The Unblinking Algorithm: Neorealism in the Age of Surveillance

By Osman Arslan Film History, Directing, Movies and TV, Cinematography January 2, 2026

The water off the coast of Miami is a placid turquoise, a baptismal font for a boy drowning in silence. As Juan (Mahershala Ali) holds a young Chiron (Alex Hibbert) afloat in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016), the camera bobs with them, an intimate third party in this fragile moment of surrogate fatherhood. For nearly three uninterrupted minutes, we are immersed in a lesson about survival, about trusting the world enough to let it hold you. The shot is a marvel of temporal grace, a pocket of real time carved out of narrative necessity. It feels profoundly new, yet its DNA is ancient, stretching back to the rubble-strewn streets of postwar Italy. There, in the cinema of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, the long take was a moral imperative, a way of looking at the world with an unbroken gaze to bear witness to the dignity of human struggle.

Yet, to simply label Jenkins’s work a descendant of Italian Neorealism is to miss the radical mutation that has occurred. While the neorealist canon is rightly celebrated for its postwar, street-level authenticity, I believe its most potent and unacknowledged legacy persists not as nostalgic homage but as a form of subversive weaponry in the 2010s streaming era. In the hands of directors like Jenkins, Chloé Zhao, and Claire Denis, the formal tenets of neorealism, particularly the long take and deep focus, are being redeployed. They are used to expose the commodification of labor under a new economic regime: the pervasive, invisible gaze of digital surveillance capitalism. This essay argues that these filmmakers invert neorealist humanism, transforming its observational ethics into a potent critique of algorithmic voyeurism, where the camera’s unblinking eye no longer merely witnesses reality but mimics the very systems that seek to data-mine it.

###

The Long Take, Reborn and Recoded

The long take has always been a repository of cinematic ideology. For a realist theorist like André Bazin, it was the cornerstone of an ethical cinema, a technique that respected the spatial and temporal integrity of an event. By refusing the analytical fragmentation of montage, the long take allows ambiguity to flourish, empowering the viewer to scan the frame and form their own conclusions. In neorealist masterworks like Rossellini’s Paisan (1946), unbroken shots following partisans through the Po Valley or impoverished families through the streets of Rome served a dual purpose: they authenticated the desperation of the historical moment while simultaneously affirming a shared, observable reality. The duration of the shot was a testament to the duration of suffering and resilience.

In Moonlight, that Bazinian principle is both honored and subverted. The floating scene carries the same weight of lived reality, but its context has been radically altered. Jenkins does not work with the grainy, contingent film stock of the 1940s, but with the pristine, accessible clarity of digital video. This technological shift is not trivial. The affordability and flexibility of digital cameras in the 2010s democratized the long take, making it a staple of independent cinema, yet this accessibility arrived alongside the rise of the streaming platform. Moonlight was famously distributed by A24 and eventually streamed on Netflix, its intimate aesthetics perfectly suited to the personal screen.

Herein lies the crucial inversion. The neorealist long take was a public act of witness, screened in theaters for a collective audience. The digital long take in Moonlight creates a zone of hyper-intimacy, a private confession. As Juan teaches Chiron to swim, the camera’s proximity and duration forge a bond between them, a sanctuary from the hyper-masculine codes of the world on shore. But this sanctuary is precarious. It is a world under constant surveillance, not just from the police who haunt Chiron’s neighborhood, but from the societal gaze that polices his blackness and his burgeoning queer identity. The unbroken shot, therefore, does not just affirm his existence; it heightens our awareness of its fragility. It feels less like an observation of public life, in the spirit of Zavattini, and more like a privileged glimpse into a private life that is perpetually at risk of being breached, catalogued, and punished. The camera’s lingering presence carries an undertone of surveillance, mirroring the forces of carceral and social control that define Chiron’s existence. As the cultural theorist Mark Fisher argued in his concept of "Capitalist Realism," we live in a state where the logic of the market feels so totalizing that its surveillance becomes an atmospheric pressure, an assumed condition of being. Jenkins’s long takes give form to this pressure, showing us intimacy that is always already circumscribed by an invisible apparatus of power.

