Who “Screens” Security?

Abstract

Films represent our awareness of surveillance and often trigger a deep emotional response from audiences, and for whole genres of film—particularly the political thriller and science fiction/speculative dystopia, along with horror films and some forms of the mystery or crime film—have been built around an individual or group of individuals who are being kept under some form of surveillance, either by the authorities of the state and by other individuals or groups who may have criminal and/or even psychotic motives. For filmmakers and their intended audiences, the surveillance narrative doubles back onto to very art form itself, composed as it is of the camera's surveillance of the action, along with the viewers' attentive watching of the film. While such audience attention had also been fundamental to drama for thousands of years, it has only been more recently that audiences began observing the fourth wall conventions of silence and darkness that make their watching of a performance a kind of surveillance.