Surveillance Film Studies

Call Northside 777 (Henry Hathaway, 1948). Take a look at
Hannah Gregory's great visual essay on this film

Today, the compulsively unsecretive, positively Panoptic, Film Studies For Free focuses on 'surveillance film studies'. Do cast a beady eye, therefore, at the unsuspiciously Open Access scholarly resources linked to further down the page.

The post has been inspired by the thrilling chronometric proximity of an interdisciplinary conference, taking place next week, on the “Cultures of Surveillance” at University College London (September 29-October 1), with keynote lectures by the very brilliant professors Tom Gunning and Simon Cole.

The full programme can be found here. Anyone interested in these topics should also check out some related and highly innovative work online by the amazing film and humanities scholars at UCL at the following four websites:

• Autopsies Research Group including the Autopsies of Surveillance Project
• The Cinetourist (aka Roland-François Lack)
• The Blow Up Moment (also by Roland-François Lack)
• The Daily Map (also by Roland-François Lack)
  

• Objects Under Surveillance Museum Roundtable, University College London, January 19, 2011 Videos [m4v] of the event can be viewed by clicking on the images below.

Intro. & Simon Baker / Sue Woods & Katy McGahan  /  Neil Paterson  /  Discussion                  

• Wesley Aelbrecht, '2 Into 1 (Gillian Wearing, 1997)', Autopsies of Surveillance, 2011
• Anders Albrechtslund, 'Surveillance and Ethics in Film: Rear Window and The Conversation', JCJPC 15(2), 2008
• Anders Albrechtslund and Lynsey Dubbeld, 'The Plays and Arts of Surveillance: Studying Surveillance as Entertainment', Surveillance and Society, 3(2/3), 2005: 216-221
• Chris Darke, Letter from London [on surveillance culture]', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 8, April 2003
• Deirdre Devers and Stephanie Wilson, 'Let Me Entertain You: Designing for Surveillance and Online Gaming', DIGRA Proceedings, 2009
• Stephanie Fuller, '"Your papers?": Objects of Surveillance at the US-Mexico Border', Autopsies of Surveillance, 2011
• Hannah Gregory, 'Surveillance on Film: Call Northside 777', Autopsies of Surveillance, 2011
• Nic Groombridge, 'Crime Control or Crime Culture TV?', Surveillance and Society, 1(1), 2002: 30-46
• Nic Groombridge, 'Crime Control or Crime Culture TV?', Surveillance and Society, 1(1), 2002 
• David Harper, 'The Politics of Paranoia: Paranoid Positioning and Conspiratorial Narratives in the Surveillance Society', Surveillance and Society, 5(1), 2008: 1-32 
• Nicholas Holm, 'Conspiracy Theorizing Surveillance: Considering Modalities of Paranoia and Conspiracy in Surveillance Studies', Surveillance and Society 7(1): 36-48, 2009 
• Andrew Hultkrans, 'Surveillance in the cinema: here's looking at you, kid', Stim, 7.1, 2006
• Dietmar Kammerer, 'Video Surveillance in Hollywood Movies', Surveillance and Society - CCTV Special (eds. Norris, McCahill and Wood) 2(2/3), 2004: 464-473
• Thomas Y. Levin, 'Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “Real Time”', In CTRL[SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Fronhe and Peter Weibel, 578-93. Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002
• Peter Marks, 'Surveillance Screens and Screening in Code 46', SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture, vol 5 number 1 May 2008
• Peter Marks, 'Imagining Surveillance: Utopian Visions and Surveillance Studies', Surveillance and Society, 3(2/3), 2005: 222-239
• G.T. Marx, 'Seeing hazily (but not darkly) through the lens: some recent empirical studies of surveillance technologies', Law and Social Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, Spring 2005
• Serafino Murri, 'Visual Irony as Virus in Panoptic Structures: Logic of Fact and Anti-Truth in Chris Petit’s “Surveillance”', ctrl[space, October 2, 2001
• Simon Rothon, '‘Through the Grapevine’? Listening Devices and Acts of Surveillance', Autopsies of Surveillance, 2011
• Simon Rothon, 'Objects of Surveillance: The Parabolic Microphone', Autopsies of Surveillance, 2011
• Jessica M. Silbey, 'Videotaped Confessions and the Genre of Documentary', Suffolk University Law School Faculty Publications, Paper 35, 2006
• The Politics of CCTV in Europe and Beyond', Special Issue: Surveillance and Society, Vol. 2 (2.3), 2004
• Giovanni Tiso, 'The spectacle of surveillance: Images of the Panopticon in science-fiction cinema', Research Paper, 2000
• Evangelos Tziallas, 'Surveillance, space and performance: informing interstitial subjectivities in Head On', Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010
• Evangelos Tziallas, 'Torture porn and surveillance culture', Jump Cut, No. 51, Summer 2010
• Kristin Veel, 'Surveillance Narratives – from lack to overload', Humanity in Cybernetic Environments, Edited by Daniel Riha. Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010
• Catherine Zimmer, 'Surveillance Cinema: Narrative between Technology and Politics', Surveillance and Society, 8(4), 2011: 427-440

