Dalia Hatalova Blog Post # 9/15

Pairing Robert Bresson's films,  A Man Escaped (1956) and L'Argent (1983), with Theodore J. Flicker's bizarre spy/sci-fi comedy The President's Analyst (1967) may seem counterintuitive. Yet, it was the very combination of these films that struck my interest. The first of the trio, A Man Escaped, which I watched yesterday with a friend and was reflecting on in the view of the readings, presents supremely traditional government surveillance. The protagonist, a man in a Nazi camp for French soldiers arrested for terrorism, attempts to escape. The surveillance is physical in the form of guards high above (a la panopticon), and his attempts to escape are conducted through purely physical means. It is the naturalness of this world and its stationing of surveillance as a governmental and military endeavor that proves curious in view of the texts assigned for this week's class. Perhaps, it is closest to Browne's descriptions of historical racialized surveillance, but it is nevertheless far from Google and Facebook, which create an entirely different sphere of information to Bresson's depiction of communication networks besides the prison washbasins. 

Contemporary governmental surveillance structures are leached off of the industry. This assertion made by Andrejevic provides an exciting reading when looking back in time to the second of the three films, The President's Analyst. In view of this course, I definitely recommend the film, which (as the title implies) centers on a doctor assigned to be a therapist for the president. Filled with the paranoia of spies targeting him, he flees the job after some time, only to be attempted to be kidnapped by a number of spies and eliminated by the FBI, as he carries secret information. The primary entity interested in capturing him, however, is surprisingly revealed not to be a country but a corporation: the phone company. In the clip below, it is the analyst captured by the phone company who is supposed to persuade the president to allow for a phone implant into people's brains. The phone company's watching of the main characters happily reuniting at the end of the film is an ominous foreboding in this fantastical comedy of what is to come. However, more pertinently, it shows that during the time, physical espionage was seen as a governmental approach, whereas technical espionage was an industrial endeavor. Since then, the two have mixed. 

Bringing in the last film was just based on the association I made when reading the text by Andrejevic, which speaks of the way that profiles and surveillance are constructed to predict crime, reminiscent of the text on terrorism targets being determined by a combination of digital traces. When speaking of preventative tactics in the police, Andrejevic mentions a man, Robert McDaniel, who was confronted by police because of an algorithmic assertion that he would commit a crime. When doing some additional research, I came upon an article that discussed the case. With McDaniel, he was identified on a heat list, but it was that process itself that led to him being not the perpetrator but the victim of gun violence. Matt Stroud writes, "In McDaniel's view, the heat list caused the harm its creators hoped to avoid: it predicted a shooting that wouldn't have happened if it hadn't predicted the shooting" (theverge.com). With this story, my thoughts turned to L'Argent, where an innocent man is taken to prison because of unwittingly passing along a forged banknote, only to eventually be led to violent crime. While identifying someone who is innocent might appear to need no more than a shrug of the shoulders, the consequences of misincarceration or mistargeting should be questioned. The intermingling of circumstances makes the individual an impossible science, as Barthes writes. While potentiality for crime exists in everyone, potential does not come into being on its own.