They may be blocked from watching YouTube, but China’s 751 million internet users can binge on real-time video streams of yoga studios, swimming lessons, alpaca ranches and thousands of other scenes captured by surveillance cameras.
Much of what’s available would be unthinkable in the West...
In China, however, surveillance is both pervasive and widely accepted. And that’s the subject of a new film by one of China’s best-known contemporary artists.
In “Dragonfly Eyes,” director Xu Bing uses real surveillance footage to tell the story of an ill-fated romance between a young woman who works on a dairy farm and a technician who watches her through the farm’s surveillance system. Mr. Xu believes it’s the first full-length fiction film to be made entirely with surveillance footage.
Creating “Dragonfly Eyes” convinced Mr. Xu of the prescience of “The Truman Show,” the 1998 satire starring Jim Carrey as a man whose every moment is telecast live without his knowledge, the director said.
“The entire world has become a gigantic film studio,” he said. more sing-a-long
