The Conversation (1974)

The infamous Jack Tarr hotel, where the key confrontation occurred in this great film, is slated for demolition (if it's not gone already). It was renamed the Cathedral Hill hotel a number of years ago. Apparently not too many people are sad to see it go (a dead end of modernist architecture, someone wrote, actually they said, "the bad direction modernism went"). It's going to be replaced by a new hospital complex.

Surveillance (2008)

To be disappointed in Jennifer Lynch's film, "Surveillance," which I just saw on DVD, would mean that I actually had high expectations in the first place. Since I had none (given some of the critical responses I've read), I was not disappointed. For a film that tries its hardest to be disturbing and shocking and brutal, it ended up being fairly affectless I thought. It's a mess, and not in a good way. It's got great actors, but the performances are all twitches and eccentricities (and not in a good way). The plot is predictable, the images gruesome in a fairly banal way (which is precisely the way death and pain and gore and brutality should NOT be represented, IMHO) or so studied that one finds oneself looking at it saying, "oh, I see, that's supposed to be creepy the way he leans in to the camera that way." Comparisons with her father's work are perhaps not fair, but the film keeps referring to her father's work and trying to mine the same territory. Even if I had not known she was David Lynch's daughter I would have found myself saying, "Wow. David Lynch did that so much better, and on broadcast TV to boot!"

What I *am* disappointed about concerned the film is that it's really not about surveillance. Yes, there is a conceit that witnesses in three separate rooms recount their stories while being filmed by Bill Pullman (who supposedly is closely attending to all three people talking at once), but nothing is really made of it. It's not really even a device. The only bit that is really about surveillance is the realization that the little girl is the real surveillor, who watches and understands much more than everyone else.

Peeping Tom

Just finished watching Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). I’ve noticed that the film is often mentioned as an early and influential film regarding voyeurism and surveillance. However, I haven’t seen it discussed much in the surveillance literature beyond the fact that it’s about a disturbed individual who stalks women with a specially prepared camera with a knife in the tripod leg so he can film them as they die. The film is obviously quite Freudian (in fact, the writer and director had initially wanted to do a film about Freudian thought, but someone else was doing it so they did this instead). Mark, the filmmaker who is the murderer, was abused by his father, a psychiatrist who was studying fear and using his son as a case study by terrorizing him and coldly watching his reactions. But not only is he watching his son’s reactions, he is filming them. Indeed, Mark is subject as a young boy to constant surveillance. He says he was filmed constantly, even while he slept, and his entire house was wired for sound. In this way the film plays an interesting articulations between obsessive voyeurism (of the father) and the scientific gaze. These traits are passed down to Mark: his father gives him a camera of his own, another psychiatrist tells the grown up Mark that he has his father’s eyes, and Mark now controls his father’s house and his father’s instruments. What makes this really creepy is that Mark’s father is played in the old films that Mark shows by the director, Michael Powell, and the young Mark is played by Powell’s real son, and in the scene where child Mark is shown by the corpse of his mother—that’s his real mother (Powell’s wife) on the bed (presumably alive).

The commentary track on the Criterion DVD is by none other than Laura Mulvey. If you want a master class in psychoanalytic film criticism, watch the film with this commentary. There’s also a documentary on the writer, Leo Marks, which connects the film with the bookstore at 24 Charing Cross Road and WWII cryptography.

The film was incredibly controversial, universally panned by critics, who were shocked by its content. Carl Boehm, who plays Mark, comments in the accompanying documentary that after the press screening no one would even look he or Powell in the eye as they left the theater. The film was pulled from theaters after a week and promptly forgotten; Powell’s career ended. Apparently we know of the film today because Martin Scorsese discovered it and championed it in the 1970s as a masterpiece. Since the film is really about being a filmmaker (voyeurism and sadism and the camera), it’s an interesting self-reflexive exercise that unnerves the audience (and perhaps the early critics). It implicates us, the audience, in the voyeurism more directly than even a slasher film since it is self aware (this film keeps reminding us that we’re watching a film, since it makes us watch films in the film). The content of the film was also shocking for the time: the first shot of the film is of a prostitute being stalked by the killer; and from the underground pornography sold at the newsagents to the first shot of nudity in a mainstream British film its content pushes boundaries. The fact that we may feel sorry for this tortured man is also controversial.

Alfred Hitchcock (with whom Powell worked at one point) refused to do a critic’s screening for Psycho (which premiered a few months after Peeping Tom) because of what they had done to Powell’s film. Hitchcock thought his film was much more shocking. [This was mentioned in some of the supplemental material]

Ebert's got a discussion of the film here

Scorsese writes about the film here

Surveillance and TV

Forgot the list of TV shows about surveillance.
I should note that I'm looking for fiction (which eliminates documentary, reality TV, etc.)

