VANISHING POINTS THE SCREEN THAT SEES ALL: THE VISUAL MOTIF OF THE CONTROL ROOM IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION (original) (raw)
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THE SCREEN THAT SEES ALL: THE VISUAL MOTIF OF THE CONTROL ROOM IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
L'Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos , 2020
The visual motif of the security control room is an invention associated with filmmaking technol-ogy itself. Through an exploration of the different configurations of the motif in contemporary film and television fiction, this article explores the centrality of this motif in any attempt to define the contemporary image. From the master control panel to the development of the horizontal surveillance that characterises post-Foucauldian societies, the control room constitutes one of the key elements in war films, critiques of power, and bank robbery or casino heist movies. The mo-tif has also been reinvented by filmmakers like David Lynch and continues to be a fundamental vector bearing the nature of all images not necessarily viewed by the human eye, referred to by Harun Farocki as operational images or “phantom shots”.
‘Control Space?: Cinematic Representations of Surveillance Space between Discipline and Control’
Recent developments in surveillance practices and their related technologies suggest that the heretofore dominant Foucauldian paradigm of discipline, with its sites of confinement in which space is "segmented, immobile [and] frozen", may no longer be an adequate theoretical framework in which to discuss space within surveillance studies (Foucault 1995: 195). In his essay Postscript on Control Societies, Gilles Deleuze claims that these sites are in the midst of widespread breakdown, leading to a fundamental shift in the notion of space, characterised by the term 'modulation' (Deleuze 1990: 178-179). In the control model, urban surveillance can be said to be characterised by an emphasis on the use of digital surveillance practices, leading to a view of urban space and the city, as well as its inhabitants, which largely resides within a computer mainframe. This raises a question: if the surveillance carried out within this conception of urban space can be described as concentrated, hidden, passive, functional, mobile, and varied, how can these changes be communicated cinematically since there is an obvious problem of representation; when much of the surveillance technology is computer and digital in form, how does cinema make visible the potentially invisible? In considering the question of how film engages with urban space between the paradigms of discipline and control, two cinematic views of the (informational) city will be discussed by considering three scenes from Erasing Minority Report (2002) in order to identify some of the cinematic strategies used in communicating contemporary surveillance practices increasingly characterised as invisible and immaterial.
The Control Room: A Media Archaeology
This paper identifies the relation between aesthetics and politics in the age of digital technoculture, especially as it is manifest in the 'terrorism genre' in film and television of the last 25 years. From Homeland and 24 to the Bourne trilogy, Skyfall and Patriot Games, techno-thrillers about counterterrorism and its enemies display the permanent political crisis of the state as a crisis of techno-aesthetic form. The control room in counterterrorism mode, a place from which drones and other remote operations are conducted, is the key manifestation of this crisis. The striking preponderance of screens embedded within screens in these narratives is a techno-aesthetic manifestation of the spatial and logical paradoxes of emergency legislation and, more broadly, of the strange location of political subjectivity in the matrix of technoculture.
Surveillance and perception in world cinema : three case studies
2008
This thesis examines the increasing centrality of surveillance devices, themes and concepts from varying social, theoretical and philosophical points of view by analysing and comparing three films. These films examine the already realised possibility of a surveillance society, whose control and reach is exercised through the manipulation of visual culture. By mobilising concepts expounded by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and David Rodowick, I unfold a critique of contemporary visual culture, its dominant modes of representation and the construction of self that they serve.
Video Surveillance In Hollywood Movies
Surveillance & Society, 2002
This paper examines the representations of CCTV in contemporary popular culture, namely Hollywood film from the perspective of culture and film studies. It starts from the observation that a growing number of Hollywood films are not only using (fake) CCTV images within their narrative, but are actually developing ‘rhetorics of surveillance’. Following the argument of Thomas Y. Levin, contemporary Hollywood film is increasingly fascinated with (the images of) video surveillance. This fascination can be explained with the use of ‘real time’ and a shift from spatial to temporal indexicality in these movies. The paper then takes a closer look at three recent films: Tony Scott's Enemy of the State, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report and David Fincher's Panic Room. The role and uses of CCTV imagery in these films are analyzed; the role of the heroine under surveillance is examined; modes of (im-)possible resistance against CCTV are discussed.
