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The Moving Master: Deconstructing Children Of Men

Author: William Dickerson, Filmmaking Department, New York Film


Academy Los Angeles
While the one-shot master, or oner, is impressive, its most impressive
when executed in service of the story, not in service of showmanship.
Alfonso Cuarons famous one-shot master from Children of Men is an
example of the former.
In the most extreme sense, a moving camera can delineate the beats
of a scene without much, if any, change in the actors blocking. A
moving camera has the ability to capture a variety of shots within the
shot, thereby isolating specific beats solely through the placement of
the frame on the subjectin this case, five actors inside a moving
vehicle. As the word implies, the beat is the pulse of the film. Its what
drives the story forward. Technically, its a division in a scene where the
action takes a turn, the momentum shifts, and one or more characters
adapt, or change, to the shift. As directors, its imperative that we
determine what the beats are, before we even think about directing
the film; as directors, we shoot the beats. While Cuaron chose to shoot
his car scene in one shot, he did not forget about shooting the beats
there are 17 of them, and he conveys each of them with crystal clarity.
Heres the premise of the film: In 2027, a chaotic world in which
women have somehow become infertile, a former activist agrees to
help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea.
The Beats:
1.The car radio crackles: it conjures nostalgia, introducing a song from
2003, a time when people refused to accept the future was right
around the corner.
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Cuaron begins the shot with a close-up single on Theo (Clive Owen),
who is sleeping against the window. He pulls out to a wide to reveal
the others in the car. This is referred to as slow disclosure, the revealing
of the full context of a situation to the audience.
2. In this wide frame, dialog exposition reveals a previous relationship
between Theo and Julian (Julianne Moore); he questions the girl
theyre transporting about what shes done, why shes special. Theres a
cynicism in his questions: hes not an activist anymore; hes part of the
system now.
Theo is going out of his way to separate himself from them: hes not
like them anymore.
3. The third beat begins with a medium close-up of Theo and Julian
together. Visually, they are not separate, but equal, subtext that is
furthermore strengthened with the use of a prop: the ping-pong ball.
Not only is he her equal, he is the only one who can perform this trick
with her. Cuaron isolates them in this frame; its as though theyre the
only ones in the car, oblivious to those around them or the passing
trees outside.
4. As Theo and Julian mime a kiss, the girl comments on it,
disapprovingly, and the camera moves toward hera move motivated
by Theos look, and subsequently, the spitting of the ball at her.
5. The camera turns 180 degrees, looking through the windshield as a
burning car rolls from the woods into the street, obstructing the
vehicles path.
6. The camera begins a 360 move, first framing the driverwho hasnt
been featured much in the scene and then framing everyone else in
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car, and in noticeably tighter shots than before. Initially, the frame was
looser, the feeling in the car more casual; however, as the urgency of
the circumstances increases, so does the tightness of the shots.
The camera begins to go in reversein fact, the entire vehicle and
camera rig goes in reversethus visually conveying a literal turn of
events.
They were moving forward with their mission, until an obstacle
occurred, which has now set them moving backwards. It is a major
turning point in the scene, and a major turning point for the camera.
Whereas before, the characters were focused on themselves, looking at
each other inside the car, now they become completely focused on
whats happening outside.
The viewer is as well. We are literally put in the middle of it all; we feel
just as vulnerable as they do. Just as the characters world is spinning
out of control, the camera is, and thats how were forced to see it.
7. The camera once again stops, framing up the windshield.
Moments before, Cuaron depicted a burning car in the distance, but
now it is his characters windshield that is on fire. The characters go
from observing a burning car to being the burning car.
As the beats progress, the drama builds and the stakes continue to
increase.
8. The camera then begins to follow the movement of the attacking
motorcyclist, i.e. the threat to the safety of the people inside the car.
The camera is right next to Julian as she gets shot, the blood
splattering onto the glass of the lens.
9. Immediately after the gunshot, the camera whips back to film the
reactions of the people in the backseat, settling on Theo as he attempts
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to treat Julians wound and then, moments later, defend himself


against the motorcyclist.
10. The camera then moves its perspective onto the driver and the
cracking windshield, throwing the focus onto the seaworthiness of the
car, and in doing so, ramping up the suspense once again: Will they
make it out of this? Will the car hold up and will the driver get them
out of this?
11. The camera twists back to Theo and Julian, once again isolated,
together in the frame (see Beat 3); however its the opposite of before.
She is facing away from him, dying in his arms. The nurse eventually
enters frame, attempting to help in the situation, and transforming the
2 shot into a 3 shot.
12. The camera turns back to the driver, resting its point of view
ostensibly with him as we see a police car drive toward, and then
eventually past, them.
13. The camera turns, framing the rear window over-the-shoulders of
Theo and the Nurse.
Once again utilizing slow disclosure, the camera pulls back to frame
the characters in a wide shot, weighing the frame toward the driver as
it racks focus onto his face: clearly, it implies, the driver has the most at
stake here if the cops catch them.
14. As with the motorcyclist, the camera movement becomes
motivated by the policeanother threatto them and their mission
moving with the police officers as they exit their car and approach.
15. As the officer speaks with the driver, the camera falls back into
Theos point of view.
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The two policemen are framed through the closed windoweveryone


else in the car obverses them, while the driver has his door open and
physically interacts with them without a barrier.
16. As the driver shoots the police officers, the camera gets out of the
car just as Theo does, moving right along with him.
At the beginning of the scene, everyone in the car was facing the same
way, joined together on the same mission. Theo now finds himself on
the opposite side of the driverhis gun, the car and line of the road
separating them physically. The mission has veered into a direction
Theo neither expected, nor approves of.
17. While Theo is forced back into the car at gunpoint, the camera is
left on the side of the roadpresumably where Theo would have liked
to remain himselfas the car speeds away from the lens.
Alfonso Cuaron is a master of shooting the beats, whether he sets
about capturing them in one shot or several. The above shot from
Children of Men is a superlative example of the importance of
delineating the beats of a scene. Cuaron meticulously crafted each of
these 17 beats and the transitions between them they are 17 reasons
why this is one of my favorite one-shot masters of all time.

Children of Men: A Visually Tantalizing Futuristic Masterpiece


Your baby is the miracle the whole world has been waiting
for.
- Michael Caine as Jasper Palmer Children of Men is a profound
film, one of the best of the year, if not one of the best ever. Children of
Menis a futuristic dramatic action film with excellent storytelling,
amazing never-seen-before cinematography and visual effects, and
fantastic performances all-around. This confirms that there are some
incredible filmmakers
out there that just need to be brought to light when they create
extraordinary films.
In 2027 the world lives in chaos as women have become infertile and
London is one of the only cities not yet destroyed by the mayhem that
results. The increasingly hostile environment builds tensions as
refugees are herded into camps and the remaining population tries to
survive. Ordinary bureaucrat Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is suddenly
drawn into a secretive adventure after he is shown the last hope of
mankind, a young woman named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) who is
pregnant. Suddenly and without warning Theo must help Kee reach
the Human Project, a boat off the shore of England that will help her to
save mankind. The film takes a rough ride from the futuristic dystopia
of London to the ravished and increasingly grungy war fields of
refugee camps, a visual feast that draws the viewer in.
Clive Owen and another great actor Chiwetel Ejiofor as Luke sharing a
few glasses of beer in a scene from Children of Men.
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Children of Men is very immersive and realistic - the filmmakers spared


no expense on immense, expansive sets and locations, and yet did not
overstep their bounds. The characters fit into the spaces with much
depth and incredible camerawork that ought to win Director of
Photography Emmanuel Lubezki an Oscar for the incomparable
cinematography. The futuristic style and attention to detail is exquisite
and everything is fully realized per the imaginings of visionary director
Alfonso Cuar3n (Y Tu Mam Tambin, Harry Potter and the Prisoner
of Azkaban). What seems like a simple set has every last detail subtly
furbished to fit a barren world 20 years in the future.
The cinematography that Cuar3n implements features lengthy scenes
that use smooth single-camera, single-shot movement over as many as
15 contiguous minutes. This amazing camerawork makes the strongest
impact in a scene near the end that keeps going so long, you'll never
believe it was done in a single shot. I have never seen scenes this
beautiful and this incredible ever. The only other movie to come close
to achieving this same unique excellence is The Fountain from this year
as well. This is an colossal achievement in its own right, on top of
everything else visually that Cuar3n has brought to the screen
withChildren of Men.
There are many moments of sheer brilliance, where Cuar3n uses
every last sense and feeling to creating an emphatic experience, and
it's unlike anything I've ever seen in a film before in my entire life. The
intricacies of the scenes and the setups that go into making sure every
meticulous detail is set perfectly is just mesmerizing. This is one of
those few films where you truly recognize how much work goes into
creating a life-changing cinematic experience, and Children of Men
will leave a life-changing impression.
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Theo (Clive Owen) escorts Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) and her baby in a
riveting scene during Children of Men.
Even if you already have plenty of respect for Clive Owen, this will
make you believe in his abilities even more. His performance, along
with an ensemble cast of Claire-Hope Ashitey as Kee, Michael Caine,
Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Huston, and Pam Ferris, fills
in as well with the same exquisite excellence that Cuar3n
implements. You'll quickly fall in love with many of the characters and
begin to care deeply for them; this is all part of the great plan that
Cuar3n has laid out to draw you even deeper into the film.
Is the film a success? Undoubtedly yes - but there is not a clear
message for audiences to take with them. Although the journey is long
and engulfing, the end just floats off quietly into the fog, without a
concrete conclusion or message. After becoming engrossed in its
identifiable, gripping themes of infertility, life, and coexisting as a
human race, I expected Children of Men to be more conclusive in its
conclusion. This ending is the only weak point, if I can call it that, a very
fine crack on an enormous marble masterpiece that can easily be
overlooked.
Last Word:
This film is a masterpiece, a visually innovative and beatuiful creation.
It's a must-see, one of the best films of 2006 (and now early 2007).
Cuaron and Owen together deliver a futuristic action sci-fi with bits of
drama, bits of tragedy, and a huge heaping of excellence that you will
not soon forget.

