THE CONCEPT OF SURVEILLANCE IN DISTOPIC CINEMA

Abstract

The phenomenon of surveillance has existed as an important control mechanism since the first years of human history. With the developing and changing technology, the phenomenon of surveillance has become sustainable in all areas of life. The fact that surveillance continues to exist in all areas of life has brought it to be a widely discussed and debated concept among different disciplines. Especially over the years, the concept of surveillance has been the subject of research in the fields of academic, literature and popular culture.  Another area that deals with the concept of surveillance as a subject is the cinema industry. The phenomenon of surveillance in the cinema industry constitutes one of the important paradigms of movies with dystopian narration. Dystopian cinema, which is a sub-genre of science-fiction cinema, conveys the human relations in the world of the present and the world of the future to the audience through the world of the future, which has a pessimistic society structure, with the opposite expression of the positive structure offered by the concept of utopia.  In this respect, the study provides an explanation of how the concept of surveillance is interpreted in dystopian cinema and how the concept plays a role. Based on the idea that one of the main themes of the films is the "surveillance phenomenon" in films with dystopian narratives, the study began with an effort to define surveillance as an indispensable power tool of postmodern society. Then, in the study, dystopian narrative and surveillance phenomenon in movies have been tried to be examined. After this conceptual framework, in the films Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott), Gattaca (1997, Andrew Niccol) and Minority Report (2002, Steven Spielberg), how surveillance became a control element in dystopian narrative was evaluated with descriptive analysis method. As a result, it has been seen that the phenomenon of surveillance, in the films chosen as samples, has loaded functions that alienate people who are watched under the name of security, alienate them from the society they are in, and differentiate the social life through the categories of "us" and "them".