paywastoon:In Kirsten Johnson’s The Above a U.S. military surveillance balloon floats on a tether hi
paywastoon:In Kirsten Johnson’s The Above a U.S. military surveillance balloon floats on a tether high above Kabul, Afghanistan. Its capacities are both highly classified and deeply mysterious.In an interview, the director notes: I was informally told by the PR person at the[American] embassy that I didn’t have the right to shoot it. And I was like oh, wow, I’m not allowed to shoot the sky? Really? Even though it’s in every one of my shots? Then I started asking people on the street what they thought it was, and what it meant to them. People said things like, “It can see underground.” “It can see underneath burqas.” To some people it was feeling like a transgression in their lives. Then other people totally didn’t care. They thought it was completely ineffective. That god is much more powerful than this little thing in the sky. So there was a huge spectrum of responses to it. I’ve long been a person who’s thought about what Foucault wrote about Jeremy Bentham and the Panopticon, and these institutions where you create setups for people feeling like they’re being watched all the time, even if they’re not necessarily being watched all the time. When I was working on a film in Sudan, every day we had to check in and talk about what we planned to film, but they would also have a list of what we’d filmed the day before — they knew everywhere we were. It was such a revelation that surveillance states can operate without technology, too. Everybody’s in on the deal. -- source link
#pedagogy#documentary