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Slate: "Nothing to Hide"
Photo illustration by Slate. Still © 1998 Touchstone Pictures.
Excerpted from Surveillance Cinema by Catherine Zimmer, PhD, Chair, Film and Screen Studies Department, Pace University:
Most generally but most straightforwardly, surveillance narratives relying heavily on satellite and GPS imagery indicate the place surveillance technologies have come to hold in the formations of geopolitics, particularly through the integration of system and subject. This integration can be traced directly to the manner in which surveillance is incorporated into a film’s storyline, but, perhaps more importantly, also to its increasingly privileged place as an aspect of cinematic continuity systems. What one finds in films that incorporate locative technology and satellite imaging is that both systems serve dual and interrelated purposes: to visually establish an individual subject from a great distance, and to find a technological means within the narrative for motivating crosscutting between shots that construct elaborate plot connections between spaces, people, events, and actions. Whether they include a liberal surface critique of surveillance in their narrative, or unabashedly celebrate the spectacle of global surveillance, such films work to legitimize that caricatured element of the “world image.”
There are myriad examples: In the seminal example of such films, Enemy of the State, the numerous shots coded as satellite images, targeting the protagonist from high above, visually situate him in a variety of complex urban spaces. These shots are then “put into play” as they are crosscut with shots of the satellites themselves in orbit, the satellite operation center, and other figures in the political drama that unfolds.
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