Ranging over a rich variety of material from film and film literature, and encompassing a critical interrogation of traditional realist ethnographic and cinematic texts, this book highlights the extent to which the cinema has contributed to the rise of voyeurism throughout society.

The cinema not only turns its audience into voyeurs, eagerly following the lives of its screen characters, but casts its key players as onlookers, spying on other's lives. The nature of the cinematic voyeur is examined in depth, as are its implications for contemporary society. Norman K Denzin analyzes Hollywood's manipulations of gender, race and class, and, drawing on the work of Foucault, argues that the cinematic gaze must be understood as part of the machinery of surveillance and power which regulates social behaviour in the late twentieth century.