Surveillance Cinema: Narrative between Technology and Politics

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the recent surge in film and television narratives constructed around and by surveillance technologies, this essay offers a historical and theoretical reexamination of the manner in which screen narrative has organized political, racial, affective, and even material formations around and through surveillance. The essay demonstrates that even when films are focused on insistently visual deployments of surveillance technologies, the narrative construction around those technologies suggests highly complex dynamics—dynamics that neither psychoanalytic conceptions of voyeurism nor Foucault’s discourse on Bentham’s panopticon can entirely account for. A visual orientation has made it these approaches which have, within the realm of cinema studies, overwhelming served to explain the formations and functions of a variety of disparate surveillance-themed narratives. A more phenomenological reading of the relations between technology and narrative, as well as a more dynamic intersection with political philosophy as is represented in the growing field of surveillance studies, allows us to see how what this essay calls “surveillance cinema” serves to consolidate the stakes of surveillance technologies and practices with greater attention to historical and structural specificity.