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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, it’s most impressivewhen executed in service of the story, not in service of showmanship.Alfonso Cuaron’s famous one-shot master from Children of Men is anexample of the former.

In the most extreme sense, a moving camera can delineate the beatsof a scene without much, if any, change in the actors’ blocking. Amoving camera has the ability to capture a variety of shots within theshot, thereby isolating specific beats solely through the placement ofthe frame on the subject—in this case, five actors inside a movingvehicle. As the word implies, the beat is the pulse of the film. It’s whatdrives the story forward. Technically, it’s a division in a scene where the

action takes a turn, the momentum shifts, and one or more charactersadapt, or change, to the shift. As directors, it’s imperative that wedetermine what the beats are, before we even think about directingthe film; as directors, we shoot the beats. While Cuaron chose to shoothis 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.

Here’s the premise of the film: In 2027, a chaotic world in whichwomen have somehow become infertile, a former activist agrees tohelp transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea.

The Beats:1.The car radio crackles: it conjures nostalgia, introducing a song from2003, a time when people refused to accept the future was “right

around the corner.”1



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 revealthe others in the car. This is referred to as slow disclosure, the revealingof the full context of a situation to the audience.

2. In this wide frame, dialog exposition reveals a previous relationshipbetween Theo and Julian (Julianne Moore); he questions the girlthey’re transporting about what she’s done, why she’s special. There’s acynicism in his questions: he’s not an activist anymore; he’s part of the

system now.

Theo is going out of his way to separate himself from them: he’s notlike them anymore.

3. The third beat begins with a medium close-up of Theo and Juliantogether. Visually, they are not separate, but equal, subtext that isfurthermore 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 trickwith her. Cuaron isolates them in this frame; it’s as though they’re theonly ones in the car, oblivious to those around them or the passingtrees outside.

4. As Theo and Julian mime a kiss, the girl comments on it,disapprovingly, and the camera moves toward her—a move motivated

by Theo’s look, and subsequently, the spitting of the ball at her.

5. The camera turns 180 degrees, looking through the windshield as aburning car rolls from the woods into the street, obstructing thevehicle’s path.

6. The camera begins a 360 move, first framing the driver—who hasn’t

been featured much in the scene— and then framing everyone else in2



car, and in noticeably tighter shots than before. Initially, the frame waslooser, the feeling in the car more casual; however, as the urgency ofthe circumstances increases, so does the tightness of the shots.

The camera begins to go in reverse—in fact, the entire vehicle andcamera rig goes in reverse—thus visually conveying a literal turn ofevents.

They were moving forward with their mission, until an obstacleoccurred, 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 ateach other inside the car, now they become completely focused onwhat’s 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 that’s how we’re forced to see it. 7. The camera once again stops, framing up the windshield.

Moments before, Cuaron depicted a burning car in the distance, butnow it is his characters’ windshield that is on fire. The characters gofrom 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 attackingmotorcyclist, 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 bloodsplattering onto the glass of the lens.

9. Immediately after the gunshot, the camera whips back to film thereactions of the people in the backseat, settling on Theo as he attempts

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to treat Julian’s wound and then, moments later, defend himselfagainst the motorcyclist.

10. The camera then moves its perspective onto the driver and thecracking windshield, throwing the focus onto the seaworthiness of thecar, and in doing so, ramping up the suspense once again: Will theymake it out of this? Will the car hold up and will the driver get themout of this?

11. The camera twists back to Theo and Julian, once again isolated,together in the frame (see Beat 3); however it’s the opposite of before.She is facing away from him, dying in his arms. The nurse eventuallyenters frame, attempting to help in the situation, and transforming the2 shot into a 3 shot.

12. The camera turns back to the driver, resting its point of viewostensibly 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 ofTheo and the Nurse.

Once again utilizing slow disclosure, the camera pulls back to framethe 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 atstake here if the cops catch them.

14. As with the motorcyclist, the camera movement becomesmotivated by the police—another threat to 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

Theo’s point of view.4



The two policemen are framed through the closed window—everyoneelse in the car obverses them, while the driver has his door open andphysically interacts with them without a barrier.

