Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 8, April 2003
Chris Darke
Letter from London [1]
'We witnesses can't escape
ourselves.' J. G. Ballard [2] Towards the end of 2002, a
new poster campaign began to appear throughout the city.
'Secure beneath the watchful eyes' was the slogan emblazoned
above a design depicting huge, flying saucer-like eyes
hovering in the London sky. It was the deliberately archaic
quality of the poster's design that struck me first. A
clever graphic artist had obviously drawn on two key
stylistic references: classic science-fiction of the 1930s
and 1940s (of _The War of the Worlds_ genre), and World War
II 'Home Front' propaganda (of the _Walls Have Ears_
variety). There are certainly plenty of 'watchful
(mechanical) eyes' in London and throughout the UK. In fact,
there is a greater density of CCTV (Closed Circuit
Television) surveillance in the UK than in any other country
in Western Europe. [3] But can it really be claimed
that, in London or anywhere else in the UK, we truly feel
more 'secure' under such eyes? Security isn't the only issue
here, merely a mechanical reassurance. The overwhelming
level of surveillance in the UK has a deeper resonance and
graver consequences that are worth examining. What did this
poster communicate beyond its purpose of reassuring people
travelling on London buses that, with the increase in CCTV
surveillance, they'd be safer and even more 'secure' than
before? Firstly, it said that 'the future' is already dated,
old-fashioned, something to be depicted through kitsch
design. And secondly, it implied that we are already in a
state of war. It seems that I wasn't alone in having
ambiguous and conflicting reactions. Researching the poster
campaign I discovered a number of internet web-logs
detailing other people's outraged responses. As one web-log
commentator noted of the poster: 'It's like something out of
a Fritz Lang movie'. [4] Fear, paranoia, security
and surveillance: the legacy of Dr Mabuse is certainly rich
in the city I write from. During the week in which I was
completing this letter, two events occurred in London which
reassured me that not only is it *possible* to consider
examples of film, art, and moving-images from the
perspective of surveillance, but that it is *imperative* to
do so. The first of these events involved the arrest (and
subsequent speedy release) of three North African men
suspected of planning to detonate a poison-gas bomb in the
London Underground. In the post-September 11th climate, and
in preparation for what appears to be an inevitable
American-led strike on Iraq, this episode fed into a climate
of fear and paranoia that can only be described as a state
of 'Phoney War'. And when the repeated refrain among many
Western European Police and Intelligence communities states
that it's not so much a question of *if* but rather *when*
such an attack takes place, then it's clear how the liaison
between 'surveillance' and 'security' comes into play with
ever greater intensity. The second event concerns the
controversial scheme introduced by the Mayor of London to
make drivers in Inner London pay a 'Congestion Charge' fee.
Designed to reduce the amount of traffic on London's already
over-congested roads and to persuade more people onto public
transport (where, no doubt, they'll feel 'secure under the
watchful eyes'), this scheme will be facilitated by the use
of a CCTV surveillance system capable of reading 90% of car
registration plates. In the name of environmental concerns,
and at a moment of no little fear, London has become the
panopticon-city that would make that 18th century British
reformer Jeremy Bentham proud. So how does one approach a
diversity of works, made for cinema, television and the
gallery, in light of this? The condition of being a subject
of surveillance is clearly omnipresent and television has
happily hooked itself into what might be called the
'panoptical imaginary'. Consider the extraordinary success
and popularity of 'Reality TV' shows such as _Big Brother_
(the British equivalent of _Loft Story_), for whose first
series more people voted than did in recent elections in the
UK (to which fact nothing, and everything, need be added).
Surveillance is a given condition of debates about law,
order and social control. All of which is only to state the
obvious, to invoke a national variation on a global theme.
So much so, in fact, that between October 2001 and February
2002 the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in
Karslruhe, Germany, devoted a major exhibition to the
subject: 'CTRL Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham
to Big Brother'. The catalogue that accompanied the show has
been an invaluable companion in researching this letter and
must surely stand as a key work of reference on the subject
if one begins to approach surveillance not only as a means
of externally-imposed social control but also as an
increasingly *internalised* condition. From which it's only
a short step to asking: what are the conditions of this
internalised self-surveillance? What are its aesthetics and
its rhetorics as visible in the UK? One place to start from
is the assertion made by Ursula Frohne in her essay for the
exhibition catalogue: 'The unforeseen success of
docu-soaps such as _Big Brother_ indicates that we are on
the threshold of a transition from the
bureaucratic-institutional tactics of surveillance to the
medially-staged spectacle of the individual's total
surrender to the media's regime of the gaze.'
