Garrett Stewart, Closed Circuits

A spate of academic monographs in recent years has highlighted the encounters and implications between cinema, television and surveillance.1 What these studies share is the conviction that ‘surveillance’ (a term that each study defines in its own way) is more than a narrative device or motif, whose noticeable recurrency on contemporary screens alone would merit closer inspection. While it is arguably true that the display of surveillance technologies – from the ubiquituous closed-circuit television installations in public streets to the less visible operations of wiretapping or dataveillance in electronic networks – has become a familiar trope in genres as various as the comic-book movie (Captain America: The Winter Soldier [Anthony and Joe Russo, 2014]), the biopic (Snowden [Oliver Stone, 2016]) or romantic comedy (This Means War [Joseph McGinty Nichol, 2012]), researchers consistently point to a deeper and structural relation, an affinity (to borrow Siegfried Kracauer’s term) between cinema and surveillance

Art · Art history · Comedy · Comics · Conviction · Framing (construction · Literature · Media studies · Movie theater · Narrative · Political science · Romance · Sociology · Trope (literature · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Narrative Theory and Analysis