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Panopticon

by Relja Penezic, Director
The Cinema Guild, NYC, 2003
VHS/DVD, 37 minutes, color
Sales, $59.95
ISBN: 0-7815-0972-6.

Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney
PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007


mike.leggett@uts.edu.au

Described by the producers as an "offbeat mockumentary" involving the Chairman of Worldwide Monitor and a performance by the Surveillance Chamber Music Society in

"a celebration of Jeremy Bentham, whose architectural design of the Panopticon revolutionised systems of penal surveillance in the 18th Century. By allowing prison guards to observe inmates without inmates seeing them, Bentham’s concept offered a tremendous boon to surveillance techniques and psychological control throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries."

The Chairman is, of course, an actor who speaks real slow about some aspects of Bentham scholarship–Foucault manages a credit too–whilst the chamber orchestra provide a contemporary musical backdrop to his voice intoning in the promised mocking manner.

The director of this confection meanwhile runs the distance with the various effects filters, (the downside of digital video production generally), as miscellaneous footage, including the trusty re-animation shots of the Muybridge subjects, are "blended with historical photos, spy cameras, surveillance video and audio sensors" apparently "to address issues of privacy in contemporary society."

This has to be recognised praiseworthy as a topic to consider in the present climate of governmental and corporate usage of surveillance in the control of freedom loving peoples like you and me. However, the fact that we are to a person suspects in the hunt for the illusive but allegedly ever present enemies of the state, is beyond creative exploration by the producers and falls short of either an entertainment or a commentary. Bentham’s precocious scholarly contributions to moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and Utilitarianism in which he observed that "pain and pleasure are the sovereign masters governing man's conduct" may well have unconsciously led the producers of this tape into a pertinent area of his work–"calculating quantities of happiness" may have also entered their equations as it did his.

There’s little to recommend this production as a means for understanding the contribution Bentham made in the several fields he helped define but, if nothing else, it may, hopefully, raise some interest for acquiring a greater understanding from other sources.
Needless to say, he’s a sexy topic for web publishers too, though University College London, which he inspired, may well be a leader in the field.

 

 




Updated 1st December 2004


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