Closed Circuits

Long before the 2013 NSA scandal about electronic surveillance, narrative cinema had become a weathervane of social phobias in regard to national security, drawing on a long history of surveillance both as theme and as audiovisual machination that saw its first heyday with the Weimar cinema of Fritz Lang. This book's analytical return to apparatus theory, and especially to suture theory's contrapuntal logic of seeing unseen, contributes to a new view of digital optics in this regard: one of contemporary cinema's most urgent cultural as well as technological flashpoints.