Eyes Without a Face: Surveillance in Cinema

Overview

Peer into a world of moral murkiness and deception, with a series of films about surveillance at ACMI. Timed to coincide with the Melbourne Festival premiere of the critically-acclaimed stage adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, Eyes Without a Face: Surveillance in Cinema is the perfect program for people who like to watch.

The two-and-a-half-week program spans more than six full decades of filmmaking, beginning in 1954 with the quintessential voyeuristic thriller: Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Jumping forward to the early '80s, Brian De Palma and John Travolta channel post-Watergate paranoia in Blow Out, while English director Michael Radford sinks his teeth into the Orwell novel that started it all.

Moving into the new millennium, Michael Haneke's Cache and Andrea Arnold's Red Road use video surveillance as a means of unsettling their audience. The program is rounded out by a pair of documentaries, with We Live in Public recounting the disastrous attempts of artist Josh Harris to broadcast his every waking moment to the internet, and Citizenfour providing a timely look into the actions of government whistleblower Edward Snowden.

For more information and session times, visit the ACMI website.