The Screen that Sees Everything: The Visual Motif of the Control Room in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

The visual motive of the surveillance and control room constitutes an invention born with the cinematographic technology itself. Through an exploration of the different configurations of the motif both in the cinema and in contemporary television fiction, this article explores the centrality of this motif in any attempt to define the contemporary image. From the control cabinet to the development of a horizontal surveillance typical of post-Foucaultian societies, the control room constitutes one of the central nuclei of war cinema, critical questioning of power and robbery movies in banks or casinos. It has also been reinvented by filmmakers like David Lynch and continues to be the fundamental vector in which is settled the nature of all those images not necessarily captured by the human eye, what Harun Farocki called operational images or phantom shots.