Closed Circuits

Screening Narrative Surveillance

Garrett Stewart

The recent uproar over NSA surveillance can obscure the fact that surveillance has been an indelible part of contemporary life for decades. And cinema has long been aware of its power – and potential for abuse.

In "Closed Circuits", Garrett Stewart explores a panoply of films, from "M" and "Rear Window" to "The Conversation" and "The Bourne Legacy", to analyze the ways in which cinema has articulated the concept of surveillance. While it has long been a mainstay of the thriller, surveillance, Stewart argues, speaks to something more foundational in the very work of the camera. The shared axis of montage and espionage – especially the way that point of view and editing techniques are designed to draw us in and make us forget the omnipresence of the camera – offers an entry point to larger questions about the politics of an oversight regime that is increasingly remote and robotic, a global technopticon.

Dazzling in its breadth of reference, and far-reaching in its conclusions about both cinematic and real-world surveillance, "Closed Circuits" further confirms Garrett Stewart as among our leading theorists of narrative.

Content:

Preface
Returns of Theory
Introduction Narrative Spycams – A 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

About the Author

Garrett Stewart is 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.

Reviews

"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 week's blockbuster, and it knows the difference between them. Deeply informed by narrative theory, film theory, and media theory, the eye-opening arguments bear on issues of real moment in our time" – James Chandler, University of Chicago

"Long after the suspected deaths of both classical narration and apparatus theory, Stewart finds the subtle and self-effacing ontological gaps that twenty-first-century cinema opens anew between story and discourse, and parses out their consequences better than anyone else I've read" – Paul Young, Dartmouth College

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