[5] Cinema, and other
moving-image art forms, occupy a privileged position in this
transition, existing between the
*bureaucratic-institutional* and the *medially-staged
spectacle* and are able to recruit, represent and possibly
even *détourne* the apparatus by which
internalisation takes place. In so doing, certain works
provide valuable meditations on the aesthetics and rhetorics
of the condition of internalised surveillance. For example, consider the
success of Kiarostami's _Ten_ when it was shown in London.
Rapturous reviews, sell-out houses, but a strange sense of
irony underpinned the welcome given to the film. For Western
metropolitan liberals to watch _Ten_ -- which for most
British reviewers was a film about 'the condition of women
in post-revolutionary Iran' -- is inevitably a
self-affirming experience. But what the reviewers missed, or
decided not to dwell on, was the insistently
surveillance-like nature of the film's *dispositif*. It's
not entirely cynical to suggest that such denial might
itself be a symptom of the overwhelming levels of
surveillance in the UK, but it's also of a part with the
sense of reassurance that Western liberals derive from the
spectacle of 'the Iranian woman', that of a highly desirable
'other' ('desirable' for all sorts of self-affirming
reasons, it should be said). If the pleasure to be derived
from _Ten_ rests partly in the spectacle of Iranian women
negotiating and living beyond the power that a theocratic
state exercises over them, that power is perversely even
more present by its absence. The world beyond the front
seats of the car driven through the streets of Tehran cannot
help but be insistently present -- in the passenger seat and
through the car windows, as well as in the way that the
microcosmic environment of the film's setting inevitably
gives onto the macrocosm of the wider society. The success
of _Ten_ for its London audiences illustrates that, to a
certain extent, there is 'bad' (or, at least,
'unacceptable') surveillance -- that of a theocratic state
over women -- and 'better' (or, at least, more 'acceptable')
surveillance -- that of our own state over us. But that a
conjunction between the two might be considered possible was
nowhere evident in criticism of the film. It was a
conjunction made impossible, or at least disabled, by the
terms of the 'otherness' attributed to the film by lazy
reviewers: an Iranian auteur making a digital-video feature
about the state of women in Iran. But it is a conjunction
made explicit by Kiarostami's own technical-aesthetic
procedure in _Ten_, in which the auteur 'vanishes' while
remaining strongly present. Kiarostami poses a very simple
and direct question (one he posed earlier, in different
terms, in _Close Up_): 'Who's behind the camera?' And he
then proceeds to complicate the answer to this question by
insisting that it's not him. That, as the auteur, he's been
'eliminated'. Why is Kiarostami's
double-edged self-elimination so useful in understanding the
rhetorics and aesthetics of internalised surveillance?
Because, in _Ten_, it involves his playing a finely-balanced
game of hide-and-seek, of visibility and invisibility, of
presence and absence (and all in the space of a car!).
Surveillance, understood here as a rhetoric of video, allows
him to extend this game to an extraordinary degree. Thanks
to the digital video-camera Kiarostami, already a master of
the *plan fixe*, can absent himself from his habitual
position behind the camera to occupy another, equally
decisive off-screen space. As he admitted to _Cahiers du
cinéma_, he was sitting in the back seat of the car
whispering (like Godard to Marina Vlady on _Deux ou trios
choses que je sais d'elle_) via a microphone into Mania
Akbari's ear. And, as Patrice Blouin observed in his review
of the film, 'that which the director calls 'the
disappearance of the mise-en-scène' is nothing other
than its faithful continuation by other means'. [6]
Blouin also observes that Kiarostami uses the digital video
cameras installed in the car, 'not in order to subjugate
his performers, to examine them like lab-rats or intruders
in the garden but just the reverse, to leave them greater
freedom -- even to give them a new, unexpected margin
[*une marge inédite*]'.
