Closed Circuits

Screening Narrative Surveillance

By: Garrett Stewart

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eText | 30 January 2015 | Edition Number 1

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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 Deja 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."

Industry Reviews

"An 'embedded critic, ' Stewart infiltrates and exposes our treacherous screen culture, delivering reports on films that deploy arsenals of often camouflaged media. The surveillance mission of "Closed Circuits" succeeds, first because it is wide open to the edgiest films and theory from the celluloid era, and second because it takes such pleasure in engaging complex images, sounds, and stories--the very pleasures of cinema--in our digital age. With Stewart we can relish cinema anew even in the monstrous forms of post-human movies."--Dudley Andrew, Yale University