16. As the driver shoots the police officers, the camera gets out of thecar just as Theo does, moving right along with him.

At the beginning of the scene, everyone in the car was facing the sameway, joined together on the same mission. Theo now finds himself onthe opposite side of the driver—his gun, the car and line of the road

separating them physically. The mission has veered into a directionTheo neither expected, nor approves of.

17. While Theo is forced back into the car at gunpoint, the camera isleft on the side of the road—presumably where Theo would have likedto remain himself—as 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 fromChildren of Men is a superlative example of the importance ofdelineating the beats of a scene. Cuaron meticulously crafted each ofthese 17 beats and the transitions between them— they are 17 reasonswhy this is one of my favorite one-shot masters of all time.

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Children of Men: A Visually Tantalizing Futuristic Masterpiece

“Your baby is the miracle the whole world has been waitingfor.”

- 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 createextraordinary 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 thatresults. The increasingly hostile environment builds tensions asrefugees are herded into camps and the remaining population tries tosurvive. Ordinary bureaucrat Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is suddenlydrawn into a secretive adventure after he is shown the last hope ofmankind, a young woman named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) who ispregnant. Suddenly and without warning Theo must help Kee reachthe Human Project, a boat off the shore of England that will help her tosave mankind. The film takes a rough ride from the futuristic dystopiaof London to the ravished and increasingly grungy war fields ofrefugee camps, a visual feast that draws the viewer in.

Clive Owen and another great actor Chiwetel Ejiofor as Luke sharing afew glasses of beer in a scene from Children of Men.

6



Children of Men is very immersive and realistic - the filmmakers sparedno expense on immense, expansive sets and locations, and yet did notoverstep their bounds. The characters fit into the spaces with muchdepth and incredible camerawork that ought to win Director ofPhotography Emmanuel Lubezki an Oscar for the incomparablecinematography. The futuristic style and attention to detail is exquisiteand everything is fully realized per the imaginings of visionary directorAlfonso CuarÃ3n (Y Tu MamÃ¡ TambiÃ©n, Harry Potter and the Prisonerof 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 CuarÃ3n implements features lengthy scenesthat use smooth single-camera, single-shot movement over as many as15 contiguous minutes. This amazing camerawork makes the strongestimpact in a scene near the end that keeps going so long, you'll neverbelieve it was done in a single shot. I have never seen scenes this

beautiful and this incredible ever . The only other movie to come closeto achieving this same unique excellence is The Fountain from this yearas well. This is an colossal achievement in its own right, on top ofeverything else visually that CuarÃ3n has brought to the screenwithChildren of Men.

There are many moments of sheer brilliance, where CuarÃ3n uses

every last sense and feeling to creating an emphatic experience, andit's unlike anything I've ever seen in a film before in my entire life. Theintricacies of the scenes and the setups that go into making sure everymeticulous detail is set perfectly is just mesmerizing. This is one ofthose few films where you truly recognize how much work goes intocreating a life-changing cinematic experience, and Children of Men

will leave a life-changing impression.7



Theo (Clive Owen) escorts Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) and her baby in ariveting scene during Children of Men.

Even if you already have plenty of respect for Clive Owen, this willmake you believe in his abilities even more. His performance, alongwith an ensemble cast of Claire-Hope Ashitey as Kee, Michael Caine, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Huston, and Pam Ferris, fillsin as well with the same exquisite excellence that CuarÃ3nimplements. You'll quickly fall in love with many of the characters andbegin to care deeply for them; this is all part of the great plan that

CuarÃ3n has laid out to draw you even deeper into the film.

Is the film a success? Undoubtedly yes - but there is not a clearmessage for audiences to take with them. Although the journey is longand engulfing, the end just floats off quietly into the fog, without aconcrete conclusion or message. After becoming engrossed in itsidentifiable, gripping themes of infertility, life, and coexisting as a

human race, I expected Children of Men to be more conclusive in itsconclusion. This ending is the only weak point, if I can call it that, a veryfine crack on an enormous marble masterpiece that can easily beoverlooked.

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 ofdrama, bits of tragedy, and a huge heaping of excellence that you willnot soon forget.