EMMEANUEL LUBEJKI CHIDLREN OF MEN


Hi,
I'm new here, and not exactly sure if I'm posting this in the right
category, but I'll give it a try.
I'm a film student in my first year, and right now our assignment is to
write an analysis on... whatever we wanted, really. The whole point
with the exercise is to show the teachers we can analyze something not
only from an audience's point of view, but as a film maker. And it had
to be something that you felt you could learn from and make full use
of later in your films.
So I chose cinematography, since I felt that was what I needed to learn
more about (editing is considered to be my strong suit). And I went
with Emmanuel Lubezki in Children of Men, more specifically the car
scene.
The analysis has to contain:
- A question/hypothesis that we must answer/investigate.
- A description of what we want to find out (no more than 25% of the
final text). - The analysis
- A conclusion
I figured maybe I could try to look at the scene as a whole: what
happens, the minus/plus strategy (bantering, laughing and having
fun, then the exploding car, someone gets shot dead etc), basically
somewhat a synopsis... and then find out how the unique
cinematography in this film tells the story: unique camera technique
and no cut at all during this scene.
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(WARNING: contains spoiler from the film)


For example, what I have so far is that the camera sort of acts like a
second person in the car. As if the audience is that person, in the car.
The camera rotates and "looks" at the same things a real person would
look at. When Julian gets shot, the camera moves away, as if turning
away from the shooting, and then focuses the attention on the front
shield breaking rather than having to look at Julian bleeding to
death...
And then there is at the end of the scene where they are pulled over by
police officers, and we step out of the car, and one of them suddenly
shoots both the officers. The camera has stepped out as well, and when
the others get back in after making sure the officers are dead, we are
left behind and have to watch the car drive away (from us). When I
showed this scene to my class, I had several people commenting on
this, and I thought it was really interesting. "Wait for me!" and "Let me
back in!" I heard.
(END spoilers)
So what I want to look at is what does this technique do for the scene
itself.. Why is it better than, say, doing regular shots inside the car with
"normal" cuts. How would that have affected the audience instead?
My question is, can anyone help me a little with this? Cinematography
and its effects on the audience/scene/ film is not something I know a
lot about yet. What do you think I could write? Am I on the right track,
can you help me elaborate? I have to write 4-6 pages about this.
Any help is much, much appreciated.
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Thanks, Stina
The reason why cinematographers/ directors/ editors will use long
takes is to put the audience into the actual action in the film and make
them a character in the story so that they can get emotions easier and
have the audience react in a certain way.
Placing the camera right behind the driver's seat in the car, as you
mentioned, makes the viewer feel like they are actually in the car with
everyone experiencing everything that is happening.
I haven't watched the movie in a long time so I can't really think of
anything else right now.
I would totally cover the 6 minute scene at the end where the camera
is in the streets and it goes into the bus, get's blood on the lens and
then it goes into a building (notice how the blood dissapears).
That scene kept me on the edge of my seat. It was very reminiscent of
saving private ryan. I was in the movie. I had blood on my face running
through the streets.
This was a beautiful movie.
Also, when the woman who takes care of the lady having the baby
get's taken off the bus, there is a narrative happening outside the
windows of the bus. You see her get a black bag placed on her head,
and as the bus takes off, you see the progression of what is going to
happen to her. That took me a few viewings to catch, but it was great
storytelling.

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To look at a single scene in Children of Men is difficult because the


entire movie flows as part of a major work as opposed to individual
scenes. The choice of camera work and lighting for the movie stays
consistent throughout and really speaks for the reality that they are
trying to convey in the film. There is something really powerful about
creating an entire scene in one cut. The truth is most people won't
initially notice what is going on but the scene conveys a sense of brutal
naturalism that could not have been done in any other way. Brutal
naturalism, that's what I call Children of Men. The power of that scene
is that it's completely real (or as real as it gets while still being a
movie). There's nowhere to hide lights, nowhere to hide wires and
camera crews. Everything unfolds before your eyes as if you were
there. It is almost like a dream.
One of the great benefits of this process was that the actors had to act
at all times because they never knew where the camera was looking.
The entire scene happened. It doesn't get more organic than that. I
remember the first time I watched Children of Men I felt really
uncomfortable. I realized afterwards that what made me
uncomfortable was how unpredictable and uncontrolled the movie
felt. Watching six minute one shot sequences will make any filmmaker
cringe.
Quote
Also, when the woman who takes care of the lady having the baby
get's taken off the bus, there is a narrative happening outside the
windows of the bus. You see her get a black bag placed on her head,
and as the bus takes off, you see the progression of what is going to

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happen to her. That took me a few viewings to catch, but it was great
storytelling.
Alfonso Cuaron and Emmanuel Lubezki are notorious for telling stories
within stories. If you watch Y Tu Mama Tambien, there are two stories
going on. The one the audience paid to see, and the one that sneaks its
way into every frame. It's so delicate, and yet so powerful.
The most f...ing great shot in the movie is what he shot inside a car
with a remote head,i mean the scene where Juluana Moore`character
was killed.Amazing prep and shot!!!!
The Director wants the audience to feel the tension in the story- all
these characters have their lives threatened and could be killed at any
moment of this scene. By using the "One Long Take" placing the
audience inside the car, the Director was able to draw that feeling of
helplessness from the audience. You cannot get away from that action.
You are not driving the car to drive whichever way you want, you are
stuck as the passenger.
If there were a lot of cuts in this scene, you wouldn't get the same
feeling from the audience.
If the camera's "One Long Take" was outside the car, for example- in
War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg's)- in the car scene on the
highway, the camera is outside the car for the most part- The audience
feels the "action" of the scene, but they don't feel the "tension" that
the characters feel like they do in Children of Man.
Posted 12 December 2008 - 03:35 AM
i would break it down. Think of how/what that scene did to pioneer the
art of cinematography. Firstly, examine the camera as a character and
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how it puts us IN the car rather than watching the action from multiple
angles. Next, I would talk about the logistics of it, the car mods, the
prep, the choreography, basically how it all went down and how
something like it has never been done before. Last, I would touch on
the effects it had on the cinematography community, 2 years later and
it's still being discussed, he was nominated for an Academy Award in
addition to winning many other awards, and talk about how it raised
the benchmark of what can and can not be done with a car scene.
This post will contain spoilers for the mentioned movie and for the
PS3 video game The Last of Us and maybe Metal Gear Solid 4.
I just watched the film and I think it's great, but let's put that aside for
the moment.
I noticed it shared many themes and ideas with The Last of Us; which, I
quickly realised, borrowed a lot from the film.
Then I noticed it was more than just themes, or similarity to a specific
game -- the entire film felt like a cinematic video game. It used
techniques that later became common in games like Metal Gear Solid
4, Modern Warfare, and Half Life series (which preceded the film).
The film rapidly switched locations, rarely backtracking (Jasper's hut
was the only place visited twice IIRC), similar to how games switch
levels/areas. Camera almost never left Theon's side.
Events were being mentioned by a quick passing shots over
background newspapers.
Many scenes a monorail style field trip to glance over the world and
create the setting, and hint on larger events.
They even have a blood stained camera, which is a huge trope for
action games today, as the classic HP bar/ number indicator faded out.
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That 3rd act ~7 minute long track one shot, while being very video
game-ish on its own, is very similar to the near final scenes in Metal
Gear Solid 4 and The Last of Us.
I feel that the nature of this film made it very influential to how and
where modern gaming want to be.
I think you're right that Children of Men is an influence on video
games, as it's cited as an influence on lots of stuff. It might be better
understood as something that came along in tandem to modern
shooters too, though, since just as some movies have started to look
like video games those video games are also going for a more
cinematic experience instead of something purely game-like. You can
look further back to movies like Ghost in The Shell and Saving Private
Ryan that were big influences on the current generation of shooters
and potentially Children of Men as well.
I agree, you definitely can't discount the effect that Saving Private Ryan
(and Spielberg) had directly on the game industry at the time,
especially through the Medal of Honor series, which had a big
influence on CoD in creating a sense of immersion and scale that's
become a necessity in big-buget games these days
It may be a coincidence but many believe Children of Men owes a lot
to Half-Life 2 (2004). Both have similar visions of the future/
environments, and more notably, they both treat their audience the
same. I feel like there has to be a term, or at least should be, that sums
up this kind of storytelling; the viewer/player is thrown into the world
with very little back story to this world, and throughout the film the
audience is treated like someone who has already lived through the
past 20 years of the film/game's history. With a keen eye, the audience
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will discover that the background acts as its own character, often telling
you more than what is spoken through the dialog. Graffiti and
newspaper clippings play are large part of the story telling in both.
But despite the similarities, I don't think Children of Men really
influenced gaming too much. And I say this because Children of Men
has really fallen off the radar since it was released (I can only hope it
gets rediscovered), but Half-Life 2 is so well renowned within the
gaming community to this very day. It tops gaming lists to this very
day. Developers openly admit the influence Half-Life 2 and the rest of
the series had on them. You just don't hear that too much about COM.
Ghost in the Shell did a lot of that first, and there may be antecedents
even before that that I don't know of. (Though Blade Runner is a safe
bet.) It's too bad The Matrix didn't copy the Background is a Character
thing, if they had, I would probably consider it a real masterpiece. (Like
I do Ghost in the Shell, Half Life 2, and Children of Men.)
I dont think Children of Men has been forgotten , it was treated as
underrated even back when it came out. It's not all that old, the people
who made it are still making successful new movies, and it's definitely
mentioned when appropriate, like when Dawn of the Planet of the
Apes was cribbing from it.
I can see how a rigidly linear movie could be inspired by Half Life's
imagery but that was possible before...are we going to say Half Life
inspired Birdman? :)
I agree that Half Life 2 was a major influence on the film, I mentioned
it by passing (on gaming as well, it was a story telling pioneer in the
medium).
However, I don't think the fact that Children of Men wasn't a major hit
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has any affect on his implied influence. By the end of the day, game
developers tend to love/appreciate cinema as a sister medium that
share story telling elements.
Kojima (who is a huge cinephile) calls Children of Men one of his
favourite films. I think it influenced 2008's Metal Gear Solid 4 series
transition from quirky take on James Bond to the sci-fi, cynical,world
on the edge setting. You can see influence in the opening credits.
The microwave scene is similar to the films ending by trying to parallel
a personal struggle to a grand scale war.
The game even used television as a major setting building tool.
2013's The Last of Us, doesn't try to hide how much it taken from
Children of Men, it basically tells the same story with a different
apocalypse trigger, here's the opening credit.
I don't understand how The Last of Us's opening credits implies that it
copied a lot from Children of Men. It seems more similar to the Dawn
of the Dead reboot's opening credits.Link. Almost every zombie movie/
game starts out that way. And, they are vastly different stories. I think
Children of Men focuses on the dystopian future and the totalitarian
government ruling over them while TLOU is more about the complete
desertion of the world around them. The post-apocolyptic results of the
big city environments when everyone disappears. The every-man-forhimself, survivor versus survivor theme. Yes, I cannot deny the
similarities in Kee and Ellie being the possible cures in these worlds,
but then again, these are recurring themes in many stories such as
these. One character is immune to whatever is affecting everyone else
and could be a possible fix to the worlds problems. Nothing new in
storytelling. Both of these stories are standalone in my book. Yes, I
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think CoM is a major influence to many but they are more different
than they are similar. TLOU is a masterpiece in videogame storytelling
and a major leap in bridging a gap between games and film. Children
of Men is one of my favorite movie and The Last of Us IS my favorite
videogame of all-time.
An influence is not a copy.
They nearly share a synopsis:
A middle aged man who lost his child is being handled by his, once
love interest, a mission to deliver a young women who may carry the
solution to the upcoming end of humanity, into safe hands, away from
the government.
They play a bit with it, the freedom fighters/terrorist group turn their
coat on our heroes in different acts, and the ending is being taken to a
different direction (as TLoU united The Fishes and The Humanity Project
into The Fireflies; and offered independent settlements as an
alternative).
Frankly, I think The Last of Us had the better ending.
This Interview with the creative minds behind the game clearly states
Children of Men (and No Country for Old Men, for that matter) as direct
influence
...both treat their audience the same. I feel like there has to be a term,
or at least should be, that sums up this kind of storytelling; the viewer/
player is thrown into the world with very little back story to this world,
and throughout the film the audience is treated like someone who has
already lived through the past 20 years of the film/game's history.
I'm not sure if this is the actual term you're looking for, but what I
think you're describing in general, is the distinction between
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"readerly" & "writerly" a term invented by the french critical theorists