[7] In conclusion, Blouin
states that: 'With _Ten_ he invents, all in one go,
'affective video-surveillance'. It's our new name for
cinema.' [8] Aside from the fact that, with these
observations, Blouin opens up an approach to _Ten_ that not
a single British critic appears to have noticed, there is
also this interesting and potentially productive figure of
'la marge inédite'. Might it be that, in _Ten_, this
'new margin' is the margin of invisibility within the
visible, the possibility of disappearing within full view of
the crowd of eyes? Why not? After all, consider how
Kiarostami condenses this play between the 'visible' and
'invisible' (the socially-permitted image and the taboo
image) into a single 'shocking' image, that of the female
passenger who raises her headscarf to reveal her shaven
head. No infringement of Islamic law here, which, in Iran,
dictates that a woman's hair must be covered. In the absence
of hair the lifting of the headscarf is, it appears,
permissible. It is a characteristically vertiginous moment
of self-reflexivity for a Kiarostami film and one in which a
surveillance-like aesthetic system delivers an extraordinary
revelation of the invisible at the heart of the
visible. From Kiarostami's _Ten_ to
Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair's essay-film _London Orbital_
is not such a great leap. The two films share many of the
same elements, it's just a different city, a different road,
a different car endlessly circulating, and a slightly
different but allied deployment of surveillance aesthetics
that one discovers in _London Orbital_. I am aware that this
duo of British writer-filmmakers probably requires a short
introduction. [9] Sinclair, a poet, novelist,
essayist, former film-student, and bookseller has invented,
described, and inhabited his own convincing psycho-geography
of the city. Drawing on William Blake and J. G. Ballard
alike, Sinclair transfigures the trash, absorbs the deep
pulse of History, and pours it all out in vivid, energetic,
and generous prose. It was a collection of his
essay-excursions throughout London, _Lights Out for the
Territory_ (1997), that delivered a surprise bestseller. In
Paris, one is guided *par arrondissement* (courtesy of the
wonderfully named 'Editions de l'Indispensable'); in London,
we use the _A to Z_ or the _Nicholson's Street Finder_.
Sinclair reorders these established cartographies, cutting
new and unfamiliar shapes into the surface of the official
map. His most recent collection of essays, _London Orbital:
A Walk around the M25_ (2002), reminds readers that London
is a monstrous conurbation fed for decades by
suburban-dwelling white-collar workers. For anyone deciding
to immerse themself in the city both are necessary books.
Not only will they tell you more than you could ever want or
need to know, they have a splendid distemper about them, a
justifiable anger towards the spectacle of the decay of the
city in which the author has lived for over thirty years.
Petit is a novelist, a former film-critic and director.
[10] Backed by Channel Four, the last three films
they have made together have reinvented the 'artisanal' mode
of personal filmmaking. Sinclair, having been trained as a
filmmaker in his youth, followed the example of his
favourite auteur, Stan Brakhage, and turned to an intimate,
diaristic form of Super-8mm 'chamber cinema' in the 1960s
and 1970s. Thirty years later and it's only the technology
that's changed. Petit, bored with the cumbersome slowness of
feature film production and frustrated by the increasingly
bureaucratic nature of television commissioning, took to
tape and then to digital like a born-again avant-garde
diarist. [11] The films they have produced together
are meshed webs of photography, Super-8mm film, and digital
video. They are 'essay-films' that look to the example of
Chris Marker's travelogues and, as Serafino Murri has
observed 'It is as if the spirit of
Marker's _Sans soleil_ and _La Jetée_ were
reincarnated with more advanced technology, the same
technology of music videos and advertisements -- in an
eclectic mix of formats, techniques and filming solutions --
to return to discussing, with poetry and disenchantment, the
world's truth transformed into images of itself.'