8



EMMEANUEL LUBEJKI CHIDLREN OF MEN

Hi,

I'm new here, and not exactly sure if I'm posting this in the rightcategory, but I'll give it a try.

I'm a film student in my first year, and right now our assignment is towrite an analysis on... whatever we wanted, really. The whole pointwith the exercise is to show the teachers we can analyze something notonly from an audience's point of view, but as a film maker. And it hadto be something that you felt you could learn from and make full useof later in your films.

So I chose cinematography, since I felt that was what I needed to learnmore about (editing is considered to be my strong suit). And I wentwith 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 thefinal text). - The analysis

- A conclusion

I figured maybe I could try to look at the scene as a whole: whathappens, the minus/plus strategy (bantering, laughing and havingfun, then the exploding car, someone gets shot dead etc), basicallysomewhat a synopsis... and then find out how the uniquecinematography in this film tells the story: unique camera technique

and no cut at all during this scene.9



(WARNING: contains spoiler from the film)

For example, what I have so far is that the camera sort of acts like asecond 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 wouldlook at. When Julian gets shot, the camera moves away, as if turningaway from the shooting, and then focuses the attention on the frontshield breaking rather than having to look at Julian bleeding todeath...

And then there is at the end of the scene where they are pulled over bypolice officers, and we step out of the car, and one of them suddenlyshoots both the officers. The camera has stepped out as well, and whenthe others get back in after making sure the officers are dead, we areleft behind and have to watch the car drive away (from us). When Ishowed this scene to my class, I had several people commenting onthis, 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 sceneitself.. 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? Cinematographyand its effects on the audience/scene/ film is not something I know alot 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 makethem a character in the story so that they can get emotions easier andhave the audience react in a certain way.

Placing the camera right behind the driver's seat in the car, as youmentioned, makes the viewer feel like they are actually in the car witheveryone experiencing everything that is happening.

I haven't watched the movie in a long time so I can't really think ofanything else right now.

I would totally cover the 6 minute scene at the end where the camerais in the streets and it goes into the bus, get's blood on the lens andthen it goes into a building (notice how the blood dissapears).

That scene kept me on the edge of my seat. It was very reminiscent ofsaving private ryan. I was in the movie. I had blood on my face runningthrough 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 thewindows 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 tohappen to her. That took me a few viewings to catch, but it was greatstorytelling.

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To look at a single scene in Children of Men is difficult because theentire movie flows as part of a major work as opposed to individualscenes. The choice of camera work and lighting for the movie staysconsistent throughout and really speaks for the reality that they aretrying to convey in the film. There is something really powerful aboutcreating an entire scene in one cut. The truth is most people won'tinitially notice what is going on but the scene conveys a sense of brutalnaturalism that could not have been done in any other way. Brutalnaturalism, 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 amovie). There's nowhere to hide lights, nowhere to hide wires andcamera crews. Everything unfolds before your eyes as if you werethere. It is almost like a dream.

One of the great benefits of this process was that the actors had to actat all times because they never knew where the camera was looking.

The entire scene happened. It doesn't get more organic than that. Iremember the first time I watched Children of Men I felt reallyuncomfortable. I realized afterwards that what made meuncomfortable was how unpredictable and uncontrolled the moviefelt. Watching six minute one shot sequences will make any filmmakercringe.

Quote

Also, when the woman who takes care of the lady having the babyget's taken off the bus, there is a narrative happening outside thewindows 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 greatstorytelling.

Alfonso Cuaron and Emmanuel Lubezki are notorious for telling storieswithin stories. If you watch Y Tu Mama Tambien, there are two storiesgoing on. The one the audience paid to see, and the one that sneaks itsway 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 carwith a remote head,i mean the scene where Juluana Moore`characterwas killed.Amazing prep and shot!!!!

The Director wants the audience to feel the tension in the story- allthese characters have their lives threatened and could be killed at anymoment of this scene. By using the "One Long Take" placing theaudience 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 arestuck as the passenger.

If there were a lot of cuts in this scene, you wouldn't get the samefeeling 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 thehighway, the camera is outside the car for the most part- The audiencefeels the "action" of the scene, but they don't feel the "tension" thatthe characters feel like they do in Children of Man.

