Description
Book SynopsisCinema and Surveillance: The Asymmetric Gaze shows how key modern filmmakers challenge and disturb the relation between film and surveillance, medium and message. Assembling readings of films by Harun Farocki, Michael Haneke, and Fritz Lang, the book considers surveillance in such different domains as urban life, religious doctrine, and law enforcement.
With surveillance present in the modern world as both a technological phenomenon and a social practice, the author shows how cinema, as a visual medium, presents highly sophisticated analyses of surveillance. He suggests that surveillance is less an issue to be tackled from a secure spectatorial position than an experience to be rendered, an event to be dealt with. Far from offering a general model of spectatorship, the book explores how narrative moments of surveillance are complicated by specific spectatorial responses.
In its intersection of well-known figures and a highly topical issue, this book will have broa
