Surveillance Cinema
Surveillance Cinema

Author: Catherine Zimmer

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-04-03

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1479836672

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In Paris, a static video camera keeps watch on a bourgeois home. In Portland, a webcam documents the torture and murder of kidnap victims. And in clandestine intelligence offices around the world, satellite technologies relentlessly pursue the targets of global conspiracies. Such plots represent only a fraction of the surveillance narratives that have become commonplace in recent cinema. Catherine Zimmer examines how technology and ideology have come together in cinematic form to play a functional role in the politics of surveillance. Drawing on the growing field of surveillance studies and the politics of contemporary monitoring practices, she demonstrates that screen narrative has served to organize political, racial, affective, and even material formations around and through surveillance. She considers how popular culture forms are intertwined with the current political landscape in which the imagery of anxiety, suspicion, war, and torture has become part of daily life. From Enemy of the State and The Bourne Series to Saw, Caché and Zero Dark Thirty, Surveillance Cinema explores in detail the narrative tropes and stylistic practices that characterize contemporary films and television series about surveillance.

Surveillance on Screen
Surveillance on Screen

Author: Sebastien Lefait

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0810885905

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The theme of surveillance has become an increasingly common element in movies and television shows, perhaps as a response to the sense that the world is now virtually under watch. But the recent surge of this filmic device calls for an explanation that transcends the basic assumption that media illustrates the changes of society. The persistent and growing presence of surveillance in cinematic productions is not merely a reflection of the advent of surveillance societies, but rather an aesthetic adaptation to the evolution of watching patterns. In Surveillance on Screen: Monitoring Contemporary Films and Television Programs, S bastien Lefait examines this ever-increasing phenomenon. Drawing on the rapidly developing field of surveillance studies, Lefait offers an in-depth analysis of television shows and films, which complement current theoretical approaches to those subjects. This unique combination of surveillance theories with the latest concepts of film, television, and Internet studies is based on a large and diversified range of popular series and films, including the shows 24, Lost, and Survivor as well as such films as Minority Report, Paranormal Activity, The Truman Show, and the on-screen version of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Written from a perspective that does not limit itself to a "reflection-of-society" approach, this book explores both how cinema shapes our experience of surveillance and how surveillance influences our viewing of cinema. Lefait follows the various identifiable stages in cinema's experimental use of surveillance, studying the impact of technology on both the watcher and the watched. In addition to film and media studies, this book will be of interest to those engaged in information technology, sociology, and, of course, surveillance studies.

Arresting Cinema
Arresting Cinema

Author: Karen Fang

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2017-01-11

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1503600750

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When Ridley Scott envisioned Blade Runner's set as "Hong Kong on a bad day," he nodded to the city's overcrowding as well as its widespread use of surveillance. But while Scott brought Hong Kong and surveillance into the global film repertoire, the city's own cinema has remained outside of the global surveillance discussion. In Arresting Cinema, Karen Fang delivers a unifying account of Hong Kong cinema that draws upon its renowned crime films and other unique genres to demonstrate Hong Kong's view of surveillance. She argues that Hong Kong's films display a tolerance of—and even opportunism towards—the soft cage of constant observation, unlike the fearful view prevalent in the West. However, many surveillance cinema studies focus solely on European and Hollywood films, discounting other artistic traditions and industrial circumstances. Hong Kong's films show a more crowded, increasingly economically stratified, and postnational world that nevertheless offers an aura of hopeful futurity. Only by exploring Hong Kong surveillance film can we begin to shape a truly global understanding of Hitchcock's "rear window ethics."

Surveillance and Film
Surveillance and Film

Author: J. Macgregor Wise

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-09-08

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1628924837

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Winner of the Surveillance Studies Network Book Award: 2017 Surveillance is a common feature of everyday life. But how are we to make sense of or understand what surveillance is, how we should feel about it, and what, if anything, can we do? Surveillance and Film is an engaging and accessible book that maps out important themes in how popular culture imagines surveillance by examining key feature films that prominently address the subject. Drawing on dozens of examples from around the world, J. Macgregor Wise analyzes films that focus on those who watch (like Rear Window, Peeping Tom, Disturbia, Gigante, and The Lives of Others), films that focus on those who are watched (like The Conversation, Caché, and Ed TV), films that feature surveillance societies (like 1984, THX 1138, V for Vendetta, The Handmaid's Tale, The Truman Show, and Minority Report), surveillance procedural films (from The Naked City, to Hong Kong's Eye in the Sky, The Infernal Affairs Trilogy, and the Overheard Trilogy of films), and films that interrogate the aesthetics of the surveillance image itself (like Sliver, Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries), Der Riese, and Look). Wise uses these films to describe key models of understanding surveillance (like Big Brother, Panopticism, or the Control Society) as well as to raise issues of voyeurism, trust, ethics, technology, visibility, identity, privacy, and control that are essential elements of today's culture of surveillance. The text features questions for further discussion as well as lists of additional films that engage these topics.