The Prisoner
The Wire
The Last Enemy

Surveillance Films

I'm compiling a necessarily incomplete list of films about surveillance. That is, films which are primarily about surveillance, where surveillance is a key element of the film, the atmosphere of the film, or plot of the film, not just films with shots of people watching each other, or occasional images of CCTV cameras. Potentially this is quite a large genre if we include police procedurals and spy films where surveillance is a matter of course. But are there specific films which seem to reflect on the act of surveillance?

I haven't categorized them, just put them alphabetically. I've included a very short list of TV programs about surveillance as well, though I'm primarily concerned about film.

Additions to the list (or objections for the inclusion of certain films on the list, I haven't watched them all) most welcome.


1984 (1956)
1984 (1984)
Blowout
Blowup
Blue Thunder
Body Double
Bourne Identity (&c)
Brazil
Cache
Code 46
The Conversation
Deathwatch
Deja Vu
The Departed
Disturbia
The End of Violence
Enemy of the State
Final Cut
Gattaca
The Good Shepherd
Hackers
The Handmaid’s Tale
Hi, Mom!
The Lives of Others
Look
Minority Report
The Net
The Net 2.0
Oceans 11
One Hour Photo
Panic Room
Peeping Tom
Rear Window
Red Road
Der Reise
Sliver
Sneakers
Stakeout (& Stakeout 2)
Surveillance (2008)
Surveillance 24/7
The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse
THX 1138
Timecode
The Truman Show
V For Vendetta
Winter Kills

"Look"

Adam Rifkin’s 2007 film Look is the latest in a long line of films that take surveillance as their central theme. I wish it were a more distinguished entry into this category, but films about surveillance often cross over from criticism to exploitation.

This is a film with actually little pretension to a message, just a general statement that there are surveillance cameras everywhere and we have no privacy (especially it seems in our most private moments of vulnerability or anguish). There is a vague gesture towards the fact that cameras can be both positive and negative, but this is not pursued in any depth. If it were attempting to be a more serious message picture, there would be more serious issues with it. As it is, I think it uses the issue of privacy and surveillance as a simply a conceit, a hook to bring in an audience to watch this sensationalist fare. It plays like a compilation of FOX surveillance camera TV specials except with better quality footage and without the pixellations.

Look is a film about disparate lives in Los Angeles, all of whom interconnect at some point, at theme that has been much better done by other films. The unique angle here is that the movie is filmed as if it were captured entirely by CCTV cameras—if CCTV cameras were all high def and had sound (and having a microphone on a CCTV camera is actually illegal in places—capture an image, but not sound too). Of course, this (a film based exclusively on CCTV footage) was done back in the 1980s with Der Reise, but no matter.

The film certainly has critical promise in that we are made to identify with the cameras (we certainly don’t identify with these caricatures of characters) and participate in the violation of privacy, the voyeurism. That discomfort of being made to watch could be turned to social critique (how can this happen? What can be done to protect us?). But this is not the case here. The violation is made entertaining. Let me give you an example. The opening scenario is of a scene that represents one of the more disturbing invasions of privacy: a young woman changing clothes in a mall department store fitting room being recorded without her knowledge. Though this makes one feel immediately uncomfortable, something else happens here. As she strips down to a thong, she begins posing in front of the mirror, to be joined by a friend who also strips down. They start engaging in a teasing play, bumping and grinding in front of the mirror. It reminded me of a point John Berger made a number of years ago about the history of the nude in oil painting. One of the themes of nudes in oil painting was Vanity. There would be a picture of a nude woman, but she would be shown admiring herself in the mirror. This would ostensibly give the painting some moral purpose as a critique of character, while it’s real purpose would be to give the wealthy owner of the painting a nude woman to look at. It’s OK to look at her because she is already looking at herself (and besides, she secretly wants to be looked at). The painting would present a nude woman and then critique HER for her moral failings (as vain). Since the girls are performing for the mirror themselves, they obviously want to be looked at. This all makes our voyeuristic invasion OK. It distracts us from the point that we are invading their privacy. The film seeks to make this scene familiar, safe, and titillating, comfortable for fans of teen sexploitation films. In the end the scene leaves me feeling disturbed but not that I have been made complicit in violating the privacy and dignity of a vulnerable individual, but that somehow I’m watching this adolescent misogynist junk.

And the film proceeds from there.