[12] In _London Orbital_, this
approach is applied, with great effectiveness, to the
generic landscape of London and its huge peripheral motorway
(the M25), a landscape of urban shopping malls, parking
lots, and postmodernist architecture. These are the
'non-places' of hyper-modernity, as Marc Augé has
christened them, whose privileged aesthetic, whose own
'cinema' one might say, is supplied by the constant
monitoring of the CCTV camera. [13] Petit was aware of this
earlier than most British filmmakers and, in 1993, made a
short video-essay on the subject for BBC television entitled
_Surveillance_ (which was also included in the 'CTRL Space'
exhibition as a single-screen installation) in which he
aligned CCTV footage with the beginnings of cinema. For
Petit, surveillance is part of the architecture and climate
of the urban landscape and his fascination with the
reverie-inducing possibilities of its impossible duration
developed as he began to experiment with videotape. In his
1999 video-essay _Negative Space_ (a film about, among other
things, R. W. Fassbinder, Manny Farber, Las Vegas, Robert
Mitchum, and 'the death of cinema'), he
reflected: 'Movies were, and are,
aspirational -- the dream factory, after all -- and the
bottom line is that you're supposed to come out feeling
better than before you went in, or at least distracted.
Videotape is more encompassing, and has more to do with
control, security, with unedited time and surveillance, and
it marks a fundamental shift in the level and type of
voyeurism.' [14] In _London Orbital_ (which
is very much more than 'the film of the book' and should be
seen as part of the overall psycho-geographical 'project'
from which Sinclair derives his motivation, material and
*modus operandi* as a writer) a dialogue evolves between the
two filmmakers -- Petit on the road, Sinclair on foot --
which unites around the figure of J. G. Ballard. _London
Orbital_ is something of a homage to the novelist, both in
terms of his influence but also as regards the (now somewhat
clichéd) realisation that, in the UK, we are living
in an increasingly 'Ballardian' landscape. Sinclair has
frequently allied Petit with Ballard, describing their
shared 'fascination with a frozen aesthetic of motorways,
business parks, airport hotels: franchised Surrealism', and
describes the filmmaker as 'the unacknowledged articulator
of the Ballardian poetic'. [15] Two brief points
towards an understanding of the 'Ballardian poetic'. The
first, that it involves both a fascination with and a
radical loss of faith in the idea of 'the future'. In the
introduction to his collection of short stories _Myths of
the Near Future_, Ballard wrote: 'Sadly, at some point in
the 1960s our sense of the future seemed to atrophy and die
. . . Yet I can remember when people throughout the world
were intensely interested in the future and convinced that
it would change their lives for the better.'
[16] The second, that there's
only one way out of this 'atrophied' sense of the
future: 'Rather than fearing
alienation, people should embrace it. It may be the doorway
to something more interesting. That's always been the
message of my fiction. We need to explore total alienation
and find what lies beyond. The secret module that underpins
who we are and our imaginative remaking of ourselves that we
all embrace. This may be true of the world we're going to be
living in for the next millennium.' [17] The 'Ballardian poetic',
then, is a valuable resource for imaginative filmmakers and
writers working in the UK in its present state (one in which
'the future' has arrived and taken up uncertain,
discomforting residence). It allows the transfiguration of
an increasingly culturally homogenised, panic-stricken, and
media-saturated landscape into one of myths and wonders. In
these terms, the contestants on _Big Brother_ could be seen
as no longer being the media-processed cretins that the
press loves to hate, but CCTV cosmonauts who have stepped
through Ballard's 'doorway' to explore the 'total
alienation' that lies beyond. And a Ballardian cinema is
beginning to emerge, if only in the form of screen
adaptations of his novels, such as Steven Spielberg's
version of _Empire of the Sun_, David Cronenberg's _Crash_,
Jonathan Weiss's _The Atrocity Exhibition_, Solveig
Nordlund's _Low Flying Aircraft_, and John Maybury's
forthcoming version of _Super Cannes_. Petit and Sinclair
have never done anything so vulgar as attempting to 'adapt'
a Ballard fiction. They understand too well that we now live
in the landscape that Ballard has been faithfully
anatomising and populating with characters since the 1960s.
