Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance [Paperback]

The recent uproar over NSA dataveillance can obscure the fact that surveillance has been part of our lives for decades. And cinema has long been aware of its powerand potential for abuse.

InClosed Circuits, Garrett Stewart analyzes a broad spectrum of films, fromMandRear WindowthroughThe ConversationtoD?j? Vu,Source Code, andThe Bourne Legacy, in which cinema has articulatedand performedthe drama of inspections unreturned look. While mainstays of the thriller, both the act and the technology of surveillance, Stewart argues, speak to something more foundational in the very work of cinema. The shared axis of montage and espionagewith editing designed to draw us in and make us forget the omnipresence of the narrative cameraextends to larger questions about the politics of an oversight regime that is increasingly remote and robotic. To such a global technopticon, one telltale response is a proliferating mode of digitally enhanced surveillancinema.

Garrett Stewartis the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters in the Department of English at the University of Iowa and the author of numerous books on fiction and film.

Preface
Returns of Theory
Introduction Narrative SpycamsA Foreshortened View

1 The Prying I of Montage
2 Telescreen Prose
3 Feedback Loops of the Technopticon
4 In Plane Sight
5 The Othering of Lives
6 Digital Reconnaissance and Wired War
7 Retrospecular Eyes
8 Parallel World Editing

Postface On Mediation as Interface
Endnotes
Index

“[A] valuable [entry] into a field that must continue to expand. . . . Extremely timely.”

A remarkable book on the cinema of surveillance. It is as comfortable with settled masterpieces like?M?and?Rear Window?as it is with last weeks blockbuster, and it knows the difference between them. Deeply informed by narrative theory, film theory, lӮ