Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Narratives on the Watch: Bodies, Images, & Technologies of Control in Contemporary Surveillance Cinema

Naveh, Jonathan
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1407952133

Abstract Details

2014, Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, Film (Fine Arts).
This thesis explores surveillance cinema though a body of films that thematize the increasing presence of surveillance images in social life. Suggesting a shift from two dominant representational modes, dystopic and conspiratorial cinema, recent surveillance films normalize the practice, diffuse the technology’s paranoiac connotation, and transcend the rhetoric that surveillance scenarios only target white men formerly a part of the surveillance apparatus. I argue that with new forms of the image, through cinema’s figuration of the surveillance image, “othered” subjects appear as “to-be-surveilled”—targeted bodies due to the determinants of their gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or class status. The films I discuss thus raise an important question relevant to contemporary surveillance theory: does cinema normalize forms of control or does it challenge these structures through a critique of the power relations found within them? As surveillance cinema integrates images of surveillance into its texts, it critiques the power disparities that exist between hegemonic disembodied surveillors and controlled bodies.
Ofer Eliaz (Committee Chair)
Louis-Georges Schwartz (Committee Member)
Thomas Vander Ven (Committee Member)
155 p.
Film Studies
surveillance; cinema; control; power; figuration; surveillance image; surveillance society; surveillance culture; normalization; technological mediation; otherness; race, class, gender;

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Naveh, J. (2014). Narratives on the Watch: Bodies, Images, & Technologies of Control in Contemporary Surveillance Cinema [Master's thesis, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1407952133

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Naveh, Jonathan. Narratives on the Watch: Bodies, Images, & Technologies of Control in Contemporary Surveillance Cinema . 2014. Ohio University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1407952133.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Naveh, Jonathan. "Narratives on the Watch: Bodies, Images, & Technologies of Control in Contemporary Surveillance Cinema ." Master's thesis, Ohio University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1407952133

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1407952133
1,617
© 2014, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Narratives on the Watch: Bodies, Images, & Technologies of Control in Contemporary Surveillance Cinema by Jonathan Naveh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.