Top Secret: Cinéma et espionnage

Forensic Architecture is presenting two films which form part of its investigation Digital Violence: How the NSO Group Enables State Terror (2021).

The Top Secret exhibition at the Cinémathèque Française explores the intertwined relationship between espionage and cinema, reflecting the scope and vitality of a subject that unfolds as much in history as in world geography. The epicenter of spy intrigue keeps being shifted and reconfigured, from the divided cities of Europe (The Kremlin Letter, John Huston, 1970) to the Middle East (The Bureau series, created by Eric Rochant ), highlighting today renewed intelligence strategies, characteristics of the post-9/11 security world, whose impact on the staging generates new codes, new faces.

The exhibition moves through a variety of espionage modes, reflected in the contributions to the exhibition. Espionage is no more reducible to a genre than it is to an artistic medium: always seeking to reinvent itself, it goes from literature to cinema (many films shown in the exhibition are adaptations of books by Ian Fleming, Graham Greene or Tom Clancy), and from design to contemporary art.

Further, the exhibition also questions romantic depictions of espionage, and seeks to expose the role of cinema as an instrument of propaganda and a tool in the hands of intelligence services. From the recording of information and the creation of narratives, to the reinvention of the same modes of surveillance and oppression turned on their heads, the exhibition demonstrates how the art of intelligence is more topical than ever, raises ethical and political questions, while producing new artistic and critical forms.

The exhibition is curated by Alexandra Midal & Matthieu Orléan.