Roland Barthes, and I think it basically comes down to how the
audience is treated; in this regard, with respect, and with the
assumption that the audience isn't stupid.
The basic distinctions between readerly and writerly, are that readerly
texts are quickly and easily digestible, entertaining, and in general
don't leave a lot of things hanging (there aren't a lot of readerly texts
with ambiguous endings); writerly texts, on the other hand, often take
much more time to digest, are entertaining, for sure, but also thought
provoking (and perhaps sometimes, somewhat uncomfortable), and in
general, leave a lot of up to the viewer (a character's motivations, an
ending, a history, etc.)
Basic contemporary examples in film include: The Avengers, The
Hangover, The Town (all, I would argue, readerly) & The Master, The
Great Beauty, Funny People (all I would argue, writerly). An important
thing to remember is that neither of these terms are derogatory a
writerly film certainly isn't always good, and a readerly film can be
much better than a writerly one (and obviously vice versa).
All of that is to say that, in general, I think any media or art-form that
treats its audience with respect, and trusts its audience with being
intelligent/attentive enough to fill in certain blanks (like the blanks left
open in Children of Men, or the blanks left open at the ending of
Boogie Nights) without having to explain everything, is ultimately
going to be of higher quality. But that really depends on the audience
(and of course, the goodness of the art itself, which varies).
Children of Men is much maligned by the casual viewer and those
interested in film alike. It's my own fault for not knowing the qualms
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of those whom I've conversed with that do not enjoy it as I spend most
of my time arguing for it to them. I see no fault in this film at all. It's
very high on my list. A desert island film if you will.
I believe that Children of Men will in hindsight be considered one of
the first great films of the 21st century. It's cinematography and
production design are firmly footed in the 'aughts' and it's story line
asks important questions of a century and millennium marked with
9/11 as it's starting bell.
Had this been a video game, with the same cast, plot, direction, tone
and todays ability to capture performances? I would most assuredly
play that game.
Would you play it?
Much maligned? On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 93% rating from critics
and 83% from the audience. I know the audience part is probably
biased, but even my dad, who is definitely a casual viewer, enjoyed the
movie. Even he was wowed by the traits already mentioned in this
thread, such as the long tracking shots and intriguing story line.
I can't speak for the other poster but I've had plenty of debates with
those who did not see the film's merits. I'm sure it's a minority of
viewers, but they are quite vocal, and can be quite harsh.
I still greatly enjoy the film so I'm certainly not in any sort of hating
camp, but the film is not at all subtle, especially when it comes to some
pretty heavy handed religious allegory (even with Cuaron toning down
the themes from the source material). Being really picky, some of the
plot devices and characters feel somewhat forced and poorly
developed (it's been a long time since I've seen the film, but new age
lady instantly comes to mind), and some of the impressive technical
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shots actually took me out of the film since you were so busy trying to
figure out how they filmed it. Personally, what I love about the movie is
the immersive atmosphere it so perfectly creates through some of the
best production design (and sound design!!) out there. It's all of the
little background details that make it a compelling film, not so much
the central story/writing).
Setting all that aside, I think there is a really strong case to be made for
transceiverfreq's argument and it will certainly be a film remembered,
loved, and studied (and contested) years down the line.
As mentioned elsewhere here in the thread, Theo's lack of character
development, seems to be a hinge upon which those arguments hang
but that's not really the films fault.
I think perception of Theo's supposed lack of development is a side
effect of his necessity as, for several reasons, but mainly as our entry
point as the viewer. This also happens to be, I think, where the real
correlation between Children of Men and video games comes into
play. Next to that, every act plays like a mission.
It's one of the best films I've ever seen. I watch it so rarely as the
weight of it is so affecting.
While I have indeed heard similar complaints about Theo and the
religious allegory, I think most of the vocal detractors are those who
just couldn't wrap their head around the plot. I've spent a ridiculous
amount of time trying to explain the motivation of the Fishes,
something that to me is so clearly spelled out in the film, so you can
imagine the difficulty one might find themselves in when trying to
explain the things told through the background.
21

Then of course, there are those who just can't get over the fact that the
film doesn't even try to explain what caused infertility, which to me is
like asking why the birds are attacking in The Birds.
I know an English major who complained about Theo's lack of
character development. I made no comment. That English Major did
not understand this film.
Just to add a few things (I hope this doesn't sound like I'm trying to
shoot you down
The film rapidly switched locations, rarely backtracking
Is this a real original trait? I can think of many films that do this. James
Bond films for one. They even have a blood stained camera
The bloodstained camera was actually unintentional, but Cuaron chose
to leave it in.
That 3rd act ~7 minute long track one shot
The long shot is a Cuaron hallmark.
I'm well aware of your points and you are correct. None of my claims
are very impressive on their own, but as a whole they paint a very clear
picture, in my opinion.
Part of the reason I didn't really like CoM was because it because it had
a video game vibe about it all (I watched it quite recently though, so
this may well have had some kind of effect on the next-gen industry).
Thought it was OK but a little too visual and gimmicky.
One of those scenes with Clive Owen hiding around behind the cars
was like something out of Watch Dogs.
I think to say Children of Men is like a video game is to not give
enough credit to the inherently cinematic nature of long takes. I'm
sure a lot of video games have taken inspiration from the movie, but I
22

think that's because games are rapidly becoming more and more
cinematic, not the other way around.