Why bother 'adapting' when you can hit the motorway and find
all the sets, the actors, and the (CCTV) camera positions
ready and waiting for you? It should be said that,
while it was commissioned by Channel Four television,
_London Orbital_ is an anomalous work in the current context
of British television: in the demands it makes on its
viewers, its experimental form, its unapologetic use of
durational structures (road-time, surveillance-time, boredom
as transcendence). It's closer in many respects to the sort
of moving-image work displayed in the more fertile and
'open' domain of art-galleries and museums. And, here too,
'surveillance' as both an aesthetic and a rhetorical address
has been much explored lately. Not that this is news to
anyone familiar with the growing corpus of artists choosing
to explore multiple-screen installation and projection
formats, but it's the work of one young British artist that
I'd like to focus on as regards the 'new margin' that the
aesthetics of surveillance might be seen to provide. Since
the mid-1990s Dryden Goodwin has produced a body of
video-works in single-screen and multiple-screen
installation formats that are fascinating for their fully
achieved exploration of a single idea. That idea might be
found in Chris Marker's observation in _Sans soleil_: 'Have
you ever heard anything more stupid than what they teach in
film schools -- not to look at the camera?' Goodwin's work,
particularly _Hold_ (1996), _Within_ (1998), _Wait_ (2000),
and _Closer_ (2001), combines surveillance with intimacy.
The artist is the surveillant, the one who gathers his
material 'on the run', filming people who are unaware of his
camera, as he waits for privileged moments to reveal
themselves: the camera's gaze returned in _Within_, the
expression of joy or sadness at the arrival or departure of
a friend or loved one in _Wait_. These privileged moments
are then extruded from Goodwin's video footage by the use of
highly sophisticated non-linear editing software which
allows the artist to 'dilate' the time around them. And
while it's correct to observe, as the curator Sophie Howarth
has done, that 'his longing to watch and touch the people he
films is characterised by a spirit of tenderness rather than
surveillance', [18] it is the conjunction between
the two states -- surveillance/intimacy, looking/touching,
visibility (of the one watched)/invisibility (of the one
watching) -- that makes Goodwin's work so satisfying. In his
most recent work _Closer_, exhibited in both three-screen
installation (2002) and single-screen formats (2001),
Goodwin extends the 'look' into a 'touch'. For this work,
Goodwin used a simple digital-video camera to observe the
play of a laser-beam that he unobtrusively manipulated over
buildings, urban surfaces, people, and faces. The work
presents a strange and compelling tension between distance
and intimacy, and provokes in the viewer both a fear of
discovery (on behalf of the laser-bearing watcher) and a
fear for those being watched and touched by the artist's
light. It's a simple idea, but one so expertly organised and
executed that the discomforting subtext remains hidden; this
is the 'tenderness' of a stalker, a version of 'affective
vidéosurveillance' that's entirely unexpected.
_Closer_ is also a 'city-poem' of the very old-fashioned
kind -- a la Vertov and Ruttman -- but also of the
absolutely contemporary kind, too. It is a poem for the city
of mechanical eyes in which the gaze becomes a strange
caress emanating from an invisible source. To sign off, I'd like to
offer some observations about a film in which there is not a
single frame of CCTV footage and yet which seems to me to be
a profound -- and profoundly enigmatic -- portrait of a
woman 'under observation'. _Morvern Callar_ is the second,
much anticipated, feature film by the young Scottish
director Lynne Ramsay. Based on the novel by Alan Warner,
_Morvern Callar_ tells the story of a young female Scottish
supermarket worker (a luminously vacant Samantha Morton
plays Morvern in Ramsay's film) whose boyfriend commits
suicide and leaves her the manuscript of an unpublished
novel. Near the beginning of the film, on the screen of the
boyfriend's computer (he's already dead and Morvern steps
carefully, tenderly over his bleeding body), we read one
declaration -- 'I Love You' -- and two injunctions -- 'Read
Me' and 'Be Brave'. The first of these injunctions -- 'Read
Me' -- doesn't only instruct Morvern to read the manuscript
of the novel but also instructs the audience to attempt to
'read' the mysterious character of Morvern herself. But, as
a friend astutely pointed out to me, it also brings to mind
the instruction that Lewis Carroll's Alice saw on the bottle
of magic potion -- 'Drink Me' -- from which she sipped in
_Through The Looking-Glass_. We too are present at the onset
of a similar transformation. Be Brave? It's a classically
existentialist injunction to Morvern (as well as being a
further nudge to the audience in their viewing, and a
declaration of intent from the director to herself) to do
what she desires, to go all the way, in the knowledge that
she is 'loved' from beyond the grave. Ramsay makes sure we
notice the significance of these words -- they almost have
the status of intertitles in what is, at least in terms of
the lack of emphasis on dialogue, a quasi-'silent film' --
by according each phrase a full-screen close-up. And Morvern
does just as she's instructed. Substituting her own name for
her boyfriend's she becomes the 'author' of his text and
mails off the manuscript to a publisher. So she steps
through the looking glass into . . . an Antonioni film.