Posted 12 December 2008 - 03:35 AMi would break it down. Think of how/what that scene did to pioneer the

art of cinematography. Firstly, examine the camera as a character and13



how it puts us IN the car rather than watching the action from multipleangles. Next, I would talk about the logistics of it, the car mods, theprep, the choreography, basically how it all went down and howsomething like it has never been done before. Last, I would touch onthe effects it had on the cinematography community, 2 years later andit's still being discussed, he was nominated for an Academy Award inaddition to winning many other awards, and talk about how it raisedthe benchmark of what can and can not be done with a car scene.

This post will contain spoilers for the mentioned movie and for thePS3 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 forthe moment.

I noticed it shared many themes and ideas with The Last of Us; which, Iquickly realised, borrowed a lot from the film.

Then I noticed it was more than just themes, or similarity to a specificgame -- the entire film felt like a cinematic video game. It usedtechniques that later became common in games like Metal Gear Solid4, Modern Warfare, and Half Life series (which preceded the film).

The film rapidly switched locations, rarely backtracking (Jasper's hutwas the only place visited twice IIRC), similar to how games switchlevels/areas. Camera almost never left Theon's side.

Events were being mentioned by a quick passing shots overbackground newspapers.

Many scenes a monorail style field trip to glance over the world andcreate the setting, and hint on larger events.

They even have a blood stained camera, which is a huge trope foraction 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 videogame-ish on its own, is very similar to the near final scenes in MetalGear Solid 4 and The Last of Us.

I feel that the nature of this film made it very influential to how andwhere modern gaming want to be.

I think you're right that Children of Men is an influence on videogames, as it's cited as an influence on lots of stuff. It might be betterunderstood as something that came along in tandem to modern

shooters too, though, since just as some movies have started to looklike video games those video games are also going for a morecinematic experience instead of something purely game-like. You canlook further back to movies like Ghost in The Shell and Saving PrivateRyan that were big influences on the current generation of shootersand 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 biginfluence on CoD in creating a sense of immersion and scale that'sbecome 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 thesame. I feel like there has to be a term, or at least should be, that sumsup this kind of storytelling; the viewer/player is thrown into the worldwith very little back story to this world, and throughout the film theaudience is treated like someone who has already lived through thepast 20 years of the film/game's history. With a keen eye, the audience

15



will discover that the background acts as its own character, often tellingyou more than what is spoken through the dialog. Graffiti andnewspaper clippings play are large part of the story telling in both.

But despite the similarities, I don't think Children of Men reallyinfluenced gaming too much. And I say this because Children of Menhas really fallen off the radar since it was released (I can only hope itgets rediscovered), but Half-Life 2 is so well renowned within thegaming community to this very day. It tops gaming lists to this very

day. Developers openly admit the influence Half-Life 2 and the rest ofthe 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 antecedentseven before that that I don't know of. (Though Blade Runner is a safebet.) It's too bad The Matrix didn't copy the Background is a Characterthing, 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 peoplewho made it are still making successful new movies, and it's definitelymentioned when appropriate, like when Dawn of the Planet of theApes 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 Lifeinspired Birdman? :)

I agree that Half Life 2 was a major influence on the film, I mentionedit by passing (on gaming as well, it was a story telling pioneer in themedium).

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, gamedevelopers tend to love/appreciate cinema as a sister medium thatshare story telling elements.

Kojima (who is a huge cinephile) calls Children of Men one of hisfavourite films. I think it influenced 2008's Metal Gear Solid 4 seriestransition from quirky take on James Bond to the sci-fi, cynical,worldon 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 fromChildren of Men, it basically tells the same story with a differentapocalypse trigger, here's the opening credit.