23

Focalisation Realism and Narrative Asymmetry


in Alfonso Cuarns
Children of Men
Ben Ogrodnik June 2014 Feature Articles Issue 71
In the very beginning of Alfonso Cuarns Children of Men (2006),
before we are introduced to characters or any images, what we first
experience as an audience is sound. We hear the voice of newscasters
describing tragic incidents in the days news. Day 1000 in the siege of
Seattle. The Muslim community demands an end to military
occupation. British borders remain closed, the deportation of illegal
immigrants will continue. Without accompanying images, we need no
further detail; it is as if the rhetoric of emergency already forms the
narration of our social experience, and the words themselves recall
still-charged political slogans, such as the clash of civilizations.
An image finally appears: a TV screen reports the untimely death of
Baby Diego (Juan Yacuzzi), the youngest born individual since the
world became sterile. A crowd of caf patrons watches, rapt and tearful.
So captivated are they by the tragedy that not one of them seems
aware that Diego himself may have caused his own death by refusing
to sign an autograph. Witnesses at the scene say that Baby Diego spat
in the face of a fan, says the newscaster, before he was stabbed
outside a bar in Buenos Aires. The speaker goes on to mention, offscreen, that on-lookers later beat the fan to death. This opening
sequence memorably ends with a long-take tracking our protagonist,
Theo Faron (Clive Owen), outside the caf so he can pour whiskey into
his cup of coffee. Moments later, the caf explodes into flames. The
24

camera strays forward to view a severely injured victim stagger into the
street holding her maimed arm, helpless. Cut to black.
The sequence has been admired for its technical virtuosity, but my
immediate interest lies in the way that the seemingly innocent act of
viewing images suddenly culminates in a deadly explosion, killing
nearly all of the spectators in the caf. Rather than neutrally showing
forms of violence such as wars, rioting, and natural catastrophes,
Cuarn implicates modern visual techniques for their capacity to inflict
violence in themselves. In this shocking sequence, Cuarn elevates the
age-old problem of attention to images and the related choices we
make aboutwhat we see, who we see, and how we see into a political,
life-and-death issue, entangled in the larger, abstract processes and
effects of globalization. Significantly, not only does the news story
about Baby Diego refer to an event outside the immediate narrative
space, but the emotional response to the caf bombing is not
registered by the central character, as we might expect it to be; instead,
we see Theo unfazed and back at work, watching his co-workers grieve
for Diego, showing little concern for what just happened.
In a future world where society itself seems to have forgotten how to
see, Cuarn provides the audience with a restless camera, a set of eyes
that provides no explicit judgments on the world at large, but that only
persistently investigates the fragments, the dead, the poor, and the
lost stories that seem impossible to fit within the space of the larger
narrative. From the films early moments to the somber finale, the
unusual camerawork exists in uneasy tension with the protocols of
classical narrative space, opening up questions around reflexivity,
visibility, and filmic storytelling, while revealing the hierarchy of
character (and the accompanying social values) that exist in classical
25

representation. The following analysis of Children of Men thus


considers how awareness to narrative asymmetry on the part of a
films narrative discourse and visual style can reorient the critical
conversation away from well-trodden binaries of political versus
non- political film (which surround Children of Mens critical
reception) by delving more deeply into crucial questions of character
and narrative attention.

26

Metacinematic tendencies in narrative discourse and


filmic visual style
Alfonso Cuarn has recently entered the critical conversation on
camerawork as an artistic tool and signifying mechanism with the
appearance of his later films, Y Tu Mam Tambin (2001) and
specificallyChildren of Men. What joins these otherwise disparate films
the former being a coming-of-age/road film set in present- day
Mexico, the latter a science-fiction blockbuster set in futuristic England
is the unusually self-conscious and virtuosic camera movement. The
camera is identified by continuous long takes and a shaky,
documentary-like mobility that constantly roves the filmic mise-enscene, demonstrating a remarkable degree of autonomy from standard
narrative goals. Particularly in the case of Children of Men, the camera
has been singled out in numerous critical articles and has been
described by various critics as subjective, dialectical, megarealistic
and anamorphic. (1)
In the literature about the film, two major strains have formed around
the camerawork. For some critics, the movie is noteworthy for its
anamorphic visual style: namely, the cameras indirect but artful
association of infertility with capitalist excess in a globalized age. This
argument has been promoted most forcefully by Slovenian scholar
Slavoj iek, who asserts that the films visual aesthetics play with the
tension between foreground and background, in order to reveal grim
truths about real-world life under contemporary capitalism that
otherwise would not be representable to viewers in a more direct
fashion. (2) Meanwhile, according to the other, less favorable camp of
critics, the real infertility of the film has to do with Cuarns
unsuccessful critique of Hollywood filmmaking, narrational practices
27

and capitalist ideology of which the film is a part.(3) This more


skeptical argument advanced by feminist scholarship concludes that
the ambiguous aesthetics of the film, dubbed megarealist, ultimately
dehumanizes women and ethnic/racialized Others, and thus hold very
little to no progressive political value.
Both groups attempt to deal with the problem of filmic visual style as
either a symptom or critique of capitalism in a way that reaches
outside the narrative discourse of the film itself. In particular, these
critics fail to acknowledge that the film at no point puts forth a specific
cause of the infertility epidemic (whether pertaining to Hollywood
production or more abstractly to global capital). Even when scholars
attempt to break with topical readings by turning to aspects of form,
such as sound design or the aesthetics of the long take, they end up
framing otherwise penetrating analyses within parameters of MarxistLacanian ideological critique of economy, a model used by the films
proponents and detractors. (4)
More specifically, few arguments to date have addressed
themetacinematic tendencies of the films narrative discourse and
visual style, those barely perceptible features which reflexively
foreground the politics of cinematic narration itself by creating tension
or attention around the relationship of the characters and the camera
device. The problem with previous criticism, in short, is that both
camps have an either/or orientation to the politics of film aesthetics.
For one group, politics derives from the knowledge (content) disclosed
by the film; for the other, politics is determined by production context,
and therefore Hollywood film and the like will always be politically
conservative. In fact, Children of Menprovides an opportunity to
rethink the conceptual presuppositions that arise any time critics seek
to establish the political implications of a filmic artifact. By Cuarns
28

example, we find that the arrangement of character and self-reflexive


narration indicate that politics in narrative cinema has as much to do
with the composition of the film as it does with the knowledge it puts
forward or the context/production circumstances in which it was
created.
In order to address how such an ideologically and commercially
overdetermined a film as Children of God has any insights into the
politics of film aesthetics, the argument of this article considers
narrative space and the apportioning of that space to different
characters, to be politically loaded concepts. Additionally, to argue that
narrative space and attention to that space entail certain political
relationships, it is necessary to unite two traditionally separate and
enclosed fields political philosophy and narrative theory as both
fields have in recent decades posited the concept of attention and
the subjects presence in a particular delimited space as crucial
problems that determine political effects.

29

The function of camerawork and character hierarchy in


classical/realist film
While many critics have approached the jarring, virtuosic camerawork
in Cuarns most recent films, Children of Men and Y Tu Mam
Tambin(2001), many accounts proceed in ad-hoc fashion. Few
contextualize the disruptive status of the camera as a narrational
device in relation to the critical discourse surrounding classical
narrative cinema as a whole.(5) Indeed, one of the foundations of my
argument is that the disruptive character of Cuarns camerawork
results from its frequent deviations from a still-present classical
tradition of representing space and time, a tradition that relies on a
handful of psychologically articulated characters as the locus and
boundary for narrative. (6)
In the classical Hollywood cinema, David Bordwell asserts that the
visual style of classical films tends to be structurally subordinate to the
narrative aims of the story. Typically, both the narrative and style of the
classical film get oriented around two points: 1) the development of
the psychologically based characters namely, the specified
protagonists who have some kind of central struggle that becomes the
dominant plot and 2) the presentation of narrative information, plot
itself. In most cases, the function of technique, whether it be mise-enscene, camerawork, editing tends to be codified in such a way that
style appears to be invisible to many viewers (even when editorial
narration becomes overt, as in montage); in other words, films made
within the classical narrative paradigm tend not to call attention to
their devices.
Thus serving as storytelling tools, visual technique such as camerawork
leads us to focus on the main characters, care about what they are
30

experiencing, and make observations about what is happening to


them. (7) Within the classical narrative paradigm, visual style therefore
belongs lower on a hierarchy of priorities than narrative: visual form
acts as a vehicle or a container through which narrative content is
rendered as perceivable, visible and enticing to the spectator. Many
scholars have observed along these lines that the classical film camera
creates idealised viewing positions with which to observe the
characters and receive cues by the film about what may or may not
occur to the characters next. (8)
Alex Wolochs recent study of character in the early realist novel, The
One Versus the Many, builds upon Bordwells classical hierarchy by
suggesting a political dimension exists in the construction and
arrangement of characters in fictional works, including Hollywood
narrative film. In every narrative, Woloch believes, fictional characters
represent both a real person who exists outside the parameters of the
novel [or story] and anartificial device within the definitively
circumscribed form of the narrative, serving a particular role or
purpose with respect to plot development. (9) Woloch observes that in
17th and 18th century realist novels and extending into art and film,
authors of realist narratives became aware of the ways in which
narrative attention the space and time distributed in the discursive
totality of the text is unequally shared by different entities within the
fictive universe. Thus, in a realist text, there remains the classical
dichotomy between major and minor characters, but there is also,
Woloch argues, a high degree of narrational awareness. This
awareness foregrounds the lack of visibility given to minor characters
and points to their abstract exploitation within the plot, their
comparative lack of interiority and emotional depth as imaginary
beings.
In the case of classical film, it is rare to find such self-conscious realist
31