###

Deep Focus and the Politics of the Pedestrian Gaze

If the long take was one pillar of the neorealist project, deep focus cinematography was another. By keeping both foreground and background in sharp relief, directors like De Sica in Bicycle Thieves (1948) could place their protagonists squarely within a larger social fabric. When Ricci and his son Bruno search for their stolen bicycle, the city of Rome is not a mere backdrop; it is a living character, a labyrinth of social and economic forces in which they are hopelessly, visibly enmeshed. The deep focus compositions insist on the relationship between the individual and their environment, a visual representation of the neorealist commitment to social context.

Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), a film that became an emblem of the streaming era through its Hulu release, revives this technique for the age of the gig economy. Drawing on a visual language heavily influenced by Terrence Malick, Zhao employs breathtaking deep-focus shots of the American West. We see Fern (Frances McDormand) and her van, the “Vanguard,” as a tiny speck against the monumental landscapes of the Badlands or a vast coastal plain. On the surface, this might appear to be a romantic vision of American individualism and open-road freedom. But seen through a neorealist lens, its political function becomes clearer.

Zhao’s aesthetic revives what Cesare Zavattini, neorealism’s key theorist, called the “pedestrian” gaze, a need for cinema to follow ordinary people through the rhythms of their daily lives. But the environment Fern traverses is not the bustling social space of De Sica’s Rome; it is a landscape of profound isolation. The deep focus does not embed her in a community but emphasizes her atomization. The vast, empty spaces between campsites, seasonal jobs, and Amazon fulfillment centers visualize the fracturing of the American social contract. In Bicycle Thieves, the crowd is a source of both anonymity and potential solidarity. In Nomadland, the other nomads Fern encounters are temporary constellations, fleeting communities in a system designed to keep them moving, and working, alone.

This is where the critique of surveillance deepens. Fern’s labor is tracked not by a foreman’s watchful eye but by the invisible logistics of platform capitalism. Her life is dictated by the rhythms of Amazon’s CamperForce program, her movements governed by the seasonal availability of precarious jobs. The camera’s expansive, all-seeing perspective, which captures the sublime beauty of the landscape, also rhymes with the detached, god-like view of a logistical algorithm tracking its assets. In this way, Zhao subverts the observational humanism of a movement like the Sensory Ethnography Lab, whose work, as seen in a film like Leviathan (2012), seeks an almost pure, disembodied immersion in physical processes. Zhao adopts a similar immersive quality, but she weaponizes it. The viewer is forced to confront not just the tactile reality of Fern’s labor, but the political and economic systems that render her both hyper-visible as a worker and socially invisible as a person. The deep focus becomes an anti-surveillance tool, not by hiding, but by revealing the sheer scale of the landscape of control. As the scholar Giuliana Bruno has written on the power of maps and location in cinema, the landscapes in Nomadland function as an "atlas of emotion," charting the geography of post-2008 economic precarity.

###

From Collective Struggle to Individualized Haunting

The thematic core of Italian Neorealism was the collective struggle for survival and dignity in the face of systemic failure. The plight of Ricci in Bicycle Thieves was his own, but it was also the plight of a generation, a nation. The camera’s persistent focus on his worn face and his son’s anxious eyes was an appeal to a shared humanity. The films of the 2010s discussed here retain the focus on economic precarity, but they dramatize a crucial shift: the struggle is no longer collective but terrifyingly individual, and the primary antagonist is not simply poverty, but the psychological horror of being perpetually monitored.

A key bridge to this sensibility can be found in the work of Andrea Arnold, particularly Fish Tank (2009). Shot with a restless handheld camera that clings to its teenage protagonist, Mia, the film uses relentless long takes to document the physical and emotional labor of her existence in a grim Essex housing estate. Arnold’s style feels like a British neorealist update, raw and immediate, but its focus is intensely personal. Mia’s struggle is a claustrophobic fight for selfhood within the confines of her bleak apartment. Her experience prefigures the prestige nomadism of Nomadland, revealing the grinding reality of underclass life that a more romanticized vision can elide.

