Watching the Night: Surveillance and Cross-Sectional Montage in Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Abendland (2011)

Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s 2011 documentary Abendland is an important, if little-known, cinematic reflection on contemporary surveillance in Europe. Along with his 2005 documentary Unser täglich Brot, Geyrhalter’s films, this paper argues, revive and revise 1920s cross-sectional montage strategies in order to represent the active roles of technology in contemporary life. Through cross-sectional, formal associations, Abendland suggests a totalizing environment of night-time surveillance in the European Union and provocatively blurs normal distinctions between care and control. Geyrhalter’s deceptively simple strategies of camera positioning and editing succeed in visualizing the deeper perceptual structures and behaviours produced by surveillance and thus assert the lasting power of traditional cinematic techniques in relation to newer perceptual technologies.