Exploring Modes of Surveillance in Films
Journal Article, 2022
This article frames a theoretical discussion of cinematic gestures in their opposing forms, illusionism and reflexivity, exploring different modes connecting surveillance and film. One observes cinema as an illusionistic surveilling machine that records reality. In this respect, surveillance can be an "element of movie plots." Then, given the simultaneously entrapped and swaying nature of cinematic gestures, the investigation of film reflexivity associated with surveillance reveals a dual character. The dominant one (auto-mediacy), although guided by a subversive thrust, ultimately reinforces the dynamics of the internal panopticon, the regulation, and the marketization of the self. Conversely, another form of emancipative self-reflexivity (autoscopia) operates a set of enunciations exalting the filmmaking process' materiality. The film Grizzly Man is an example of autoscopia generating a form of technology-mediated subversive self-examination.
Ambivalent Screens: Quentin Tarantino and the Power of Vision
Film-Philosophy, 2015
With a central problematic concerning the role of fiction in relation to reality and a provocative falsification of the historical events of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) contributes importantly to analyses of the relation between perceptions of the image and conceptions of the real. Tarantino's film, as we will see, is highly invested in the role of vision both in the metacinematic sense of its blatant self-referentiality and as a thematic for the narrative and the mise-en-scene itself. From the very opening scene, in which the daughter of a French dairy farmer hears an approaching Nazi vehicle and lifts the corner of the bed sheet she is hanging up to dry and thereby invites both herself and the audience to see the Nazi intrusion into her reality, to the final scene in which two of the protagonists look straight into the camera, Tarantino's film may be understood as an invitation to look at seeing itself. Just as Tarantino, as always, paints a cinematic universe highly invested in its own role as such, where the importance of appearances, roles, acting, and clichés are put on center stage, his view of the Second World War too is staged as a battle of appearances. A film about war, it also portrays this war as a war of seeing. It is through images, the film seems to suggest, that agency can be located. Including the screen as a central factor in its cinematic and metacinematic configurations of events, the film presents the screen as a surface for projection, but also for concealment and division. As such, the screen also becomes the key to seeing, to surviving, and to remembering. Testing a more common reading of Tarantino's work in terms of Baudrillardian hyperreality against Virilian and Deleuzian conceptions of the relation between image and reality, this essay suggests that Inglourious Basterds helps testing the usefulness of these different theoretical perspectives for analyzing how agency is configured in contemporary visual culture.
For the US, the period following the events of 9/11 has been one of deep suspicion and terror of its own history. However, as this chapter proposes, Hollywood has offered a way to rescue and construct another narrative—one that is more palatable—offering ‘a way out’ of contemplating actual events too difficult to face. These re-narrations take the form of revisiting events such as 9/11, thus re-enacting the “farcical spectacle of the impotency of American power.” Specific attention is given to how these re-narrations take the form of the construction of the Arab Other through a discussion of television and video installation forms. The example of Showtime’s Homeland television series reveals the prevalence of dominant narratives and media constructions of paranoia. Consideration is then given to video and installation artworks that suggest counter narratives to dominant narratives of paranoia: the art of montage in the drama-documentary forms of Adam Curtis; the discursive approach of Harun Farocki; and the adoption of un-fittedness as an act of dissensus in my own art practice. These models are explained through the image and motion theories of Sergei Eisenstein, who brought to the screen the technical, aesthetic, and ideological potentials of montage, after which other more recent models of montage are examined.
This thesis engages with surveillance as a pervasive theme presented in several modes of modern visual culture and is approached with particular reference to Guy Debord's theory of the spectacle. Through an historically contextualized analysis, I locate the centrality of surveillance in Western culture as a visual regime that institutionalizes spectacle. This is revealed in a number of prominent events between 1920 and 2008 that illustrate ethical shifts in the historical subject in which the presence or the absence of the witness becomes a meaningful consideration. Surveillance is thus linked inextricably to two main discourses regarding the spectacle and the witness, a theme that is expanded upon through the analysis of specific films and other representations of modern visual culture, including painting and television. The spectacle within our ocularcentric society has, as I see it, not enhanced the world so much as it has separated us from it, and has thus consistently obscured instances of moral reflection by the individual in the form of witness. I link this concept to the thinking of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and others.