Surveillant filmmaking, the carceral and the transnational: image and viewers in Celda 211

Abstract

This article engages several topics explored by this special issue. First, it examines an internationally marketed Spanish co-production, Celda 211 (Monzón, Spain/France, 2009), whose genre identity and relationship to other Spanish genres and marketing strategies have invited extensive critical conversation. Second, this article studies the role of nation-state vis-à-vis transnational cinema and audience networks by analyzing the multiplication of spectatorship (citizenship) positions. By examining new modes of intervening in the brutal viewer/viewed, subject/object interpellation of the carceral, it argues that Celda 211 dismantles our ideas about the traditional architecture of control. The film’s visual and aural narratives create a parallel drama in which new media interventions disrupt the traditional panoptic model of controller and controlled. Finally, this article dialogs with current post-panoptic theory that scrutinizes the transition from analog to digital and probes the implications of digital culture for the future of embodiment. Understanding the film’s popularity in the context of the status of the image and mediated vision deepens our understanding of the relationship between cinema and the framework of the transnational.