Surveillance as Cinema

Several years ago, I worked as an archivist for Foster and Partners, the London-based architectural design firm responsible for New York’s Hearst Tower, the British headquarters of Swiss Re, and Hong Kong International Airport, among other well-known projects. One of my earliest assignments was to sort through and catalog the contents of some white laminate cupboards, each stuffed full to bursting with random, often unlabeled, videotapes. One day, among press copies of American engineering documentaries and amateur recordings of television interviews featuring Lord Foster himself, I came across a small cardboard box containing surveillance tapes.

Alone in a dark room on the second floor, I began replaying the tapes on the office VCR. I realized I was looking at security footage, shot from within London’s Wembley Stadium. My immediate thought was that I had discovered something—a crime, a mugging, a murder—and so I sat forward and watched the scene very carefully.

I waited. But nothing happened. Or, more precisely, not much happened. People walked across the frame. Men stepped into the restroom, or ordered more beer. A woman stopped, pulled a phone out of her handbag, and dialed. After all, this was 2002—which meant Foster and Partners were still in the process of refining their design for the new Wembley Stadium, a soccer arena that opened in 2006. The project architects must have saved these tapes, it finally occurred to me, for the sake of some form of spatial analysis: that is, these tapes would reveal, in all their boring, black and white eventlessness, how crowds moved through and interacted with the structure; where people congregated within the stadium; and what Foster and Partners should prepare for while finalizing their plans. Video surveillance, in this case, had been used not to solve a crime or to capture pickpockets, but as a clever way to improve architecture.

In a short film called Surveillance, pointed out to me by Princeton’s Thomas Y. Levin, artist Chris Petit questions the purpose of this kind of video surveillance, called closed-circuit television, or CCTV. “The idea of something being watched for twenty-four hours makes these images unlike any others,” Petit explains. “They deal in unedited time.” Petit’s film suggests that surveillance tapes don’t reveal a world riddled with crime and violence; on the contrary, CCTV shows “how little can still go on: a picture of an empty car park, where only the stamped-on time-code says we’re not looking at a photograph. It stays empty for so long that its very emptiness becomes a form of suspense.” In other words, there is something altogether more cinematic about CCTV than its current use as a tool of urban security might suggest; CCTV is strangely avant-garde, Petit claims.

In 1964, for instance, Andy Warhol produced a film called Empire. It consists of nothing but one stationary, eight-hour shot of New York’s Empire State Building. There is no dialogue, and no obvious plot. Aside from random effects of nighttime lighting, the image on the screen does not change. The camera sits, staring out at the towers of the city, sleepless, as if desperate for something to happen. Warhol’s Empire is cinema that waits. In many ways, it is Manhattan’s first surveillance film.

Of course, since Warhol pointed his lonely camera out the window of the Time-Life building, the amount of video surveillance in Manhattan has soared. There were some 2,397 cameras in all of Manhattan in 1998, but now Greenwich Village alone contains that many. In Britain, according to the BBC, there are now an astonishing 4.2 million CCTV cameras—about one for every fourteen people. These Orwellian factoids have prompted public dialogue to hover feverishly around two key questions: first, does surveillance really reduce crime and make our cities safer? Second, doesn’t surveillance, performed without public consent, violate our right to privacy?

These questions may seem somewhat less urgent upon reading a paper called “Behind the Screens” by University of Aberdeen sociologist Gavin J.D. Smith. He reveals, through ethnographic fieldwork conducted among CCTV control room operators, that the very guards meant to sort through this footage are much more likely to be drinking tea, filling out crossword puzzles, taking long cigarette breaks, or even, according to one guard, “swing[ing] camera 8 round on to the car park so that I can watch my own car. I just leave it on it the whole time I’m working,” the guard explains, because it “gives me a bit more peace of mind.”

Smith unsurprisingly concludes that “CCTV control rooms are perhaps not always operated as effectively as some public officials and academics assume. Indeed, the reality of CCTV operation would appear much more complex and ambiguous.”

Fear factor aside, I won’t deny the moral and political urgency behind questions of state power, surveillance, and citizens’ rights. I will nevertheless suggest that a much more interesting conversation could be had. Why have serious discussions of architecture and urban design for the most part excluded surveillance tapes? One of today’s most comprehensive catalogs of architectural space has been completely overlooked by the people most likely to learn from it. Surveillance tapes might actually be an ideal tool for spatial analysis, to be taught in our classes alongside books by Jane Jacobs and Manfredo Tafuri.

The precursor to such studies might be found in the work of urban planning analyst William H. Whyte. He spent sixteen years observing everyday life in contemporary cities and came up with such aphorisms as, “An open door is very attractive. Given a choice, people will head for the door that is open. Some people are natural door-openers. Most are not.” Whyte spent hours watching people on the sidewalk using time-lapse photography. What came of this was occasionally obvious (“People in big cities walk faster than people in small cities”) but often amusing.

The practice of architecture has neglected the mapping of these sorts of patterns, according to Bernard Tschumi, a Swiss architect and former dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. In his 1981 book The Manhattan Transcripts, he wrote that the task of the architect is to discover new ways of describing urban space—new forms of transcription for the city. “Any new attitude to architecture,” he explained, “had to question [architecture’s] mode of representation.” Tschumi thus devised his “Manhattan transcripts”: elaborate diagrams of urban events, which he called “movement notation,” that could be easily adapted “for architectural purposes.”

Tschumi’s new “science of the city,” however, being nothing more than a book full of diagrams, pales in comparison to the technical ambition of what we now call the security industry. If, in Britain alone, there are 4.2 million cameras watching the nation’s streets, parking lots, lobbies, and loading docks, then security guards are several orders of magnitude more successful at “notating” urban space than Bernard Tschumi—or any other architect, for that matter.

If there is a true transcript of the city, it is to be found in the avant-garde vigilance of CCTV, which captures the ongoing events of modernity, 24 hours a day. It should not be security guards installing and monitoring these cameras, but architects and urban planners. Only in the minutiae of passing minutes will they discover how the city should evolve. As composer John Cage once wrote: “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.”