technique that foregrounds the distributional matrix, though it is not


unheard of. Bordwell writes of films that make use of artistic
narration or incorporate visual excess to strategically foreground
narrative attention as a central concern, but he admits that these
exceptions are permitted only by genre. Realism in the classical
paradigm is generally considered to be one element of narrative
motivation among others, referring to the representation of the story
in terms of verisimilitude and plausibility applying a set of rules
considered to be
realistic. (10)Nonetheless, Woloch asserts that the distributional
matrix that underlies a narrative work, by its very nature, always
entails a series of choices: each moment magnifies some characters
while turning away fromand thus diminishing or even stinting
others. This would suggest that, whether or not classical narrative film
displays realistic motivation, any characters structured position
within...the narrative space he occupies acquires political
implications.
As early as the epic poem, the classical protagonist typically symbolizes
a core of humanity, while the minor characters that exist around him or
her serve only to elaborate or nuance the interior humanity and
psychological depth that the protagonist embodies. As such, to
recognize a character as human or as significant within and beyond
the fictive totality, rather than a cog in the narrative machine, is to
depend upon his [or her] textual position and the descriptive
configuration that flows out from this position. For Woloch, the mark
of a truly realist narrative, then, is one that reflexively highlights and
problematizes the ethical dilemma of granting humanity and
importance to some imagined beings over others, while the human
aspect of a character is dynamically integrated into, and sometimes
absorbed by, the narrative structure as a whole. (11)
32

If what Woloch describes as the asymmetrical structure of


characterization (12) is both a structural and political problem
constantly at play in other narrative forms, such as the classical
Hollywood system of representation, then the concern for politically
self-conscious narrative film would seem to be how to develop a set of
devices within the narrative as well as visual armature which would
consciously register the socially marginalized elements of the narrative
order. The disruption of narrative asymmetry would, in turn, break with
the classical norm that unconsciously marches through plot and
lavishly bestows attention upon heroes without a second thought.
Cuarns may seem an odd choice for such an analysis of realist poetics
in film. Children of Men clearly borrows elements of science fiction and
action cinema, while demonstrating adherence to classical narrative
tendencies (character and plot remain key foci throughout). And yet, at
key moments the film foregrounds classical hierarchy of character,
marking it as radically unstable and thematically significant. This
occurs through the films realist and self-conscious use of camera and
character presentation.
In order to push against unselfconscious narration, the film deploys
unusual camerawork a formal aspect that has been well documented,
though under-theorized in the context of the films narrational
principles and purpose. Becoming a mode of visual narration that tells
more than the characters themselves know, Cuarns camera creates
tension between characters and film-viewers, both in order to register
the gap between character knowledge and the filmic narrators
knowledge, and to dramatize the inequality of attention given over to
a limited number of character-spaces in any act of narration.

From protagonist to minor character, and back again


33

As stated above, Cuarns film adheres to many aspects of classical


representation (character and plot remain key foci throughout);
however,Children of Men deliberately attempts to break with the
classical paradigm at several decisive points, turning toward a
Wolochian conception of realist self-consciousness at the level of the
story and visual style. As in the case of realist novels, several major
characters in the film are initially offered to viewers as the source of
narrative information but are then devalued at different points in the
plot, if not as narrationally insignificant, then as unreliable sources for
the viewers information (and, in some cases, they are killed off). The
central figure on which the film destabilizes the primacy of classical
character is the protagonist Theo Faron.
The principal distinguishing characteristic of Theo is by far the
skepticism he has toward the utopian projects that struggle around
him, attempting to preserve what little life exists before humanitys
inevitable extinction. The utopian cause that receives the most interest
from the people of futuristic London is the Human Project, a rumored
group of scientists trying to find a cure for infertility. Theo treats this
rumour with characteristic cynicism: Human project. Why do people
believe in this crap? We later see Theo wake up in his apartment,
alone. The stark mise-en-scene of his bedroom resembles a darkened
cave, with only a single window showing a foggy and empty city below.
The noticeably jerky, hand-held camera nonetheless gives us a static,
painterly composition: Theo is placed in the centre of the dark room,
standing between the window and a television set his alarm-clock
showing an ad for the Quietus, a self-administered suicide kit (You
Decide When). In a single image, Cuarn thus presents the selfdestructive logic of London society as a whole, a choice between life or
34

suicide, and evokes the films larger problem of viewing: what do we


see, from where do we see?
So what sustains Theo in his unglamorous existence, where each day
for him is the same (empty) as the last? Theos humanity emerges in
Wolochian fashion with reference to other minor characters. As Woloch
notes, the audience of a realist narrative is never privy to the entire
spectrum of motivation and action, to the very soul of any individual
character. However, we do gain an inflection of implied humanity
depending on that characters presentation within the larger charactersystem. None of these characters gets elaborated in a vacuum,
Woloch writes, even if the particular configuration of a character can
tempt the reader to consider him outside or extract him from the
coordinated narrative; [rather] the space of a particular character
emerges only vis--vis the other characters who crowd him out or
potentially revolve around him.(13) Importantly, several scenes
indicate that the critical attitude on Theos part is dependent on his
ability to exploit others, minor characters, who evidently do not see the
world for what it is. For instance, while he no longer participates in
political activism, he supports his self-image as a lone resistor by
carrying out micro- subversions against his workplace. After Theo sees
co-workers distraught by the tragedy of Baby Diegos untimely death,
he pretends to be too upset to stay at work for the day, even though he
views Diego as another undeserving celebrity. An astute spectator, he
knows how to act from seeing others act first. He gets what he wants
out of his co-workers and his boss; he makes a lot of jokes and puns to
give him the upper hand in a situation.
To borrow Wolochs terms, other people revolve around him, not the
other way around. Or, to put it another way, Theo somehow sees
35

himself as a character who achieves autonomy by a certain disregard


toward other human beings, the masses of people that form a
background of unknowingness for his superior knowingness. A
consummate protagonist, Theo stands out from multiple characterspaces, manipulating the attention of those around him. However, as
the plot moves forward, the camera begins to assert more autonomy
and, at various points, decouples itself from his superior-critical gaze.
The model of the critical- interpreter/protagonist, detached from the
social world, thereby becomes a foil to the alternative model of seeing
offered by the camera.
The tension introduced by the moving camera suggests that Theos
critical vision conceals more than it reveals. We come to understand
that, in contrast to the classical and dependable hero, our protagonists
perspective is lacking as a means for story data. The cameras ability to
decouple itself from Theo, to pause and focus on other objects of
interest with no apparent narrative motive, serves also to test Theos
claims (inward or outwardly expressed) about his indifference and
superiority, showing contradictions he has with the social world
around him. At one point in the film, right before the Fishes terrorist
organization kidnaps Theo, he leaves his apartment and wanders in
the streets of London. A police officer wipes graffiti off the wall, while a
group of people poor, foreign-looking are seen kept in cages,
standing in long lines, being mistreated by the police officers. Theo
briefly looks at what is going on, but then one of the police officers
says turn away, which he does. At this crucial moment, the camera
breaks with his action.
If the narrative exposition so far sets Theo up as smug, unethical,
asleep-at-the-wheel, a shell of his former self, Theo here becomes the
36

object not subject of the camera, as the device becomes a more


active observer. Rather than merely be a passive recipient of what is
going on, as Theo can be with others around him, the camera finds an
object of its own attention, while also highlighting its inability to see
everything. At the same time, the camera points to what lies beyond
the protagonists gaze; typically, what lies beyond is a poorly treated
human being, blocked off by some kind of border a prison gate, walls,
a closed window. The camera focuses its attention on what is outside,
beyond the boundaries of any characters limited worldview; it shows,
it contradicts.
The effect of the camera capturing Theo act submissively toward the
police, despite his claims to oppose the status quo, deflates the criticalinterpreters desire for resistance. Hence, in spite of his deft
manipulation of certain character-spaces, Theo clearly offers no
alternative to the exploitation around him. The critical- interpreter
standpoint creates a vicious cycle of superiority and capitulation, and,
later on, it is revealed to be unsustainable: the symbolic violence that
it produces comes back for the interpreter.
Theo loses any singular symbolic core of humanity, as in Wolochs
sense of the classical protagonist. He becomes more and more what
we might call an unreliable character. Theos self-image as an
observer who lives outside ideology and refuses to go along with the
masses is, in fact, the very same myth shared by the films least
dynamically human characters. Theo gets aligned with his cousin
Nigel (Danny Huston), whose unique character-space is defined by the
safe, almost sterile, confines of the government-subsidized art facility
featured later on. In the ultra-modern and high-security apartment that
overlooks the decay of modern London, Nigel collects the last
37

