Surveillance cinema / Catherine Zimmer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zimmer, Catherine, 1969- author.

Series:

Postmillennial pop

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Electronic surveillance in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

xi, 273 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, [2015]

Summary:

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. Examining films ranging from Enemy of the State and the Bourne series to Saw, Caché, and Homeland, Surveillance Cinema explores in detail the narrative tropes and stylistic practices that characterize contemporary films and television series about surveillance. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: Surveillance cinema in theory and practice

Video surveillance, torture porn, and zones of indistinction

Commodified surveillance: first-person cameras, the internet, and compulsive documentation

The global eye: satellite, GPS, and the "geopolitical aesthetic"

Temporality and surveillance I: terrorism narratives and the melancholic security state

Temporality and surveillance II: surveillance, remediation, and social memory in strange days

Conclusion.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781479864379

1479864374

9781479836673

1479836672

OCLC:

893452397