surveillance & control

A photographer with a broken leg watches the courtyard in Rear Window until he is sure a neighbour has killed his wife. A Clockwork Orange takes a violent boy and edits him. Somebody is always being watched, corrected, or kept, and the person doing it thinks they are helping.

Its neighbour is Institutional Corruption, which is about offices abused for gain; this term is about visibility as the instrument, whether or not anyone profits. The control half of the name is not decoration. These films are interested in the behaviour that being observed produces — the self-editing, the compliance, the performance — more than in the secrets that get collected.