remaining Picasso and Michelangelo artworks, the wondrous signs of


an earlier time.
Our entrance into his world is, however, decidedly unromantic. Once
Nigel and Theo embrace, the viewer misses the intimacy (if any) that
passes between them. The film then immediately cuts to an extreme
close- up of a zit located on the face of Nigels own son (or possibly
lover), Alex. We then cut to a wider view: Alex playing a video game at
the table. He barely moves, besides twitching his hand to control the
game console. Alex here resembles a human vegetable, barely alive.
After eating, Theo asks Nigel how he can go on with himself. Nigel tells
him bluntly: I dont think about it.
The vegetable-like Alex, much like L.B. Jeffries in Alfred Hitchcocks
Rear Window, haunts Cuarns entire picture. A representative of the
bad spectator, Alex is so submerged in a bubble of consumer bliss, so
enslaved to a manipulative regime of looking, he appears to us as if in
a trance. His alienation and elite status disqualifies his character as
socially disengaged and ethically unreliable. In another reflexive cue,
the boys passivity and Nigels willful blindness are depicted in
relatively static shot/reverseshots and the rotation of camera to wide
shots that frame the scene. Such visual choices stand in stark contrast
to the fluid, handheld camera movements that seem characteristic of
so much of the film. The viewer is asked to question the seeming
clarity provided by the sharp white dcor of the apartment and by the
tremendous height with which the building towers over London.
Looking back on Theos apartment, the scene asks: What type of view
onto the narrative, onto the wider character-system, does this
provide? By attempting to exit the character system, the pair of
38

characters shows how in the realist text, an elitist character trait tends
to be figured as a negative, rather than positive, value.
The vertical relationship afforded by the apartment therefore provides
a visual clarity that is ultimately illusory upon further inspection. As
Theo and Nigel drink wine beside the wall-sized dining room windows,
we cannot help but feel cheated if we, too, gaze outside, as they do:
the world below appears in a kind of impenetrable fog. Only the hazy
skyline and some architectural flourishes of the Ark of the Arts facility
are visible from this high position, along with significantly a
massive, floating piggy bank, surely a piece of art owned by the facility
and Cuarns own allusion to the broken dreams of Pink Floyd. Nigels
anti-social elitism corresponds with Theos tendency to turn away
whenever foreign character-spaces filter into his own; through this
scene, Theo becomes unreliable or un-singular by association with
Nigel, in whom he shares significant traits.
This rich, but empty, composition suggests that the type of vision
afforded by such social power is, in the end, only self-referential to that
power. In other words, the window is less a window than a mirror
through which Nigel can have reflected back at himself the referents of
status and influence: financial wealth, signified in the ever-present
floating piggy bank; and social stratification, implied in the
impossibility of the gazer to ever literally see what is below. What
supports this privileged vantage point is the multitude of characterspaces, the brutal sociopolitical realities on which the films mobile
camera focuses its gaze throughout. It is this mode of stasis, this vision
of literal unseeing, embodied in the static facility, that the film
repeatedly attacks by various acts of perceptual violence, inflicted on
both the characters and the films own spectator.
39

By observing and ignoring certain of Theos actions, the film camera


renders him both an inadequate protagonist and (later) an inadequate
spectator. This sets the realist foundation for the latter half of the
story when, importantly, Children of Men does not install a new
protagonist to replace the first, but instead opens the narrative space
to invisible characters, revealing the problem of unequally
distributed narration. Following realist narrational principles, the only
way that the viewer can locate symbolic humanity in Theos character is
by virtue of not being attached to his point-of-view, but by seeing Theo
experience injustice, first- hand, in the socially entangled world around
him. The camera points to the social exclusivity of filmic narrative space
in those brief moments when it rejects classical protocol of
subordinating visual style to the protagonists.

Camera movement and the appearance of a


supernumerary group
In contrast to principles of classical Hollywood cinema, the camera
inChildren of Men does not remain wholly subordinate to the
presentation of Theo; rather, it asserts the necessity of recognizing
what he and other characters refuse to see. The moving camera seeks
out the contours of the character-system, the arrangement of multiple
and differentiated character-spaces; in turn, the rejection of classical
protocol transforms the unified narrative structure into something
more contingent, only partially organized.
We thus begin to doubt Theos critical diagnosis of the world around
him, while the narrative space of attention begins to widen and allows
the spectator more choice in what to see, freed from the protagonists
gaze. In an early scene, Theo rides the train home from work, falling
40

asleep by a window. As before, the window in Cuarns films tends to


be a symbol for a viewing screen; its presence acknowledges, metacinematically, that the diegetic scene on the train resembles a viewing
situation like our own. However, by falling asleep, Theo cannot use the
frame before him: if the train window becomes a sort of frame onto the
world he fails to look through, we are meant to notice this ethical
failure. While he dozes off, a mass of unidentified young people
hooligans? run up along the train tracks and throw garbage at the
window, startling Theo awake. As it happens, we glimpse graffiti on the
walls beyond the train tracks: a scrawl of handwritten letters proclaims
the mysterious HUMAN PROJECT that is so important to the plot.
The reappearance of the words Human Project helps to establish the
sense of deep social conflict, the multiplicity of character-spaces that
have failed to make their relationships with each other fully visible, but
have in the process troubled the closed unity of the narrative space. In
the same maneuver, the camera gives space and attention to
unrepresentable beings, the mass of hooligans, who serve but to
attack Theos narrative authority, self-consciously calling into question
narrative attention in the first place. Such narrational intervention does
not give voice to the traditionally neglected, but rather indicates twofold agencies of the seeking camera in Cuarn: to interrupt and to
(re)distribute narrative attention within a wider spectrum of objects
and human beings.
As manifestations of the anonymous crowds that populate Cuarns
film, both the hooligans and the babbling old woman foreground the
instability of the filmic viewing space in which narrative action
unfolds: they have no traditional dialogue or functional relation to the
protagonists, beyond simply that of disrupting the closed unity of that
space and interrogating the properly subordinate relation of camera
to specified agents. They therefore exist outside the spectrum of
41

humanity and utility that generates both major and minor


characters. In effect, if anything (inanimate objects, text) or if anyone is
free to interrupt the steady progression of plot events by capturing the
cameras seeking eye, then we, as an audience, have trouble
determining who or what should occupy our narrative attention at all.
Or, as Woloch writes of Dostoevskys similarly realist poetics, all
characters are potentially overdelimited within the fictional world and
might disrupt the narrative if we pay them the attention they deserve.
(14)
The audiovisual presence of these imaginary beings who, contrary to
Wolochs paradigm of literary character, do not strictly serve as either
human personalities or as artificial devices that reveal information
about the plot or protagonist, calls to mind the fundamental division
of noisemaker and speaking subject that remains a problem for
political philosophy since Aristotles Politics.(15) As noisemakers, the
unnameable beings intrude on social asymmetry without being added
or counted as speaking or acting participants of that space. In the
political writings of Jacques Rancire, it is significant that the
appearance of a supernumerary people, the group that cannot be
accounted for by the dominant parameters of the community,
represents the properly political act: politics comes about solely
through interruption, the initial twist that institutes politics as the
deployment of a wrong of a fundamental dispute. (16)The dispute put
forward by noisemaking beings within the films narrative discourse,
then, has to do with the initial classical hierarchy or mis-counting
around narrative point of view: the separation between speaking and
nonspeaking characters, the separation between camera and
narrative aims as a creative collaboration within classical style, and the
relationship of the viewer to all the elements contained in and outside
the film frame.
42

Such formal reflexivity, I argue, attempts to move beyond


comparatively infertile or unselfconscious classical representation
that would allow imaginary human beings to be exploited by narrative
asymmetry. As a result of visual style, many narrational strategies of
classical cinema become newly conspicuous, displaced onto nonnormative devices, such as minor characters, objects or mise-en-scene,
taking attention away from the psychologically based characters so the
viewer is able to perceive differently and imagine further hypotheses
about the narrative as it develops. The film presents characters as
viewer-characters, while the narrative arc itself moves from one
stultified norm of viewing to a decidedly emancipated one. For these
reasons, the realist aspect of the film occurs around seeing and
narrating from different points of view, as in those key moments where
the visual style comments on narrative discourse as well as invites the
viewer to recognize the imaginary beings as viewing agents similar to
themselves, in effect, treating acts of viewing as the central dramatic
element.

Toward the socioformal study of narrative


asymmetry in realist film
The preceding analysis of Children of Men considered how awareness
to narrative asymmetry on the part of a films narrative discourse
and visual style can reorient the critical conversation away from welltrodden binaries of political versus non-political film by delving more
deeply into crucial questions of character and narrative attention. By
way of conclusion, I would like to clarify the larger implications of this
study.
The purpose in juxtaposing these fairly distinct and currently undersynthesized thinkers Bordwell and Woloch was to show how the
43

formation of character, alongside the use of camerawork, functions as


an important dynamic in differentiating classically and realistically
constructed film narratives. Bordwell and Wolochs insights reveal that
the narrative architecture of a particular film is fraught with value
judgments and strategic choices that encourage spectators to evaluate
content, people, places, and things within (and beyond) the frame in
particular ways. In this sense, the distributional matrix of the classical
cinema has a vertical relationship of narrative and character at the
expense of visual style; however, once perceptible camera movements
cannot fit into the classical guidelines, the realist film highlights the
inequality of character-space that gets produced when visual style is
rendered invisible, along with minor characters, only to prop up the
protagonists. To be sure, making the system of social representation
visible does not lead to narrative unintelligibility, but it does
foreground questions of character agency and the ethics of privileging
one viewpoint overwhelmingly to the exclusion of others.
Moving forward, film scholars may be able to unsettle well traversed
problems in the field if we insist on analyzing narrative film from
within the critical standpoint of what Woloch describes as
socioformalism, in which the analyst explores the rapport between
artistic form and the exterior social inequality to which it corresponds,
and the referenced social conflicts and relations between posited or
implied persons within the imagined world of the story itself. (17) In a
socioformal approach to film studies, the formal techniques
associated with Bordwells classical paradigm even those as
seemingly banal as the choice of shot distribution, the cameras
subordination or relative autonomy to characters, distinctions between
major and minor characters, etc. would be shown to carry important
implications around questions of community and belonging.
In order to expand critical discourse on Children of Men and narrative
44

cinema as a whole beyond political- film versus unpolitical-film


oppositions that have dominated the films reception so far, the
socioformal approach usefully rethinks the relationship between
politics and aesthetics in the cinema around narrative point of view, in
addition to production, economic, and ideological considerations.
Doing this leads us to another set of terms and questions: How does
any film embody a political structure in its narrative discourse? What
filmic narrational devices can be used to politicize the act of
storytelling? How does the use of camera movement trouble audience
expectations of character identification? Finally, what image of the
spectator are we left with?