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Once more with paranoia: conspiracy film studies

Ewan McGregor in The Ghost Writer [aka The Ghost] (Roman Polanski, 2010)

Not only has Film Studies For Free's author been catching up with a slew of contemporary 'conspiracy films' (The Ghost [Writer]; State of Play; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, among others); she has also been transfixed, like many of her (otherwise politically divided) country-people, by the real-life conspiratorial, and other, dramas of a national, post-electoral, political process.

Tired of biting her nails and shouting at the telly, she took to comfort blogging. Here, then, is an FSFF entry appropriately prepared, given its subject, under duress and on tenterhooks: a list of links to openly accessible and predominantly scholarly studies of the conspiracy film.

• Brenda Austin-Smith, 'The Conversation', Senses of Cinema, Issue 13, 2001
• Emilia Bakola, The Paranoiacs Who Knew Too Much: Postmodern Knowledge and Hollywood Cinema, PhD Thesis, Stony Brook University, 2007
• Emily Bakola, 'How to Do Conspiracy Theory with Fetishism: The Myth of the “Slain King”', Gramma, 2008
• Karyn Ball, 'Hitchcock's "Material Whirl"', Culture Machine Reviews, 2006
• Matthew David Barber, 'Shooting the President: The Depiction of the American Presidency on Film and Television from John F. Kennedy to Josiah Bartlet', PhD Thesis, University of Exeter, 2009
• Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, 'Hollywood and the Spectacle of Terrorism', New Political Science, Volume 28, Number 3, September 2006
• Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, 'Postmodern Cinema and Hollywood Culture in an Age of Corporate Colonization', Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2001
• David Bordwell, 'Watching a movie, page by page [on The Ghost Writer and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo]', Observations of Film Art, May 10, 2010
• Pat Brereton , 'Hollywood Representations of Irish Journalism: A Case Study of Veronica Guerin', Dublin Institute of Technology School of Media Articles, 2009
• James Amos Burton, Film, History and Cultural Memory: Cinematic Representations of Vietnam-Era America during the Culture Wars, 1987-1995, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2007
• Stephanie Chieh-Ying Chong, The Anthropomorphization of Law: Fictional Judges and Lawyers in Contemporary North American and European Settings, PhD Thesis, University of Toronto, 2009 
• William Clark , 'The Academy Awards [review of The New American Cinema, by John Lewis, ed.]', Variant, 2.10, 2000
• Graham Coulter-Smith and Maurice Owen, 'Introduction', Art in the Age of Terrorism (Paul Holberton publishing/University of Washington Press, 2005)
• David Crawford, 'Realism vs. Reality TV in the War on Terror: Artworks as Models of Interpretation', Geometer, January 19, 2009
• Brenda Cromb, 'War Films Without War: The Gulf War at the Movies', Cinephile, vol. 3, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2007
• Adam Curtis, Panel Discussion on'Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age' in association with Routledge and King's College London, and sponsored by the Body and Soul section of The Times, An Institute of Ideas symposium at King’s College London, 22 November 2003
• Christian Devine, Visionary Paranoia'', Bad Subjects, Issue #34, October 1997
• Scott Forsyth , 'Hollywood's War on the World: the New World Order as Movie', Socialist Register, 1992
• Vincent M. Gaine, ‘"We’re on Flashdrive or CD-ROM": Disassembly and Deletion in the Digital Noir of Collateral',Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, Vol 2, No 1 (2009)
• David Greven, 'Misfortune and Men's Eyes: Voyeurism, Sorrow, and the Homosocial in Three Early Brian De Palma Films', Genders, Issue 49, 2009
• Oscar Guardiola Rivera, 'Terrorism and the Global Public Sphere', International Law: Revista columbiana de derecho internacional, December 2004
• Steffen Hantke, 'Germany's secret history: Stefan Ruzowitzky's Anatomie (Anatomy, 2000)', Kinoeye, Vol. 1, Issue 1, 2001
• John Harkness, 'The Word, the Flesh, and the Films of David Cronenberg', Cinema Canada, June 1983
• Nicholas Holm, 'Conspiracy Theorizing Surveillance: Considering Modalities of Paranoia and Conspiracy in Surveillance Studies', Surveillance & Society 7(1): 36-48, 2009
• Adrian Ivakhiv, 'Green Film Criticism and Its Futures', Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 15.2 (Summer 2008)  
• Tom Jennings, 'The Ill-Health of the State', Variant, 36, Winter 2009
• Tom Jennings, 'Parcels of Rogues', Variant 35, Summer 2009
• Tom Jennings , 'Craven New World', Variant, 32, Summer 2008
• Tom Jennings, 'Rose Coloured Spectacles', Variant, 27, Winter 2006 
• Laura Jones , 'A Geopolitical Mapping of the Post-9/11 World: Exploring Conspiratorial Knowledge Through Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Manchurian Candidate', Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, Vol. III, 37–57, June 2008
• Orit Kamir, 'Michael Clayton, Hollywood’s Contemporary Hero-Lawyer: Beyond Outsider Within and Insider Without', Suffolk University Law Review, Vol. XLII: 829, 2009
• Dietmar Kammerer, 'Video Surveillance in Hollywood Movies', Surveillance and Society - CCTV Special (eds. Norris, McCahill and Wood) 2(2/3): 464-473
• Kathryn Muriel Kang, "Ch. 7: Picture This [scroll to p. 161]", in Agnostic democracy : the decentred "I" of the 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 (for full thesis click here)
• Kathryn Muriel Kang, 'Patch and reboot in Memento', in Agnostic democracy : the decentred "I" of the 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 (for full thesis click here) 
• Fredric Jameson, 'Totality as Conspiracy', The Geopolitical Aesthetic (London : British Film Institute, 1992)
• Peter Knight, 'Conspiracy Theories about 9/11', Centre for International Politics Working Paper Series, No. 34, August 2007
• Robert Koehler, 'Neo-Fantasies and Ancient Myths: Adam Curtis on The Power of Nightmares', Cinema Scope Issue 23, 2005
• Li Zeng, 'Horror returns to Chinese cinema: an aesthetic of restraint and the space of horror ', from Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009
• Thomas Y. Levin, 'Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “Real Time”', In CTRL[SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Fronhe and Peter Weibel, 578-93. Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002
• Virginia Luzón Aguado , Film Genre and its Vicissitures: the Case of the Psychothriller', Atlantis, Vol. XXIV Núm. 2 (Junio 2002): 163-72
• Adrian Martin. 'Driven', Mesh, 18, 2005
• Kyle Ross McDaniel, Reviewing the Image of the Photojournalist in Film [...] from1954 to 2006, MA Thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007
• John S. Nelson, 'Political Rhetorics for Film: Argument through Experience in War Movies', Poroi, Vol. 4, Issue 2, 2005
• John S. Nelson, 'Four Forms of Terrorism: Horror, Dystopia, Thriller, and Noir', Poroi, Vol. 2, Issue 1, 2003  
• Catherine O’Rawe, 'More more Moro: Music and montage in Romanzo criminale', The Italianist 29 · 2009 · 214-226 
• Tarla R. Petersen, '“National security, and all that it implies…”: Communication and (post-) Cold War culture', Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 86, No. 4, 2000
• Katie Ryan, 'The Circling, Shades and Shadows of Polanski's Chinatown', Cross-sections, The Bruce Hall Academic Journal - Volume II, 2006 
  
