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.