Cinema and Surveillance: The Asymmetric Gaze shows how key modern filmmakers challenge and disturb the relation between film and surveillance, medium and message. Assembling readings of films by Harun Farocki, Michael Haneke, and Fritz Lang, the book considers surveillance in such different domains as urban life, religious doctrine, and law enforcement.
With surveillance present in the modern world as both a technological phenomenon and a social practice, the author shows how cinema, as a visual medium, presents highly sophisticated analyses of surveillance. He suggests that “surveillance” is less an issue to be tackled from a secure spectatorial position than an experience to be rendered, an event to be dealt with. Far from offering a general model of spectatorship, the book explores how narrative moments of surveillance are complicated by specific spectatorial responses.
In its intersection of well-known figures and a highly topical issue, this book will have broad appeal, especially, but not exclusively, among students and scholars in film studies, media studies, German studies, European studies, art history, and political theory.
Introduction
1. Counter-Music: Farocki’s Theory of a New Image Type
2. Utterly Mysterious: Haneke’s Caché
3. “In the Name of the Law”: Lang’s M
Biography
Martin Blumenthal-Barby is a Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures at Rice University, where he also co-directs the Program in Cinema and Media Studies.
"Martin Blumenthal-Barby offers a succinct yet profound analysis of the complex dynamics involved in surveillance. With insightful readings of three canonical artists—Harun Farocki, Michael Haneke, and Fritz Lang—Blumenthal-Barby shows how we as viewers become implicated in complex image economies and asymmetrical relations between observer and observed. Reading closely with Blumenthal-Barby, we come to participate in the power dynamics of the surveillant works he discusses. Ever so rarely, as he lucidly shows, we undermine those dynamics through our very participation."
Fatima Naqvi, Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures & Film and Media Studies, Yale University
"This elegant, compact book performs an exercise in close looking—at the ways in which we are always being watched. Its careful tracing of the surveillant in three major works asks us to reckon with cinema as an ontologically guilty medium."
John David Rhodes, University of Cambridge
"Martin Blumenthal-Barby’s Cinema and Surveillance is a work of singular importance in our media-saturated age where surveillance cameras and satellites are ubiquitous. With a delicate hand Blumenthal-Barby shows how experimental cinema unmasks the position of the observer otherwise hidden from sight and explores the ethical implications of a distant gaze that participates in the violence that it records. The book masterfully orchestrates a dialogue between thinkers as varied as Jeremy Bentham, Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault, and Georg Simmel and the filmmakers Harun Farocki, Michael Haneke, and Fritz Lang. Cinema and Surveillance is essential reading for anyone concerned about the powers of the state and the possibilities for film in our political climate."
Rochelle Tobias, Johns Hopkins University
"Martin Blumenthal-Barby’s Cinema and Surveillance deserves to be read widely, both by those who study surveillance and those interested in the cinema more broadly. Unlike many who work on this topic, Blumenthal-Barby writes with great lucidity, and he penetrates to the core of complex theoretical arguments precisely and concisely. The book is therefore an excellent primer for those new to the field of surveillance studies. But Blumenthal-Barby does more by offering sophisticated and illuminating readings of works by Farocki, Hanke and Lang in the context of theories of surveillance. He thereby reveals aspects of their work I, for one, had not considered before and makes a genuine contribution to the study of these major filmmakers."
Malcolm Turvey, Sol Gittleman Professor, Tufts University
"In Cinema and Surveillance, Martin Blumenthal-Barby pushes theories of spectatorship and voyeuristic pleasure beyond the entrenched paradigms we have inherited. In stunning readings of films by Harun Farocki, Michael Haneke, and Fritz Lang, Blumenthal-Barby demonstrates that surveillance is not always, or perforce, an experience of visual mastery. It is, above all, a performance that the viewer takes part in through discrete aesthetic strategies, which give rise to feelings of discomfort, implication, and exposure. Reading this concise and inventive book, I come to the uneasy revelation that these films are also watching me."
Jennifer Fay, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Cinema & Media Arts, Vanderbilt University
"It has become a commonplace of media theory to regard the culture of surveillance, which is often said to emerge in the 20th century with the advent of moving image technologies, as an overwhelming effect of those technologies—as if free will and human flourishing would have continued unabated were it not for the camera. Beginning with the Old Testament, where others might begin with the Bolex, Blumenthal-Barby’s groundbreaking new book, Cinema and Surveillance, guides us toward a more complex understanding of technology, toward the ways that cinema complicates the relation between seeing and being seen, which moves always in more than one direction. It is a stunning description of both how much deeper, how much older, the problem of being watched is and a brilliant account of how cinema helps us to think critically and agentially from within a control society facilitated by the camera, even though the camera is but the latest tool in the longstanding work of moral, social, and economic coordination."
Brian Price, University of Toronto
"Blumenthal-Barby constructs a compelling narrative for explaining Harun Farocki’s 'Counter-Music,' a multifaceted installation with many visual scenes and inputs (from traffic light patterns to electricity grids and mobile phone networks). In addressing such a complex work in a fashion accessible to students of Cultural Studies and literature, Blumenthal-Barby continues in the footsteps of the trend-setting comparatist Eduardo Cadava (Princeton), who has made the full-service theoretical 'turn to the visual' before him. Blumenthal-Barby succeeds as a theoretically-oriented close reader who renders authoritative exegeses of exemplary artifacts."
Henry Sussman, Yale University