• Ian S. Scott, ‘"Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water": Politics, Perceptions and the Pursuit of History in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, European journal of American studies, 2, 2007
• Aaron Smuts, 'Sympathetic spectators: Roman Polanski's Le Locataire (The Tenant, 1976)',  Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 3, 2002
• Matthew Stoddard, 'Contested Utopias: Ghost in the Shell, Cognitive Mapping, and the Desire for Communism', ImageTexT, Volume 5, Issue 2 (2010)
• Benjamin Strong, 'All the President's Men: Follow the Paper Trai', the L Magazine, May 10, 2010
• Sharon Lin Tay, (2008), long excerpt from ʻUndisclosed Recipients: documentary in an era of digital convergenceʼ, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1, pp. 79–98
• Henry M. Taylor, 'The Capgras Syndrome in Film: Don Siegel's “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and its Legacy', Vol. 2, May-August 2005
• Bo Kampmann Walther, 'The art of staying tuned in real-time: remediation in 24', Revista de Comunicação e Cultura, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2003
• John Walton, 'Film as Urban history: the Case of Chinatown', in Shiel and Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) 
• Jerry White, 'Hidden Agenda. JFK: Conspiracy thrillers', from Jump Cut, no. 38, June 1993, pp. 14-18
• Mary M. Wiles, 'Mapping the Contours of Cyborg Space in the Conspiracy Film: The Feminine Ecology of Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita', Post-Identity, Fall 1997

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