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Films

Defining Violence

Terri Murray on Wim Wenders and panoptic power.

Wim Wenders’ penultimate film, The End of Violence (1997), portrays a vast government satellite surveillance network, the putative purpose of which is “to cut down on crime response time by two hundred percent.” This, claim its owners, “could be the end of violence as we know it.” The true aim of the state is a voyeurism which will allow its users to be all-seeing and hence all-knowing. Wenders’ aim in this film is to say something about violence of another kind – a kind which cannot be seen, but is a way of seeing.

Wenders’ implicit critique of state surveillance and the presuppositions used to justify it has many parallels with Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and knowledge, and especially with what Foucault called ‘bio-power’.

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