or even supplanted by the machine that is supposedly its obedient surrogate. The 1929 Soviet documentary essay Man With a Movie Camera features the image of a human eye superimposed on the centre of a camera lens, as if biology had been absorbed into the machine. Its director Dziga Vertov coined the term “cine-eye” (kino-glaz) to convey this sense of the camera as a new organ allowing film-maker and viewer a vital unimpeded access to the world: as if film-making could become an instinctive physical activity.
In subjective shots, the camera literally stands for the eye, for what a specific character sees. We are most used to experiencing the subjective camera in brief snatches, often seeing through the eyes of characters we might normally prefer not to identify with, such as the killer in Halloween.
But in Robert Montgomery’s 1947 Chandler adaptation The Lady in the Lake, we see the entire film from detective Philip Marlow’s point of view. This equivalence was stretched to a parodic degree in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, in which we see not only through the eye of a patient in surgery, but through the thin flesh of his eyelids too.
As ever-lighter film and video cameras let us take the immediacy of film-making increasingly for granted, films have tried to problematise the naive equivalence of camera and eye. Science-fiction writer William Gibson has imagined a future in which film stars have lenses transplanted into their eyes so that they become both actors and film-makers, recording their own experiences.
Here they becomes a mere vehicle for the camera, and the camera becomes an apparatus of surveillance and control, the electronic eye replacing the human eye altogether: in Pedro Almodovar’s Kika, a reality-show presenter (Victoria Abril) literally becomes a “roving eye”, her camera implanted into her rubber headgear. She is the hi-tech granddaughter of Fritz Lang’s monster of surveillance in The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960), where the eyes were TV screens monitoring hotel rooms.
A more humanistic view sees the eye as a transcendental organ - the gateway to inner or outer space, even a portal to infinity. Saul Bass’s opening credits to Hitchcock’s Vertigo convey the film’s psychological complexity, as strange abstract whirls - mathematical forms known as Lissajous figures - spiral out of Kim Novak’s eye.
A more metaphysical version of this trope is the bravado opening sequence of Robert Zemeckis’s science-fiction film Contact. We zoom slowly out through space, as the earth recedes into the distance, through comet storms, constellations and vast gaseous nebulae, and finally out through the eye of a young girl (who grows up to be the Jodie Foster character). By the end of the film, we realise that the outer space explored by the cosmonaut heroine is really the inner space of her own transcendentally inclined imagination.
If the eye can be an object of scrutiny in itself, it’s a short conceptual jump to the sense of the eye becoming disembodied, disturbingly autonomous from the human form that usually houses it. In Georges Franju’s 1959 film Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage), a plastic surgeon removes his victims’ faces. The film, in other words, is not so much about eyes as about what happens when eyes and faces no longer form a single unity.
The surgeon’s disfigured daughter (Edith Scob) hides behind a featureless, but oddly beautiful alabaster mask, through which her recognisably human eyes gaze out enigmatically and poignantly. But the eyes of the title are also those of her father (Pierre Brasseur), gleaming malevolently through his own surgeon’s mask - eyes and face separated, dehumanising the human form.
We are routinely arrested by eyes that seem to leap out of the face they sit in, either because of their intensity, or because they are artificially enhanced: the bloodshot glare of Christopher Lee’s Dracula, say, or the bizarre contact lenses (dollars, snake-like slits) worn by Charles Dance’s villain in Last Action Hero. Even more alarming is the face without eyes - the unnerving transparency within Kevin Bacon’s latex eyeholes in Paul Verhoeven’s invisibility fantasy Hollow Man, or the eyeless metallic smoothness of the rampaging penile-headed predator in Alien.
In all these cases, the eye has an element of abstraction - it appears, or fails to appear, as a window to the soul, offering access to inner feelings and intentions. But a disturbing, recurrent theme of cinema is the reminder that an eye is also a fleshy object, an organ that can be attacked, damaged and in extreme cases, detached from the body altogether. Perhaps cinema’s most enduring image of nightmare violence is the opening of Bunuel and Dali’s 1929 Un Chien Andalou: a man casually takes a cut-throat razor, holds open a woman’s eye and slices it, so that it appears to exude a milky fluid.
Perversely, we as viewers feel that we are the ones truly violated: the surrealistic reversal here is that the victim, in a bizarre state of acquiescent coolness, never flinches - but we do. As critic Linda Ruth Williams has put it, violence against the eye is “a spectacular last straw of horror”, the eye being “grotesquely penetrable, soft, liable to cry, bleed, respond with discharge, exquisitely sensitive to light and touch.” No wonder eyes continue to be victimised: pecked out (The Birds), gouged by demons (The Saragossa Manuscript), sucked out of the skull (Total Recall), sliced (Lucio Fulci’s notorious slasher movie The New York Ripper), surrounded with fringes of pins (Dario Argento’s Opera, as well as the forthcoming Japanese chiller Audition).
Few such acts have felt as painfully real as the clamping-open of anti-hero Alex’s eyes in A Clockwork Orange, to force him to watch atrocities projected on a screen. The intensity of the sequence comes not only from the fact that we are in a similar position ourselves as we watch Kubrick’s film, but that actor Malcolm McDowell endured considerable pain during the making of the film.
The more the eye is treated as an object, the more it tends to become a ghoulish comic prop - like the gelatinous, artificially grown eyes waggled temptingly by a market trader in Blade Runner. One of the most grisly subjective shots in the horror genre puts us in the position of a flying eyeball as it hurtles directly into an onlooker’s mouth in Evil Dead II.
Glass eyes are a favourite for black comic effect: most scabrously in Bed Scenes, a short by French director François Ozon. A young soldier asks a prostitute to sample her speciality: a blow job during which she sings the Marseillaise. It is only when the sequence ends that her eye resting on the bedside table tips us off as to how she did it.
British-based animators The Brothers Quay and their Czech mentor Jan Švankmajer have among them made a fetish of the artificial eye, human- or doll-size. In their films, the eye becomes a thing possessed of its own free-ranging will, and liable to appear where it wants to - in a doll’s head, or generating new life forms in juxtaposition with a piece of liver. In Švankmajer’s latest film Otesanek, a chunk of wood comes alive and grows a murderous set of human teeth - disturbing enough, but not nearly as much as the single glaring eyeball that appears where the mouth should be.
There is a less aggressive variant of this: the same sort of eyes pressed into smiling Plasticine heads, a trademark of the Aardman animation studio. In Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit films, the puppet eyeball is benign rather than sinister - yet it’s a thin line. A current ad for Peperami sausage on the London tube shows a puppet eye peering out of the darkness from a strip of spicy meat.
The ad is a clever parody of the Anthony Hopkins image: the caption reads, “ANIMAL”. It is usually right next to the Hannibal poster, but I know which I find more disturbing. One eye is human and tinged only with chianti; the other may be glass, but it suggests blood, bone and offal. And unlike Dr Lecter at even his most implacable, the Peperami eye never blinks.