By the 2010s, this individualized focus is fully integrated with a critique of surveillance. The unblinking camera in films by Jenkins and Zhao no longer functions as a compassionate witness in the neorealist tradition. Instead, it simulates the indifferent, panoptic gaze of data capitalism. In Moonlight, Chiron’s life is a series of performances, of codes he must adopt to survive. The long take in the diner scene near the film’s end, where he reunites with Kevin, is heavy with unspoken history. The duration of the shot forces us to sit with the weight of everything that has been repressed. The camera’s steady observation feels less like Bazin’s window on the world and more like a security camera in the soul, recording the subtle transactions of identity.

This brings us to an unexpected but crucial figure in this lineage: Claire Denis. For decades, Denis has practiced a form of corporeal ethnography, using long takes and a tactile sensory focus to explore bodies under pressure, often within institutional or colonial frameworks. In Beau Travail (1999), her camera observes the ritualized labor of French Foreign Legionnaires in Djibouti with a gaze that is both hypnotic and analytical. The endless, repetitive drills under the punishing sun are captured in long, mesmerizing sequences that predate the aestheticization of labor in many contemporary films. Denis’s work provides a vital bridge. Her postcolonial lens understands that the surveilled body is almost always a marginalized one, and her focus on the militarized, masculine body anticipates Jenkins's deep interrogations of black masculinity.

In later films like 35 Rhums (2008), Denis’s use of long, patient takes to observe the domestic rituals of a father and daughter, whose lives are structured by the rhythms of the railroad, feels like a direct precursor to the neorealist revival of the 2010s. For Denis, as for Jenkins and Zhao, duration is a tool to resist the hyper-acceleration of modern life. They use the long take to insist on the material reality of bodies and the dignity of labor, whether it is operating a train, cooking a meal, or packing a box in an Amazon warehouse. In their hands, the streaming platform, an engine of digital acceleration, becomes an unwitting archive of slowness, a repository for a cinematic tradition re-tuned to critique the very logic that sustains it.

###

The Spectator in the Machine

What, then, does it mean to watch these films today? The neorealist project was predicated on a moral contract with the viewer. By showing the unvarnished truth of postwar life, it sought to provoke empathy, understanding, and perhaps even action. The films were a mirror held up to society, demanding that it recognize itself. Seventy years on, that mirror has become a screen, and the act of watching has grown infinitely more complex. When we stream Moonlight or Nomadland, we are not simply passive observers. We are users, our viewing habits tracked, our preferences logged, our emotional responses converted into data points that feed the very algorithmic systems these films implicitly critique.

This creates a profound and unsettling paradox. We are moved by a cinematic language of humanism, of duration, and of physical reality, delivered to us through a disembodied system of abstract data. The streaming platform becomes both the gallery for the art and the architecture of the prison it depicts. The empathy we feel for Chiron or Fern is real, yet our act of watching makes us complicit in the culture of surveillance that defines their worlds. We are not the unified audience of a postwar cinema palace, sharing in a public emotional experience. We are isolated nodes in a network, our private sympathies transmuted into fuel for the machine.

Perhaps this is the ultimate, chilling legacy of neorealism in our time. Its formal strategies are no longer just tools for revealing the world; they are tools for revealing our fraught relationship to watching itself. The directors carrying this tradition forward are not asking us to simply look at the struggles of others. They are challenging us to consider the political implications of our own gaze. The unblinking eye of the camera, once a symbol of moral clarity and humanist witness, now stares back at us, reflecting our own image in the polished black screen of a laptop or a phone. It leaves us with an open and deeply uncomfortable question: in an age when every act of looking is recorded, what does it mean to truly see? The long take rolls on, but now it captures both the character on screen and the ghost of the spectator trapped in the machine.

---