50 years after The Conversation: A Virtual Roundtable on a Watergate Thriller in the Age of Snowden
(11/13 at 5pm CST)
Sponsored by the SSN Arts Committee
This event will focus on Francis Ford Coppola's classic, The Conversation (1974), a paranoid thriller that was made during the Watergate era. Its story about an audio surveyor who gives into paranoia invites questions regarding the lure of a paranoid outlook, the responsibility of the listener, and the way recognitions of the porous boundary between surveyor and surveyed may create a vexed political awakening. In a post-Snowden moment (more than 10 years after the revelations), the film also pushes us to ask: what can classics of surveillance cinema teach us about the historical roots of and coping with the dataveillance era? How does the cinematic aesthetic allow viewers a way to productively grasp the full allures and traps of the surveyor's position? Finally, can we use such cinema about analogue forms of surveillance to sense our own present digital vulnerabilities?
Moderator Fareed Ben-Youssef will offer attendees an account of the broad contours of The Conversation’s plot at the start of the conversation.
Join us on Wednesday 11/13 at 5:00pm CST for what is sure to be a provocative conversation on how essential surveillance concerns are mediated in classic American cinema!
Link to register for the hour-long Zoom conversation:
Rent The Conversation here:
Please circulate word of this event widely!
Speaker Bios:
Fareed Ben-Youssef is Assistant Professor in Film & Media Studies in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. He has frequently published on the intersections between surveillance studies and popular cinema including in his book No Jurisdiction: Legal, Political, and Aesthetic Disorder in Post-9/11 Genre Cinema (SUNY Press, 2022). He is also the Film Review Editor of Surveillance & Society.
Rory Fitzgerald Bledsoe is an interdisciplinary scholar/artist/curator. She is a PhD candidate in media studies and holds a J.D. She researches the legal gray areas created by digital technology and how art can intervene. Bledsoe recently founded the gallery project, Space___Space, which focuses on conceptual shows that contemplate advancing media technologies.
Torin Monahan is a Professor of Communication at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-Editor-in-Chief of Surveillance & Society. He is an internationally recognized researcher who studies the social and cultural dimensions of surveillance systems, with a specific focus on gender and racial inequalities. His latest book, Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance (Duke University Press, 2022), investigates the racializing effects of contemporary surveillance through the lens of visual and performance art.
David Murakami Wood is Professor of Critical Surveillance and Security Studies in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa, a Faculty Member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society and an associate of the AI + Society initiative. He is a leading organizer in the field of surveillance studies as co-founder and now co-Editor-in-Chief of Surveillance & Society.
