Film Chronicle: 1984 dir. by Michael Radford, and: Eye in the Sky dir. by Gavin Hood, and: The Last Enemy dir. by Iain MacDonald, and: Hamlet dir. by Gregory Doran, and: Hamlet dir. by Michael Almereyda, and: You Were Never Really Here dir. by Lynne Ramsay, and: Caché dir. by Michael Haneke, and: The Lives of Others dir. by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (review)

Do you sense you're being watched? That inconspicuous camera set high up on the building façade, panning relentlessly from side to side—what footage is it recording, and for whom? Is your tablet being tracked? Or the turnpike transponder in your car? What happens with all the personal data you so heedlessly furnish to the internet? In the latest breach of a computer system, did someone hack your social security number? Has the tiny aperture at the top of your laptop screen been opened by a malware worm and is it clandestinely taking pictures of you and recording your voice? How private is your privacy, really?

On its way to becoming a mainstay of the contemporary economy (see Shoshana Zuboff's recent book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism), the exposure to onlookers' eyes and listeners' ears has for years now been a daily constant, and for some a cause for concern or anxiety, or even paranoia. Modern-technology-enabled onlookers' eyes and listeners' ears: that is important. In the past surveillance had to be carried out artisanally, for example by watchers with binoculars or shadowers on the street like the trench-coated pair whom Richard Hannay glimpses through the window in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. Then later, electronics arrived, and auditory surveillance suddenly became the thing to fear, the bug in the room, the wiretap on the phone line, the unimaginably sensitive directional microphone such as was pointed at the trysting couple in Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation. Nowadays, thanks to improved technology—CCTV and tracking cookies, one-way mirrors and facial recognition software, drone-mounted sensors and voice-activated recorders—all modes of overseeing and overhearing seem possible, automated ones, improvised ones. Think of the opening scene of John Chu's rom-com Crazy Rich Asians, where the rich boy's new girlfriend is surreptitiously photographed by a passerby pretending to take a selfie on her smartphone. The girlfriend's photo is instantly uploaded to social media, her once-private identity transformed to a meme. The very latest thing in surveillance is crowdsourcing.

The whole world as panopticon . . . No art forms seem better suited to trace the lineaments of this world than film and television, creative modes which are of course camera- and microphone-based themselves, investigations of what can be seen and heard. Screens are good at showing the screens all around our lives and at mimicking technical developments in the art of surveillance; also good, over time, at revealing our varying attitudes to the art. Six decades ago, in Hitchcock's Rear Window, we could applaud the across-the-courtyard snooping of Jimmy Stewart's photo-journalist character because he is tracking the progress of what appears to be a murder. Later, surveillance became permissible as a tool of Lawful Authority. In the opening episodes of David Simon's The Wire, Baltimore detectives listen in on drug dealers' phone calls; in the closing scenes of Alastair Reid's Traffik, a bug is hidden under the desk of the cartel kingpin; and in hundreds of police-procedural television dramas, closed-circuit footage from street cameras leads to quick arrests, usually after the geeks on the squad sharpen up the images with a few keystrokes. Unquestionably, screens can be protective. Think of those shown...