From the surveilling subject to the surveilled object; Surveillance as an aesthetic form in The Color Purple (2010) and Midday Adventures (2017)

The present article analyzes the representation of surveillance in The Color Purple (2010) and Midday Adventures (2017) with an aesthetic approach. Regarding the idea of Panopticon surveillance, the selected movies for case study are two notable films in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Michel Foucault, the French thinker and historian of the 20th century, in his book, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, based on the idea of the Panopticon prison, analyzes the concept of Panopticon surveillance. The Panopticon, a fundamentally new type of prison, was designed in the 18th century by Jeremy Bentham, an English utilitarian philosopher. This modern prison exposes the cells of prisoners to a supervisor who is hidden in the darkness of central tower. Foucault describes the surveillance mechanisms in the Panopticon as the surveillance mechanisms of modern political powers in order to maintaing social order in society. In recent years, the discourse of surveillance influenced by the thoughts of Michel Foucault has formed a discussion about surveillance cinema in film studies. By reviewing the works of early cinema, the theoreticians of this field have confirmed the inherent links and affinities between surveillance and medium of cinema and have paid attention to thematic and structural ways of using it in films. Also they have tried to study the ways of using this concept in movies by emphasizing the affinity between the surveillance and the cinematic form. In this approach, they have paid attention to the moving from a thematic concern away to structural engagement of surveillance in the aesthetic foundation of films. In Iranian cinema, one can find significant examples that have used the idea of Panopticon surveillance in an intelligent way. The present research first tries to examine the concept of Panopticon surveillance in Michel Foucault's thought and in the next step to study the analytical approaches of film scholars in explaining the concept of surveillance cinema. At the end, by focusing on the selected films, the structural application of surveillance in these two works is examined. The findings of this research reveal that these two works have used structural elements in different ways to reflect the idea of surveillance in their aesthetic forms.