I don't understand how The Last of Us's opening credits implies that itcopied a lot from Children of Men. It seems more similar to the Dawnof the Dead reboot's opening credits.Link. Almost every zombie movie/game starts out that way. And, they are vastly different stories. I thinkChildren of Men focuses on the dystopian future and the totalitariangovernment ruling over them while TLOU is more about the completedesertion of the world around them. The post-apocolyptic results of the

big city environments when everyone disappears. The every-man-for-himself, survivor versus survivor theme. Yes, I cannot deny thesimilarities in Kee and Ellie being the possible cures in these worlds,but then again, these are recurring themes in many stories such asthese. One character is immune to whatever is affecting everyone elseand could be a possible fix to the worlds problems. Nothing new instorytelling. Both of these stories are standalone in my book. Yes, I

17



think CoM is a major influence to many but they are more differentthan they are similar. TLOU is a masterpiece in videogame storytellingand a major leap in bridging a gap between games and film. Childrenof Men is one of my favorite movie and The Last of Us IS my favoritevideogame 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 thesolution to the upcoming end of humanity, into safe hands, away fromthe government.

They play a bit with it, the freedom fighters/terrorist group turn theircoat on our heroes in different acts, and the ending is being taken to adifferent direction (as TLoU united The Fishes and The Humanity Projectinto 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 statesChildren of Men (and No Country for Old Men, for that matter) as directinfluence

...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 hasalready 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 Ithink you're describing in general, is the distinction between

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"readerly" & "writerly" — a term invented by the french critical theoristsRoland Barthes, and I think it basically comes down to how theaudience is treated; in this regard, with respect, and with theassumption that the audience isn't stupid .

The basic distinctions between readerly and writerly, are that readerlytexts are quickly and easily digestible, entertaining, and in generaldon't leave a lot of things hanging (there aren't a lot of readerly textswith ambiguous endings); writerly texts, on the other hand, often take

much more time to digest, are entertaining, for sure, but also thoughtprovoking (and perhaps sometimes, somewhat uncomfortable), and ingeneral, leave a lot of up to the viewer (a character's motivations, anending, a history, etc.)

Basic contemporary examples in film include: The Avengers, TheHangover , The Town (all, I would argue, readerly) & The Master , The

Great Beauty , Funny People (all I would argue, writerly). An importantthing to remember is that neither of these terms are derogatory — awriterly film certainly isn't always good, and a readerly film can bemuch 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 thattreats its audience with respect, and trusts its audience with being

intelligent/attentive enough to fill in certain blanks (like the blanks leftopen in Children of Men, or the blanks left open at the ending ofBoogie Nights) without having to explain everything, is ultimatelygoing 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 qualms19



of those whom I've conversed with that do not enjoy it as I spend mostof my time arguing for it to them. I see no fault in this film at all. It'svery high on my list. A desert island film if you will.

I believe that Children of Men will in hindsight be considered one ofthe first great films of the 21st century. It's cinematography andproduction design are firmly footed in the 'aughts' and it's story lineasks important questions of a century and millennium marked with9/11 as it's starting bell.

Had this been a video game, with the same cast, plot, direction, toneand todays ability to capture performances? I would most assuredlyplay that game.

Would you play it?

Much maligned? On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 93% rating from criticsand 83% from the audience. I know the audience part is probably

biased, but even my dad, who is definitely a casual viewer, enjoyed themovie. Even he was wowed by the traits already mentioned in thisthread, 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 withthose who did not see the film's merits. I'm sure it's a minority ofviewers, 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 hatingcamp, but the film is not at all subtle, especially when it comes to somepretty heavy handed religious allegory (even with Cuaron toning downthe themes from the source material). Being really picky, some of theplot devices and characters feel somewhat forced and poorlydeveloped (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 technical20



shots actually took me out of the film since you were so busy trying tofigure out how they filmed it. Personally, what I love about the movie isthe immersive atmosphere it so perfectly creates through some of thebest production design (and sound design!!) out there. It's all of thelittle background details that make it a compelling film, not so muchthe central story/writing).

Setting all that aside, I think there is a really strong case to be made fortransceiverfreq'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 characterdevelopment, seems to be a hinge upon which those arguments hangbut that's not really the films fault.

I think perception of Theo's supposed lack of development is a sideeffect 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 realcorrelation between Children of Men and video games comes intoplay. 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 theweight of it is so affecting.