There's more than a few features to _Morvern Callar_ that
recall Antonioni, that almost make the film _The Passenger_
for the Prozac Generation: the identity-swap, the flight to
Southern Spain (in which Morvern is 're-born' in the rave
clubs of the Mediterranean coast). And then there's the
sense that Ramsay is experimenting with an Antonionian
camera-poetic in which the camera's point-of-view lends
itself to being interpreted as the perspective of a 'missing
person'. Like _The Passenger_ and _L'Avventura_ before it,
_Morvern Callar_ is the chronicle of a disappearance --
Morvern from her life as a supermarket worker into one of
hedonism and ambiguous freedom. But, in the process, Morvern
becomes as ghostly as her dead boyfriend. But she's *our*
ghost, the spectator's own projection, and Samantha Morton
-- with her extraordinary satellite-dish blankness --
receives and projects back what the audience requires of
her. This facility is what endows Morton with such a
powerfully enigmatic screen presence, akin to that of the
great actresses of silent cinema. It's little wonder that
Spielberg, in an inspired piece of casting, had her play a
Delphic mute in _Minority Report_. The strange fascination
with 'vanishing', with a 'fading' of identity, with 'missing
persons' and 'ghostliness' that Ramsay finds and films in
Warner's novel, creates in Morvern a kind of anti-heroine
for the surveillance age. It's interesting to hear that
Ramsay's next project will be a screen version of Alice
Sebold's novel _The Lovely Bones_, whose narrator is a dead
girl (!). In _Morvern Callar_ Ramsay emphasises this
'fading' of identity through her use of sound and music. The
film's musical soundtrack is just that, a literal soundtrack
supplied in the shape of a cassette of music left to Morvern
as a gift by her dead boyfriend. And when Morvern listens to
this music Ramsay either cuts abruptly just before a melody
starts to crystallise or a rhythm takes root or, very
insistently, 'fades' the music from being the major element
of the soundtrack to being experienced as a kind of ambience
emanating from the headphones of Morvern's walkman. Is this
the director's wink in the direction of a similar treatment
of sound (and theme) in Agnès Varda's _Sans toit ni
loi_? Consider how Mona listens to a tape of (what else?)
'The Changeling' by The Doors. It makes sense. There's
little doubt that Ramsay is a filmmaker who would not only
know these works (Varda, Antonioni) but would also -- and
this is a mark of her talent -- be able to allude to them in
ways that enrich the texture of her stories and
themes. Ghosts. Missing Persons.
Invisibility. A strange and compelling fact -- of the
sociological variety -- came to my mind while watching
Morvern becoming ghost-like in the dance-clubs of Southern
Spain. The 2001 Census in the UK uncovered the remarkable
new phenomenon of nearly a million people going 'missing'
from the population, 'largely due to the untracked movements
of men in their 20s and 30s heading abroad for work or
extended raves in the Mediterranean sun'. [19]
Morvern -- who is at least in part under an assumed (male)
identity -- is one of these 'missing people' who, supposedly
ever more visible 'under the watchful eyes', have vanished
from the UK population. Clearly, it's a fairly large *marge
inédite* that is opening up within the UK's culture
of surveillance. And since I first saw _Morvern Caller_ it's
been that existential injunction, delivered from one ghost
to a ghost-to-be, that has haunted me: Be Brave. London, England Footnotes 1. This text, written in
November 2002, was first published in French as 'Lettre de
Londres', _Trafic_, no. 45, Spring 2003, pp. 38-48
<http://www.pol-editeur.fr/revues/fiche1.asp?LaRevue=Trafic>.
