‘Surveillance cinema’ has become as ubiquitous as the technology which is used to track our every move. Films such as Michael Haneke’s Hidden (2005), Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning The Lives of Others (2007) exert a seductive appeal for the viewer. They play on what is routinely labelled ‘the post 9/11 climate of paranoia,’ make us ponder the significance of personal privacy, and sanction that most popular of contemporary vices: voyeurism.
But how should we read the vogue for films about people watching other people? As exploitation? Warning? Prophecy? Are we being presented with accurate portrayals of our panoptical world of CCTV cameras, GPS tracking systems, shop registration plate recognition cameras, satellites and email interception? Or is something else going on?
‘By its very nature film lends itself to stories about voyeurism,’ says Nick James, editor of Sight and Sound magazine. Indeed, Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), three of the most lauded films of the twentieth century, all deal explicitly with this theme. As does Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), the story of a man who photographs the last moments of the lives of the women he murders. Powell’s film was once considered so depraved that it all but destroyed the great director’s career, but has since been seen as a masterpiece.
Film critic Chris Darke traces ‘surveillance cinema’ back to German director Fritz Lang’s Mabuse cycle of films which began in the 1920s. ‘Lang demonstrated that cinema is an art implicated by its machine nature,’ he says. For Darke then, what we are seeing is cinema in conversation with itself. ‘Cinema has not only been transformed by technological shifts and competition from other media,’ he says, ‘but has also dramatised and represented the stakes of the transformation.’
Surveillance has long been a staple of Hollywood thriller and spy movies of course. These have, unsurprisingly, tended to focus more on the sensational aspects of the technology involved. A glut of such movies in the last decade, Enemy of the State (1998), Panic Room (2002), Minority Report (2002), Syriana (2005) and Déjà vu (2006), have all, in different ways, been in thrall to the excitement and possibilities of machines.
Away from Hollywood, other films have focused more on the human consequences of surveillance. Haneke generates intense disquiet in Hidden by refusing to reveal who is watching a self-satisfied Parisian family disturbed by the receipt of anonymous video footage of their home. Nick James believes Hidden is indicative of a more practical problem for contemporary filmmakers: ‘there is a need to tell a story,’ he says, ‘but how do you tell that story when you are not permitted a villain? We don’t know who the villains are anymore and that’s what’s behind what’s going on. You need an ‘other,’ you need a villain, but who is the ‘other’? There is anxiety about the unseen and the hidden: hence the title of that film.’
Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006) approaches the subject with far less icy detachment than Haneke. Jackie, a CCTV operator in Glasgow, spots a man she knows on one of the monitors at work. She begins to stalk him Arnold reveals significant details very slowly. The man’s name is Clyde. He was once a drug addict. For much of the film we have no idea why Jackie is so interested in Clyde which makes her obsession with him all the more sinister. When it is finally revealed that she is seeking revenge for what Clyde did to her we realise that she is as much in confrontation with herself as anyone else.
Novelist and filmmaker Chris Petit believes that ‘it would have been strange if surveillance had not become a potent contemporary theme given that cinema is essentially an exploitative and responsive medium.’ Much of his work has been a variation on voyeuristic themes, from his 1993 BBC short Surveillance to his 2002 collaboration with Iain Sinclair on London Orbital. Petit says he is interested in ‘the notion of diaries being kept by machines of hitherto unrecorded landscapes.’ His 2006 adaptation of Gregory Dart’s Unrequited Love, a subtle tale of stalking, complicity and modern sexuality, uses CCTV footage and blurs the boundaries between who is the stalked and who is the stalker. Petit eschews conventional notions of plot, narrative or character and his approach to stalking, a subject he finds ‘cinematic because it is about projection,’ is far more opaque than Andrea Arnold’s.
Despite the upbeat ending, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) is an extremely insidious film. It deals with the idea of being watched in a way which unsettles any sense of security you might have had in who you are and what you think you know. Described by many as a satire on reality television upon its release, it can also be seen as an existential tale of illusion, delusion and the dissolution of identity. It feels increasingly relevant. When Truman Burbank comes to the limits of his world he discovers that his life has not only been a lie but an entertainment for millions of viewers. With a flash of painful anger, he tells Christof, the creator and producer of the show, ‘you never had a camera in my head.’
Watching the film now we might be tempted to respond, it’s only a matter of time.