Videotaping Surveillance

Before I start, I don’t think Levin is right to call “Enemy of the State” a remake of “The Conversation.” They share the idea that the main character is under surveillance, but that seems to be all.
Anyways, I thought his paper was a neat exploration of cinema’s incorporation of surveillance into its diegetic and structural worlds. I found the most compelling cases to be “Snake Eyes” and “The Truman Show.”
“Snake Eyes” seems to foreground surveillance as a narrative device not only through its overbearing presence in both the cinematic space and plot, but also through its incorporation in structural use, such as the shot reverse-shot with Nicholas Cage looking through the security camera at the man in the security booth. The “endlessly identical hallways” (589) at the end of the film are symptomatic of the kinds of shots regularly surveyed by the CCTV cameras. Breaking with this highly focused emphasis on regular surveillance by the “impossible” tracking shot only serves to further enunciate this point.
“The Truman Show” is a like an unholy montage of all things surveillance, what with switches between standard camera shots and those of the surveillance cameras hidden throughout Truman’s world. The difference between these might well be ambiguous until he realizes he is being watched and begins to address those surveillance cameras with his gaze. Unlike “Time Code,” there is only one subject of this movie, so as far as surveillance goes, there is only one object of interest, and this allows a feeling of surveillance to be maintained for the fictional audience of this show without showing multiple screens at once. The film can’t help but announce the presence of the camera used to shoot non-surveillance shots, bringing another level to Truman’s “watchedness.”
These movies seem to indicate that cinema is becoming more interested in its variants, such as security, but they do not fall far from the extremely reflexive or foregrounded films of Godard and others.