Endnotes
1. See: Slavoj iek, Children of Men: Comments by Slavoj
iek.http://www.childrenofmen.net; Kirk Boyle, Children of Men and
I Am Legend: the disaster-capitalism complex hits Hollywood. Jump
Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51 (2009). 13 Nov. 2009http://
www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/ChildrenofMenLegend/ text.html;
Terryl Bacon, and Govinda Dickman. Whos the Daddy?: The
Aesthetics and Politics of Representation in Alfonso Cuarns
Adaptation of P.D. Jamess Children of Men. Carroll, Rachel ed.
Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities. London,
Continuum, 2009.
2. In the supplementary material of the Children DVD, iek borrows
the psychoanalytic term anamorphosis to characterize Cuarns
attention to objects in the foreground as well as in the background of
the diegetic space. For iek, such an anamorphic technique is a
suitable means for representing the Real of unrepresentable
45

structural violence a reading that evokes the Lacanian-psychoanalytic


notion of the Real- as-stain that pervades the subjects symbolic field,
yet cannot be encountered directly. Similarly, film scholar Kirk Boyle,
whose analysis of Children borrows heavily from ieks insights,
argues that the camera focuses a critical eye on real world social
crises by foregrounding Childrens background.
3. See Whos the Daddy?: The Aesthetics and Politics of
Representation in Alfonso Cuarns Adaptation of P.D. Jamess Children
of Men by Terryl Bacon and Govinda Dickman. Contrary to ieks
suggestion that anamorphic film technique subverts ideological
complacency, they believe the use of overly immersive camerawork
and remediated images of TV stereotypes, consisting of nameless
immigrants and decontextualized masses of Muslim protestors, is in
fact highly typical of the Hollywood blockbuster tradition, masking the
complex reality of geopolitical crises in order to literalize the
reactionary white-male fantasy of the threatening, non-white
Foreigner.
4. William Whittington,Sound design for a found future: Alfonso
CuarnsChildren of Men. New Review of Film and Television Studies
9.1 (2011): 3-14. Whittingtons otherwise astute analysis of the close
association between character subjectivity of Theo and the use of
sound techniques, such as frequency loss and audio alarms in the film,
still tends toward the dominant anti-capitalist topical reading. For a
less sympathetic, technically-oriented account of Children, see James
Udden, Child of the Long Take: Alfonso Cuarns Film Aesthetics in the
Shadow of Globalization. Style 43.1 (2009): 26-44. Udden cites
industry interviews with Cuarns cinematographer to expose the
widely celebrated documentary-style long-takes as, in fact, not
46

documentary-like at all, but artificially composed with complex CG


editing and elaborately designed set pieces. Such production-focused
treatments of Cuarns cinematic style nevertheless reduce the
function of camerawork to simple illusionism and historical
convention; no more than a strategy of Hollywood product
differentiation. Also see Zahid R. Chaudhary, Humanity Adrift: Race,
Materiality, and Allegory in Alfonso CuarnsChildren of Men. Camera
Obscura 24.3 (2009): 73-110.
5. See Paul Julian Smith, Heavens Mouth. Sight and Sound. April
2002. 13 Nov. 2009. http:// www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49.
Smith faces the difficulty many popular as well as scholarly critics have
in situating the political status of the camera work in Cuarns
filmography. Smith notes: Cuarn himself is eager to disassociate
himself from what he calls a cinema of denunciation the explicitly
political output of an earlier generation of engaged auteurs such as
Felipe Cazals Los Motivos De Luz(1985)...or Paul Leducs Dollar Mambo
(1993). Smith ends up equivocating between criticism and admiration
for Cuarns artfully artless film, concluding that perhaps the most
noteworthy aesthetic achievement of the film is its fresh sense of
confidence: Cuarn is willing to risk being branded as superficial
because his film is entertaining, treacherous because it draws on US
culture, and reactionary because it deals with bourgeois characters.
6. In recent years, a number of critics have called into question the
enduring descriptive value of the classical narrative cinema concept
that was popularized in film studies by the scholarship of David
Bordwell. Eleftheria Thanouli argues in Post-Classical Cinema: An
International Poetics of Film Narration for expanding the taxonomy of
narrational modes beyond the handful that Bordwell identified earlier
in his career (historical-materialist, artistic, classical, and so on). Such a
limited number of narrational modes, in Thanoulis eyes, seems
47

inadequate for capturing recent trends in film. I have chosen not to


adopt Thanoulis terminology to explore Children of Men because it
would seem to assert a coherent, unified and relatively stable aesthetic
norm from which the narrative and visual aspects flow out and inform
each other. In the case of Children of Men, I argue that audiences only
register the destabilization of the narrational matrix by the
camerawork as significant technique if it is seen as anamolous
deviations from a more stable classical paradigm.
7. The possible uses of the film camera, much like other visual
technologies afforded by the film form, tend to be restricted in practice
according to certain widely used and historically resilient narrational
principles and procedures. In critical circles, Hollywood classical style
tends to be described with such terms as transparent, smooth, or
invisible, words that help us understand that the style itself strives
for narrative clarity, not wanting to call attention to itself but to present
story data in as efficient and timely a manner as possible. Bordwell
notes further that the camera should be considered as distinct but
obviously privileged material for the construction and presentation of
story information, as a device among others that aims to generate a
bounded and coherent space and time for the narrative to organize
and develop itself. If, Bordwell observes, on the whole, classical
narration treats film technique as a vehicle for the syuzhets
transmission of fabula information (emphasis mine), then the primary
aim of the camera in classical style would be both to attract and
manage the viewers attention toward the characters who struggle to
complete a particular task over the course of the film, and more
indirectly, to generate a viewing position of the ideal invisible
observer, freed from the contingencies of space and time but then
discretely confining itself to codified patterns for the sake of story
intelligibility. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison,
48

Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p.24-26


8. In Classical narrative space and the spectators attention, Bordwell,
Staiger, and Thompson note that the classical notion of the spectator as
the ideal invisible onlooker has its roots in, among other things,
Renaissance linear perspective, a style of visual composition in which
the space of the scene, both in the painting and in the classical film, is
organized outward from the spectators eye. Classical film and
traditional media (namely painting) have reinforced this impression of
the all-powerful, mythic spectator, whose gaze is privileged as
totalizing and God-like, implying that humanity occupies the center of
the universe. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The
Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 215
9. Alex Woloch, The One Versus the Many: Minor Characters and the
Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2003. p. 13
10. Quoted in Eleftheria Thanouli, Post-Classical Cinema: An
International Poetics of Film Narration. London: Wallflower Press, 2009,
pp. 31-2
11. Woloch, 14
12. Woloch, 30
13. Woloch, 18
14. Woloch, 13 (emphasis in original)
15. Aristotle states, Nature, as we say, does nothing without some
purpose; and she has endowed man alone among the animals with
the power of speech. Speech is something different from voice, which
is possessed by other animals...Speech serves to indicate what is
useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and what is unjust.
(Quoted in Jacques Rancire, Dis-Agreement: Politics and Philosophy.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 1)
49

