surveillance
13 films tagged with “surveillance”
Citizenfour
The film opens with text on a black screen and a voice reading it: instructions for staying alive. Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second. Use a machine that has never touched the network.…
A Scanner Darkly
The scramble suit is the film's central organisational object. Agent Fred — undercover narcotics officer Bob Arctor — wears a device that projects a constantly shifting composite of thousands of different people onto his…
The Lives of Others
Wiesler is the best at what he does, and the film establishes this before it establishes anything else. In a lecture hall at the Stasi academy he explains, with the unhurried patience of a man describing a craft he has f…
Minority Report
The system works. This is established early, stated often, and never contradicted by the evidence within the film's own logic. The precogs see murders before they happen, and Pre-Crime intervenes, and for six years no on…
The Truman Show
The Truman Show is the first film about a platform product, made a few years before anyone needed the word. The economics are stated plainly and are worth restating because they have become the default arrangement of the…
Sneakers
The MacGuffin in Sneakers is a small black box that decrypts everything. Plug it into the Federal Reserve and the accounts open. Plug it into air traffic control and the system is legible. Plug it into the power grid, mi…
Brazil
A fly falls into a teleprinter and a letter is struck wrong. Archibald Tuttle, heating engineer, becomes Archibald Buttle, cobbler. Armed men come through the ceiling of the Buttle flat at Christmas, bag the father in fr…
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Ministry of Truth is not a propaganda bureau. That framing would be too simple, and Orwell knew it. What Winston Smith does for a living is something more vertiginous: he rewrites the historical record so that whatev…
Three Days of the Condor
Joe Turner's job description is one of the most precise metaphors for knowledge work ever put on screen. He works for the CIA, but not in the way anyone imagines working for the CIA. His office is a brownstone in New Yor…
The Conversation
Harry Caul is one of cinema's great craftsmen, and like most great craftsmen he has drawn a very precise line around what his craft includes. He builds his own equipment. He knows which microphone to point at a moving ta…
The Parallax View
Pakula's conspiracy trilogy — Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men — moves from a crime with a single victim to a crime against the republic, and the middle film is the one that looks at the mechanism. Where…
THX 1138
George Lucas made this film in 1971, before Star Wars, before Industrial Light & Magic, before merchandising became his real product — and the fact that the same person made THX 1138 and then built one of the most vertic…
M
The premise of M sounds like a thriller, but Lang's actual subject is institutional architecture under pressure. When Hans Beckert begins killing children, Berlin's police apparatus deploys every instrument available — i…