I’ll be watching you: a non-linear reading of Roland Gräf’s Die Flucht

Abstract

ABSTRACT As surveillance (its role in policing and regulating behaviours in societies understood to be “free� and its relationship to privacy and intimacy) becomes an increasingly pressing and relevant contemporary concern, and as more and more contemporary films interrogate technologies of surveillance and reflect on film’s place within such contexts, it is perhaps a good time to pull into the contemporary moment representations of surveillance from the East German State that devoted significant resources to developing and implementing technologies of surveillance and enjoyed a robust cinematic tradition. Thus, this essay explores how Roland Gräf’s Die Flucht (1977) exposes surveillance as a series of gendered and engendering practices that are inscribed and invented, re-inscribed and reinvented, in multiple contexts and shows how reading non-linearly (a strategy promoted by Vicki Callahan in Reclaiming the Archives) reveals the remarkably similar deep-structures of this DEFA film and contemporary commercial films about surveillance.