Surveillance and Film
Surveillance and Film

Author: J. Macgregor Wise

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-09-08

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1628924829

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Winner of the Surveillance Studies Network Book Award: 2017 Surveillance is a common feature of everyday life. But how are we to make sense of or understand what surveillance is, how we should feel about it, and what, if anything, can we do? Surveillance and Film is an engaging and accessible book that maps out important themes in how popular culture imagines surveillance by examining key feature films that prominently address the subject. Drawing on dozens of examples from around the world, J. Macgregor Wise analyzes films that focus on those who watch (like Rear Window, Peeping Tom, Disturbia, Gigante, and The Lives of Others), films that focus on those who are watched (like The Conversation, Caché, and Ed TV), films that feature surveillance societies (like 1984, THX 1138, V for Vendetta, The Handmaid's Tale, The Truman Show, and Minority Report), surveillance procedural films (from The Naked City, to Hong Kong's Eye in the Sky, The Infernal Affairs Trilogy, and the Overheard Trilogy of films), and films that interrogate the aesthetics of the surveillance image itself (like Sliver, Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries), Der Riese, and Look). Wise uses these films to describe key models of understanding surveillance (like Big Brother, Panopticism, or the Control Society) as well as to raise issues of voyeurism, trust, ethics, technology, visibility, identity, privacy, and control that are essential elements of today's culture of surveillance. The text features questions for further discussion as well as lists of additional films that engage these topics.

Surveillance in Asian Cinema
Surveillance in Asian Cinema

Author: Karen Fang

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-02-24

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1317298810

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Critical theory and popular wisdom are rife with images of surveillance as an intrusive, repressive practice often suggestively attributed to eastern powers and opposed to western liberalism. Hollywood-dominated global media has long promulgated a geopoliticized east-west axis of freedom vs. control. This book focuses on Asian and Asia-based films and cinematic traditions obscured by lopsided western hegemonic discourse and—more specifically—probes these films’ treatments of a phenomenon that western film often portrays with neo-orientalist hysteria. Exploring recent and historical movies made in post-social and anti-Communist societies such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and South Korea, the book picks up on the political and economic concerns implicitly underlying Sinophobic and anti-Communist Asian images in Hollywood films while also considering how these societies and states depict the issues of centralization, militarization and technological innovation so often figured as distinctive of the difference between eastern despotism and western liberalism.

Closed Circuits
Closed Circuits

Author: Garrett Stewart

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-01-30

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 022620135X

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The recent uproar over NSA dataveillance can obscure the fact that surveillance has been part of our lives for decades. And cinema has long been aware of its power—and potential for abuse. In Closed Circuits, Garrett Stewart analyzes a broad spectrum of films, from M and Rear Window through The Conversation to Déjà Vu, Source Code, and The Bourne Legacy, in which cinema has articulated—and performed—the drama of inspection’s unreturned look. While mainstays of the thriller, both the act and the technology of surveillance, Stewart argues, speak to something more foundational in the very work of cinema. The shared axis of montage and espionage—with editing designed to draw us in and make us forget the omnipresence of the narrative camera—extends to larger questions about the politics of an oversight regime that is increasingly remote and robotic. To such a global technopticon, one telltale response is a proliferating mode of digitally enhanced “surveillancinema.”

Spaces of Surveillance
Spaces of Surveillance

Author: Susan Flynn

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-08-22

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 3319490850

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In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, watching and being watched are the salient features of the lives depicted in many of our cultural productions. This collection examines surveillance as it is portrayed in art, literature, film and popular culture, and makes the connection between our sense of ‘self’ and what is ‘seen’. In our post-panoptical world which purports to proffer freedom of movement, technology notes our movements and habits at every turn. Surveillance seeps out from businesses and power structures to blur the lines of security and confidentiality. This unsettling loss of privacy plays out in contemporary narratives, where the ‘selves’ we create are troubled by surveillance. This collection will appeal to scholars of media and cultural studies, contemporary literature, film and art and American studies.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Author: Shoshana Zuboff

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 683

ISBN-13: 1610395700

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The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Media, Surveillance and Affect
Media, Surveillance and Affect

Author: Nicole Falkenhayner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0429880774

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Surveillance has become a part of everyday life: we are surrounded by surveillance technologies in news media, when we go down the street, in the movies, and even carry them in our own pockets in the form of smartphones. How are we constructing imaginaries of our realities and of ourselves as living in structures of control? What affects, emotions and feelings do we develop in societies of control, and how do we narrate them? Media, Surveillance and Affect represents a big step in revealing the depth of the entanglement of surveillance technology not only with our everyday lives, but with our imaginaries and affective experiences. Combining insights from affect studies with narratological and visual cultural studies approaches, the case studies in this book focus on how surveillance cameras and surveillance camera images have been used to narrate affective stories of Great Britain. Cases discussed include the memory work surrounding the murder of James Bulger in 1993 and of Lee Rigby in 2011, but also novels and artworks. With a multidisciplinary approach Media, Surveillance and Affect will appeal to students, scholars and specialists interested in fields such as media and cultural studies, literary studies, cultural sociology and surveillance studies.