16. Jacques Rancire, Dis-Agreement: Politics and Philosophy.


Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 13

50

A Master Class in 5 Scenes From


GravityCinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki
The best cinematographers often form a long-lasting, creatively fruitful
relationship with an A-list filmmaker think of how Steven Spielberg
uses Janusz Kaminski, for example, or how many iconic shots Roger
Deakins has set up for the Coen brothers but few are as fortunate as
Emmanuel Lubezki, the 49-year-old Mexican director of photography
who can count both Alfonso Cuarn and Terrence Malick among his
closest collaborators. Oscar nominated five times, the gifted Lubezki
(nicknamed "Chivo" by his friends) has strung together some
stunning, impossible shots for his buddy Cuarn, including the
wowser of a scene that opens their new space epic, Gravity. At the same
time, he has a talent for making those technically difficult shots look
natural and tossed-off, a trick he puts to good use in his gorgeously
filmed projects with Malick. How does he do it? Let Lubezki himself
explain, by way of five superb sequences he's shot for both directors.
Before Lubezki worked on Cuarn's breakthrough film, Y Tu Mam
Tambin, the two men collaborated on Cuarn's initial Spanishlanguage projects and his first two studio movies: the family film A
Little Princess and a remake of Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke
and Gwyneth Paltrow. "I knew Cuarn since before film school, and I'd
worked with him at least a dozen times," Lubezki told Vulture. "Many
times, we went to the movies together, and we'd talk about film,
music, girls ... everything!"
Y Tu Mam was borne from those youthful conversations, and its
documentary-like look ran counter to the work Lubezki had done for
Cuarn on Great Expectations. "Y Tu Mam Tambin was a little bit of a
reaction to our previous film, which had been incredibly planned and
51

overstylized," Lubezki admitted. "The experience had been not great


and the final product wasn't as satisfying as we wanted it to be. I
remember in those first few movies, we were very, very precise about
the color palette we wanted to use: It was narrowed down to just
greens and a few other colors. [With Y Tu Mam,] we wanted to do
something else that would get rid of this dogmatic sense of our work."
You could hardly find a less dogmatic moment than one in this
virtuoso third-act sequence: After a very long, drunken conversation at
the bar between the two lead boys (Gael Garca Bernal and Diego Luna)
and their older companion (Maribel Verd), Verd heads to the
jukebox, then dances flirtatiously with the omniscient camera on her
way back to the table. (The long sequence is shot in a single take, a
soon-to-be-hallmark of Lubezki's work with Cuarn.) "When we were
rehearsing, I remember Maribel looked at the lens for one second, and
I just felt this energy of Maribel connecting with the audience,"
Lubezki explained. "It was a very powerful feeling where she's almost
aware of this consciousness looking at her, so we just shot it like that."
The sequence is followed by the movie's famous mnage trois,
another single-take scene that few crew members were present for
besides Cuarn, Lubezki, and his actors. Lubezki says the threesome,
one of the last scenes filmed for the movie, was warm, intimate, and
the complete antithesis of the chillier sex scenes he'd shot between
Hawke and Paltrow on his previous film. "You know, I met Diego Luna
when he was born, and Gael when he was a little kid," he said. "What I
can say is that it's a relationship you don't usually have here in America
on what I call 'Burbank movies.' You don't get that close with the actors
or the crew when you're shooting here on a big studio movie. Again, it
was a little bit of a reaction to some rough times that we had trying to
52

shoot sensual or erotic sex scenes forGreat Expectations, where the


actors are uncomfortable and the set is cold."
The Tree of Life
Lubezki's second film with Terrence Malick is filled with so many
stunning, beautifully lit images that it's hard to believe how many of
them were captured on the fly, as in this sequence, where Lubezki's
camera chases Jessica Chastain's young sons as they run around their
house. "I was able to shoot a movie like Tree of Life because I had done
Y Tu Mam Tambin," said Lubezki. "The camera needed to capture that
sense of freedom and joy and life you have when you're young. But it
was very, very difficult, and it required a great camera operator and an
incredible focus-puller and another person helping me expose as I
moved through the rooms."
It also meant that Lubezki had to keep following the children if they
decided to run out the front door. Though most cinematographers
would require a few hours to reset their equipment for an outdoor
shoot, Lubezki simply kept filming in long, continuous takes. "If I
hadn't done Y Tu Mam, I would have been terrified about the
difference in exposure between interior and exterior, about the
direction of the lighting at certain moments, the overexposure from
the windows," said Lubezki. "It took me a long time to get to that point
where I could accept that. I had to be a more mature cinematographer
so I could be less mature in my work." That freedom, Lubezki said, was
something he and Malick had started to explore on The New World,
their previous film. "Terry came to me and said, 'I would love to try this,
and if we fail, I will never use it. I would never put anything in the
movie that would humiliate you or makes you feel uncomfortable, but
53

let's just try to go to the edge of the abyss, because that's where the
best images are.' Once he said that and allowed me that freedom to
fail, I was free of all those rules and regulations that were imposed by
going to film school and reading all those manuals."
Children of Men
And here we come to Lubezki's most famous work, a virtuoso take from
Cuarn's dystopian classicChildren of Men, where a car containing
Clive Owen and Julianne Moore is attacked, the entire siege taking
place in one single shot. "On Y Tu Mam Tambin, we started exploring
shots that are longer, where the camera is moving around the actors
and there are no cuts and you feel like you're there," said Lubezki.
"When Alfonso started talking to me about the scene in Children of
Men, he said, 'I would love to do it in one shot, and I have an idea:
Why don't we put the car on a stage and surround it with a green
screen?' Basically, to shoot it as a visual effect. For probably a week, I
was thinking that way, until I realized it was absolutely the wrong way
to do it. The rest of the movie was going to have a very naturalistic,
almost documentary-like feel to it, and maybe the best way to shoot it
was to really be in the car with the actors."
In order to pull off the scene, then, Cuarn and Lubezki jerry-rigged
the car so that some of the seats would rotate in and out, seamlessly
allowing the camera (operated from the roof of the vehicle) to go
wherever it needed to. But make no mistake, that car was really
moving, and the shoot was dangerous and unprecedented. "It was
very, very scary," admitted Lubezki. "At that time, we didn't have much
support for doing those very long scenes, because the other people

54

around us were used to cutting and doing these scenes in a very


Burbank way. They'd say, 'Why bother? What a waste of effort.'"
Any little screw-up could scuttle the whole four-minute take, so how
did the actors feel once they'd nailed it? "Oh my God!" laughed
Lubezki, remembering. "In reality, we could not shoot it more than two
or three times, because the scene is so long and the choreography is so
complex that it takes hours to reset between takes. So we did our first
attempt, and when we said 'Cut,' we had achieved it on the first take,
and the actors were screaming. They couldn't believe it! I've never
seen something like that, where they were shouting like little kids,
'Yeah, we did it!' The guy who was operating the crane? He was crying.
It was that release of tension."
To the Wonder
For Malick's most recent film, a poetic look at a Midwestern man (Ben
Affleck) and his two loves (Olga Kurylenko and Rachel McAdams),
Lubezki shot most of the movie in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where
Malick grew up. And yes, To the Wonder boasts plenty of Malick's
trademark magic-hour shots of people frolicking in tall grass, as in this
sequence, where Affleck and McAdams have a romantic idyll in nature.
"Maybe for some people it doesn't feel honest, because he's shot tall
grass before, but it's a very honest thing," insisted Lubezki. "It's not
forced, it's not that he's trying to make it pretty it's his backyard! It's
like Woody Allen shooting in New York; why do you see these tall
buildings over and over in his movies? This is a place he knows well."
This is the only sequence that Lubezki shot using the 65mm format,
"And there was an interesting reason for that," he said. "There's a
moment where you fall in love where light feels enhanced, where
55

things look bigger than what they are. You experience life in a much
more powerful way. And we felt like capturing this moment with a
bigger negative, with more resolution, was going to help you feel a
little bit of what he's going through in that moment."
Nearly all of Affleck's dialogue was subtracted from the film in
postproduction, an experience that left the actor scratching his head.
"Terry uses actors in a different way," Affleck told GQ last year, adding,
"He'll [have the camera] on you and then tilt up and go up to a tree, so
you think, 'Who's more important in this me or the tree?'" When
asked, Lubezki laughed off the remark. "I think everybody knows that
the shoot is just another part of Terry's experimentation and search,
and everyone on the set is very open to his suggestions," he said.
"Everyone's fishing for this thing, that moment where it can feel like a
found moment. So yes, the camera sometimes pans away from the
actor, but Ben and Olga and Rachel never complained. At least, I don't
know if they did maybe they went to their agents later on and said,
'What the fuck am I doing?'"
Gravity
Yes, Lubezki's previous single-take shots with Cuarn have been
stunning, but they're dwarfed by the mammoth opening to Gravity, a
twelve-minute single take in outer space that begins with a satellite
repair mission gone wrong and ends with Sandra Bullock's astronaut
cast terrifyingly into the void. "I have to say something about that:
Cuarn tried to make the shot much longer!" said Lubezki. "I felt a
little bit like the Inquisition, coming in and saying, 'Cuarn, this is too
long.' It felt contrived, like we were pushing it. I don't like it when a
movie becomes a series of 'tour de force' shots, and in a way, I was
56

disappointed that with Children of Men, people noticed that the car
scene was one shot with no cuts. If people notice that, it's like they're
noticing my trick, you know what I mean? I'm doing it so people will
get immersed in the movie, not to show off."
Though Lubezki has gone on to lens a few other films since Gravity
wrapped principal production, he admitted, "I just finished working on
this shot a couple weeks ago! It took many, many years." During
production, Cuarn and Lubezki shot Bullock suspsneded in a ninefoot cube surrounded with LED lights; they then worked to composite
those images of the actress with the outer-space setting during
postproduction. "It's basically lighting the movie with computers, not
unlike lighting a Pixar film," said Lubezki. "I did it from my house
while most of the CG gaffers were in London."
So why the single take? "Cuarn told me, 'I want to it be the most
immersive movie we've ever done,'" explained Lubezki. "It was
incredibly difficult to make. We wanted this movie to feel as
naturalistic as possible, and that's really hard to do in CG." With their
shots growing ever grander, should we expect the next movie Lubezki
shoots for Cuarn to consist only of one unbroken two-hour take? The
cinematographer laughed at the notion. "If the audience starts to
sense your trick, it's good to stop the trick at some point and start
again," he said. "It's like erasing your tracks, so that the people cannot
trace and follow you."

57

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