Surveillance Cinema

by Catherine Zimmer

Overview

In Paris, a static video camera keeps watch on a bourgeois home. In Portland, a webcam documents the torture and murder of kidnap victims. And in clandestine intelligence offices around the world, satellite technologies relentlessly pursue the targets of global conspiracies. Such plots represent only a fraction of the surveillance narratives that have become commonplace in recent cinema.

Catherine Zimmer examines how technology and ideology have come together in cinematic form to play a functional role in the politics of surveillance. Drawing on the growing field of surveillance studies and the politics of contemporary monitoring practices, she demonstrates that screen narrative has served to organize political, racial, affective, and even material formations around and through surveillance. She considers how popular culture forms are intertwined with the current political landscape in which the imagery of anxiety, suspicion, war, and torture has become part of daily life. From Enemy of the State and The Bourne Series to Saw, Caché and Zero Dark Thirty, Surveillance Cinema explores in detail the narrative tropes and stylistic practices that characterize contemporary films and television series about surveillance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479858484
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	04/03/2015
Series:	Postmillennial Pop , #2
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	409,726
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Catherine Zimmer is an Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies and English at Pace University in New York City.

Table of Contents

vii Contents Acknowledgments ix Author’s Note xi Introduction: Surveillance Cinema in Theory and Practice 1 1. Video Surveillance, Torture Porn, and Zones of Indistinction 31 2. Commodified Surveillance: First-Person Cameras, the Internet, and Compulsive Documentation 73 3. The Global Eye: Satellite, GPS, and the “Geopolitical Aesthetic” 115 4. Temporality and Surveillance I: Terrorism Narratives and the Melancholic Security State 157 5. Temporality and Surveillance II: Surveillance, Remediation, and Social Memory in Strange Days 181 Conclusion 209 Notes 221 Bibliography 251 Index 261 About the Author 273 9781479864379 zimmer text.indd 7 1/20/15 3:32 PM

Editorial Reviews

"Catherine Zimmer offers a generative analysis of surveillance as aesthetic and structuring logic....an exciting project that will surely open doors in critical examinations of surveillance, popular culture, and power."

Film Criticism

"Surveillance Cinemais a thorough, innovative project useful to scholars researching surveillance."

Creative Commons

"InSurveillance Cinema, Catherine Zimmer sets out to claim that our popular imagination of surveillanceconstructed by decades of espionage thrillers, police procedurals, and torture horror flicksserves to create and sustain the actual methods of surveillance that have come to encompass almost all cultural and social life."

Rain Taxi

"Zimmers absorbing study zeroes in on the work of & surveillance cinemaher term for films in this modein the near present. Indeed, rather than focusing on the construction of an elaborate genealogy, Surveillance Cinematurns specifically to the & millennial surge in films and television series organized around and by surveillance technologies."

Film Quarterly

"Surveillance Cinemapresents cutting-edge scholarship in the field of cinema studies in its reconceptualization of the centrality of surveillance to film narratives, subject formations, and temporalities. Smartly pushing beyond the critical models that have long been associated with surveillance in and outside of cinema, Zimmer makes a persuasive case for examining surveillance within historical and political contexts. An excellent book, both far-reaching and convincing in its claims,Surveillance Cinemais sure to become one of the central works in the emerging field of surveillance studies.-"

Aviva Briefel

"[A] genuinely groundbreaking study. Timely, ideologically engaged and passionate in its critique both of contemporary geopolitics and the cinematic works that depict its sites of contestation, this is a book of significant interest to scholars in the fields of film studies and surveillance studiesand to those of us who are, quite justifiably, haunted by the sense that someone, somewhere is watching."

Times Higher Education - Linnie Blake

"Catherine ZimmersSurveillance Cinemaexplores the increasing presence of surveillance narratives in tandem with the socio-political ideologies underpinning the proliferation and normalization of monitoring technologies."

Surveillance & Society

"Catherine Zimmer offers a generative analysis of surveillance as aesthetic and structuring logic....an exciting project that will surely open doors in critical examinations of surveillance, popular culture, and power."- Film Criticism

"[A] genuinely groundbreaking study. Timely, ideologically engaged and passionate in its critique both of contemporary geopolitics and the cinematic works that depict its sites of contestation, this is a book of significant interest to scholars in the fields of film studies and surveillance studies…and to those of us who are, quite justifiably, haunted by the sense that someone, somewhere is watching."-Linnie Blake, Times Higher Education

“Catherine Zimmer’s Surveillance Cinema explores the increasing presence of surveillance narratives in tandem with the socio-political ideologies underpinning the proliferation and normalization of monitoring technologies.”- Surveillance & Society

“In Surveillance Cinema , Catherine Zimmer sets out to claim that our popular imagination of surveillance—constructed by decades of espionage thrillers, police procedurals, and torture horror flicks—serves to create and sustain the actual methods of surveillance that have come to encompass almost all cultural and social life.”- Rain Taxi

“Zimmer’s absorbing study zeroes in on the work of ‘surveillance cinema’—her term for films in this mode—in the near present. Indeed, rather than focusing on the construction of an elaborate genealogy, Surveillance Cinema turns specifically to the ‘millennial surge in films and television series organized around and by surveillance technologies.’”- Film Quarterly

From the Publisher

★ 08/01/2015
Exploring the intertwining of surveillance culture with the many expectations built into the act of surveillance, Zimmer describes these expectations as deriving from various aspects of culture—cinema in particular.

Library Journal