While I have indeed heard similar complaints about Theo and thereligious allegory, I think most of the vocal detractors are those who just couldn't wrap their head around the plot. I've spent a ridiculousamount of time trying to explain the motivation of the Fishes,something that to me is so clearly spelled out in the film, so you canimagine the difficulty one might find themselves in when trying toexplain the things told through the background.

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Then of course, there are those who just can't get over the fact that thefilm doesn't even try to explain what caused infertility, which to me islike asking why the birds are attacking in The Birds.

I know an English major who complained about Theo's lack ofcharacter development. I made no comment. That English Major didnot understand this film.

Just to add a few things (I hope this doesn't sound like I'm trying toshoot you down

The film rapidly switched locations, rarely backtracking

Is this a real original trait? I can think of many films that do this. JamesBond films for one. They even have a blood stained camera

The bloodstained camera was actually unintentional, but Cuaron choseto leave it in.

That 3rd act ~7 minute long track one shotThe long shot is a Cuaron hallmark.

I'm well aware of your points and you are correct. None of my claimsare very impressive on their own, but as a whole they paint a very clearpicture, in my opinion.

Part of the reason I didn't really like CoM was because it because it hada 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 carswas like something out of Watch Dogs.

I think to say Children of Men is like a video game is to not giveenough credit to the inherently cinematic nature of long takes. I'm

sure a lot of video games have taken inspiration from the movie, but I22



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

23



Focalisation Realism and Narrative Asymmetry

in Alfonso Cuarón’s

Children of Men

Ben Ogrodnik June 2014 Feature Articles Issue 71

In the very beginning of Alfonso Cuarón’s 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 newscastersdescribing tragic incidents in the day’s news. “Day 1000 in the siege ofSeattle.” “The Muslim community demands an end to militaryoccupation.” “British borders remain closed, the deportation of illegalimmigrants will continue.” Without accompanying images, we need nofurther detail; it is as if the rhetoric of emergency already forms thenarration 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 ofBaby Diego (Juan Yacuzzi), the youngest born individual since theworld became sterile. A crowd of café patrons watches, rapt and tearful.So captivated are they by the tragedy that not one of them seemsaware that Diego himself may have caused his own death by refusing

to sign an autograph. “Witnesses at the scene say that Baby Diego spatin the face of a fan,” says the newscaster, “before he was stabbedoutside a bar in Buenos Aires.” The speaker goes on to mention, off-screen, that on-lookers later beat the fan to death. This openingsequence memorably ends with a long-take tracking our protagonist,Theo Faron (Clive Owen), outside the café so he can pour whiskey intohis cup of coffee. Moments later, the café explodes into flames. The

24



camera strays forward to view a severely injured victim stagger into thestreet holding her maimed arm, helpless. Cut to black.

The sequence has been admired for its technical virtuosity, but myimmediate interest lies in the way that the seemingly innocent act ofviewing images suddenly culminates in a deadly explosion, killingnearly all of the spectators in the café. Rather than neutrally “showing”forms of violence such as wars, rioting, and natural catastrophes,Cuarón implicates modern visual techniques for their capacity to inflict

violence in themselves. In this shocking sequence, Cuarón elevates theage-old problem of attention to images– and the related choices wemake aboutwhat we see, who we see, and how we see– into a political,life-and-death issue, entangled in the larger, abstract processes andeffects of globalization. Significantly, not only does the news storyabout Baby Diego refer to an event outside the immediate narrativespace, but the emotional response to the café 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 grievefor Diego, showing little concern for what just happened.

In a future world where society itself seems to have forgotten how tosee, Cuarón provides the audience with a restless camera, a set of eyesthat provides no explicit judgments on the world at large, but that only

persistently investigates the fragments, the dead, the poor, and thelost stories that seem impossible to fit within the space of the largernarrative. From the film’s early moments to the somber finale, theunusual camerawork exists in uneasy tension with the protocols ofclassical 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 classical25



representation. The following analysis of Children of Men thusconsiders how awareness to “narrative asymmetry” – on the part of afilm’s narrative discourse and visual style – can reorient the criticalconversation away from well-trodden binaries of “political” versus“non- political” film (which surround Children of Men’s criticalreception) by delving more deeply into crucial questions of characterand narrative attention.

