The article carried aut an iconographical study of the mostif of the surveillance room in film and TV series. This reserach has been carried out within the project Visual motifs in the public sphere: Production and circulation of images of power in Spain, 2011-2017 (MOVEP), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (CSO2017-88876-P, PIs: Jordi Balló and Ivan Pintor). 

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.

Salvadó, A., Oliva, M., & Pintor, I. (2020). The screen that sees all: The visual motif of the control room in contemporary fiction.  L’Atalante: Revista de Estudios Cinematográficos, (30), 167-181. http://www.revistaatalante.com/index.php?journal=atalante&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=798&path%5B%5D=624