Acknowledgements: Gareth Evans, Kieron Corless, Yann
Perreau, Libby Saxton, Steven Bode at Film and Video
Umbrella, Rudolf Frieling at ZKM 2. Quoted in Iain
Sinclair, _Crash: David Cronenberg's Post-mortem on
J.G.Ballard's 'Trajectory of Fate'_ (British
Film Institute,
1999), p.42. 3. For statistics and
details of CCTV surveillance in the UK see
<http://www.privacyinternational.org>.
Also useful are: Simon Davies, _Big Brother: Britain's Web
of Surveillance and the New Technological Order_ (London:
Pan, 1996); Anthony Giddens, _The Nation-State and Violence:
Volume Two of a Contemporary Critique of Historical
Materialism_ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987); and David
Lyon, _The Electronic Eye: The Raising of the Surveillance
Society_ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). 4. For images of and
responses to the poster campaign see <http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/002285.html>
and <http://www.londontransport.co.uk/campaign/bus_improvement/index.shtml>. 5. Ursula Frohne, ''Screen
Tests': Media Narcissism, Theatricality, and the
Internalized Observer', in Thomas Y Levin, Ursula Frohne,
and Peter Weibel, eds, _CTRL Space: Rhetorics of
Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
and London: ZKM/The MIT Press, 2002), p. 257. 6. Patrice Blouin, 'Sur la
route', _Cahiers du cinéma_, Septembre 2002, p.
23. 7. Ibid. 8. Patrice Blouin and
Charles Tesson, 'Elimination de l'auteur. Entretien avec
Abbas Kiarostami', _Cahiers du cinéma_, Septembre
2002, p. 15. Patrice Blouin, 'Sur la route', _Cahiers du
cinéma_, Septembre 2002, p. 23. 9. Sinclair's novels
include _White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings_ (1987),
_Downriver_ (1991), _Radon Daughters_ (1994) and _Landor's
Tower_ (2001). 10. Petit's films include
_Radio On_ (1979), _An Unsuitable Job for a Woman_ (1981),
_Flight to Berlin_ (1983), _Chinese Boxes_ (1984). He has
made four films for British television with Sinclair: _The
Cardinal and the Corpse_ (1995), _The Falconer_ (1997),
_Asylum_ (1999) and _London Orbital_ (2002), as well as
several alone including: _Surveillance_ (1993) _Radio On
Remix_ (1998) and _Negative Space_ (1999). 11. For an account of
Petit's transition from film to tape see: Petit, 'Pictures
by Numbers', _Film Comment_, vol. 37 no. 2, March/April
2001, pp. 38-43. 12. Serafino Murri, 'Chris
Petit: Anatomies of the Image', _Afterall: A Journal of Art,
Context and Enquiry_, no. 5, 2002, p 86. 13. For a detailed
analysis of _London Orbital_ and the Sinclair 'phenomenon'
see 'Hygiénisme Social Autoroutier: M25: l'urbanisme
thatchérien vu par Iain Sinclair', at
<http://melanine.org/article.php3?id_article=71>. 14. _Negative Space_
(Chris Petit, Illuminations Films/BBC TV, 1999). See also:
Laura Mulvey, 'Detail, Digression, Death: The Movies in
Chris Petit's Film _Negative Space_', _Afterall_, no. 5,
2002, pp 98-105; and Serafino Murri, 'Visual Irony as Virus
in Panoptic Structures: Logic of Fact and Anti-Truth in
Chris Petit's _Surveillance_', in _CTRL Space_, pp
496-497. 5. Iain Sinclair, _Crash:
David Cronenberg's Post-mortem on J. G. Ballard's
'Trajectory of Fate'_ (London: British Film Institute,
1999), pp. 37 and 40. 16. Ballard, _Myths of the
Near Future_ (London: Vintage, 1999). 17. Ballard, quoted in
Sinclair, _Crash_, p. 42. 18. Sophie Howarth,
'Fugitive Intimacy', in _Dryden Goodwin: A Minigraph_
(London: Film and Video Umbrella, 2003), p. 8. 19. John Carvel, 'Missing,
Probably on a Rave: The Million Who Have Left a Hole in the
UK's Population Tally', The _Guardian_, 1 October 2002
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,802077,00.html>. Copyright © Chris
Darke 2003 Chris Darke, 'Letter from
London', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 8, April 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n8darke>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
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