Invisible Trap (1979): A Utopian Representation of the Surveillance Society in the Second Pahlavi government

Panopticon surveillance is a concept that was first used by Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher of the 18th century, in designing a fundamentally new type of prison. Michel Foucault, a French historian and thinker, returns to this concept in the 20th century and explains it as the new surveillance mechanisms of modern societies. Foucault believed that the disciplinary power to be applied should have a permanent, exhaustive and omnipresent means of surveillance that remains invisible while making everything visible. As a result, the new strategy of this power is based on hierarchical surveillance. In fact, Foucault reads the Panopticon as a generalizable model and a plan for the future that explains power relations in the daily life of people on a very macro level. From his point of view, omniscient supervision in Bentham's plan provides a central metaphor to describe the mechanisms of disciplinary power in modern societies. As a result, he believed that modern societies can be called disciplinary societies.
During recent decades, this concept has transcended the framework of social studies and entered the field of cinema studies. By reviewing the works of early cinema, film scholars have confirmed the inherent links and affinities between surveillance and medium of cinema and have paid attention to thematic and structural ways of using it in films. This article seeks to analyze the way Panopticon surveillance is represented in the film The Invisible Trap (1979), borrowing from the ideas of Michel Foucault. The Invisible Trap is a lesser-known film in Iran's pre-revolutionary cinema, which was made by the order of SAVAK security organization in 1979. Following the developments of the year of its production and the reluctance of its actors to talk about it, the film was forgotten and joined the list of abandoned films in the history of Iranian cinema. The film narrates the true story of identifying, monitoring and arresting one of the spies of the imperial army of the Pahlavi regime, named Ahmad Moqrabi, who was cooperating with KGB officers for many years. To this end, first, the surveillance mechanisms in Panopticon are examined, and then, in order to explain the concept of the Panopticon surveillance, Foucault's views are borrowed. Then, the concept of surveillance cinema is analyzed from the perspective of important theoreticians of this field and finally the selected film in Iranian cinema is analyzed. At the end, a conclusion is drawn about the application of Panopticon surveillance in The Invisible Trap (1979). The current research, which was carried out with a descriptive-analytical method and using library sources, raises the argument that through this work, SAVAK had tried to represent itself as a Panopticon institution that is able to secretly monitor and take care of all citizens in their daily affairs. From this point of view, the film takes powerful steps in the aesthetic drawing of Pahlavi's disciplinary character and displays a completely calculated disciplinary maneuver for its audience; Creating a utopian image of the city under domination.