Surveillance surveyed: the effects of remote sensing technologies on perception through the films of Harun Farocki

This paper looks at three of the filmmaker Harun Farocki’s recent films, War at a Distance (2003), and Serious Games I: Watson is Down (2010) and Serious Games II: Three Dead (2010). I am interested in how these films trace the contemporary acceleration of surveillance image production and reception used for the regulation of manufacturing and the domination of populations. While theorists like Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault have written extensively on the phenomenon of increased surveillance in contemporary society, Farocki’s films manifest a critique from within film – one that repositions viewers actively and critically in relation to the images with which they are constantly inundated in our current image saturated environment. By using film itself to critically intervene in a pivotal moment in the history of the medium, I argue that Farocki’s work is able to deliver a critique that affectively repositions viewers in relation to the surveillance technologies themselves.