The prescient 1984 came but never really went away. Like with so much dystopian science-fiction, it appears that often the problem is not that these dire speculations were too wild but that they were perhaps not wild enough.
In the case of George Orwell, it is interesting that he chose to situate his bleak vision of authoritarianism alongside the regime of surveillance and even if it is not the all-seeing eye of a single Big Brother, what has come to be are numerous institutions, players and sites all participating in the economy of surveillance.
It is estimated that for every hour we spend, there are hundreds of thousands of hours of video footage being captured by surveillance cameras. These secretive and silent filmmakers of our time seem to be producing images that challenge our traditional understanding of what counts as an image itself.
If cinema is the art of making images, how are we to make sense of these millions of hours of banal images? Media scholar Laura U. Marks argues that in our contemporary media landscape, we have to distinguish between the domain of images and the domain of information. The former belongs to the world of the sensuous while the latter belongs to the world of the rational bureaucratic. Thus, the images captured by surveillance cameras rarely enter the world of image-making but are deployed for evidentiary purposes or used as pure information per se.
Shift of images
This seems to signal a significant shift of images from the the realm of the sensual and perceptual to information culture where images are subsumed within the logic of data, power and secrecy. In contrast to the domain of information, Laura posits images as things that unfold from the world not in a truthful but in an enigmatic manner.
Actual CCTV footage went into the making of Manu Luksch’s Faceless.
What then might it mean to think of film or image-making practices that seek to rescue images from the domain of information? Will these image-making practices be confined only to oppositional practices pitting art against surveillance regimes, or is it possible to imagine creative and radical art practices that use infrastructures of surveillance against itself?
These questions gain a special urgency in India where projects like Aadhar (despite its dubious legality) are being implemented as a fait accompli , and it might be worth revisiting a remarkable film project from 10 years ago for clues, and one which to my mind perfectly illustrates the possibility of how images may unfold enigmatically even from the regime of information.
Faceless is a film by Austrian artist Manu Luksch set in a not-too-distant future ruled by a “Real-Time” calendar, without the past or future, and where everybody is faceless. A woman panics when she wakes up one day with a face. She slowly finds out more about the lost power and history of the human face and begins a search for its future.
Imagined as a science-fiction fairytale, the film moves between quotidian images of the protagonist’s wandering amidst a population of people alienated without faces, and her dreams of intimacy and community. Made as a response to the hyper-surveillance of London (where it is estimated that up to 70% of your time in a public place is captured by a video camera), the manner in which the film was made is a remarkable coming together of legal activism and filmmaking.
Actual CCTV footage went into the making of Manu Luksch’s Faceless.
The Data Protection Act in the U.K. and EU directives give individuals the right to access personal data held in computer filing systems but protects the privacy of third parties. The law has subsequently been amended but at the time when Manu made her film, it meant that any citizen could requisition the government for all video footage which had captured her face in public spaces. But while providing such footage, the government also had to ensure that it did not violate the privacy of other citizens whose faces may have been captured. They thus had to go through the laborious process of blackening out the faces of everybody else and giving the footage to the filmmaker.
Blackened out
Creatively using the right to information as well as this provision of the data protection act, Manu collected a large amount of CCTV footage in which you could only see her face while everyone else’s was blackened out.
This footage formed the basis of her faceless world. Manu also innovatively staged situations (from elaborately choreographed dances to romantic sequences) in front of surveillance cameras and then proceeded to requisition footage of those cameras, effectively using the infrastructure of the state as a filmmaking apparatus.
Her practice was inspired by an activist group called the Surveillance Camera Players who have attempted to subvert the entire process of surveillance by using all of the infrastructure of these hundreds of thousands of cameras installed in various public places.
This group is also responsible for creating a “manifesto for CCTV filmmakers” — which amongst other things mandates that films made from CCTV should not use any specialist equipment or cameras; the only cameras that could be used had to be CCTV cameras already in place and the footage had to be obtained by using the Data Protection Act.
One of the earliest instances of a counter aesthetics of surveillance, Faceless holds out the promise that image-making may still be one of the last defences against an information regime that threatens to swallow up all images, and for that reason alone, the film could not be more timely.
The writer started watching films in theatres. Then video came and shocked him. Now, he tries to figure out even smaller screens and the future of image cultures.