26



Metacinematic tendencies in narrative discourse and

filmic visual style

Alfonso Cuarón has recently entered the critical conversation oncamerawork as an artistic tool and signifying mechanism with theappearance of his later films, Y Tu Mamá También (2001) andspecificallyChildren of Men. What joins these otherwise disparate films– the former being a coming-of-age/road film set in present- dayMexico, the latter a science-fiction blockbuster set in futuristic England

– is the unusually self-conscious and virtuosic camera movement. Thecamera is identified by continuous long takes and a shaky,documentary-like mobility that constantly roves the filmic mise-en- scene, demonstrating a remarkable degree of autonomy from standardnarrative goals. Particularly in the case of Children of Men, the camerahas 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 aroundthe camerawork. For some critics, the movie is noteworthy for its‘anamorphic’ visual style: namely, the camera’s indirect but artfulassociation of infertility with capitalist excess in a globalized age. This

argument has been promoted most forcefully by Slovenian scholarSlavoj !i"ek, who asserts that the film’s visual aesthetics play with thetension between foreground and background, in order to reveal grimtruths about real-world life under contemporary capitalism thatotherwise would not be representable to viewers in a more “direct”fashion. (2) Meanwhile, according to the other, less favorable camp ofcritics, the “real” infertility of the film has to do with Cuarón’s

unsuccessful critique of Hollywood filmmaking, narrational practices27



and capitalist ideology of which the film is a part.(3) This moreskeptical argument advanced by feminist scholarship concludes thatthe ambiguous aesthetics of the film, dubbed “megarealist”, ultimatelydehumanizes women and ethnic/racialized Others, and thus hold verylittle to no progressive political value.

Both groups attempt to deal with the problem of filmic visual style aseither a symptom or critique of capitalism in a way that reachesoutside the narrative discourse of the film itself. In particular, these

critics fail to acknowledge that the film at no point puts forth a specificcause of the infertility epidemic (whether pertaining to Hollywoodproduction or more abstractly to ‘global capital’). Even when scholarsattempt to break with ‘topical’ readings by turning to aspects of form,such as sound design or the aesthetics of the long take, they end upframing otherwise penetrating analyses within parameters of Marxist-Lacanian ideological critique of economy, a model used by the film’s

proponents and detractors. (4)

More specifically, few arguments to date have addressedthemetacinematic tendencies of the film’s narrative discourse andvisual style, those barely perceptible features which reflexivelyforeground the politics of cinematic narration itself by creating tensionor attention around the relationship of the characters and the cameradevice. The problem with previous criticism, in short, is that bothcamps have an either/or orientation to the politics of film aesthetics.For one group, politics derives from the knowledge (content) disclosedby the film; for the other, politics is determined by production context,and therefore Hollywood film and the like will always be politicallyconservative. In fact, Children of Menprovides an opportunity torethink the conceptual presuppositions that arise any time critics seek

to establish the political implications of a filmic artifact. By Cuarón’s28



example, we find that the arrangement of character and self-reflexivenarration indicate that politics in narrative cinema has as much to dowith the composition of the film as it does with the knowledge it putsforward or the context/production circumstances in which it wascreated.

In order to address how such an ideologically and commerciallyoverdetermined a film as Children of God has any insights into thepolitics of film aesthetics, the argument of this article considersnarrative space and the apportioning of that space to different

characters, to be politically loaded concepts. Additionally, to argue thatnarrative space and attention to that space entail certain politicalrelationships, it is necessary to unite two traditionally separate andenclosed fields – political philosophy and narrative theory – as bothfields have in recent decades posited the concept of “attention” andthe subject’s presence in a particular delimited space as crucialproblems that determine political effects.

29



The function of camerawork and character hierarchy in

classical/realist film

While many critics have approached the jarring, virtuosic cameraworkin Cuarón’s most recent films, Children of Men and Y Tu MamáTambién(2001), many accounts proceed in ad-hoc fashion. Fewcontextualize the disruptive status of the camera as a narrationaldevice in relation to the critical discourse surrounding classicalnarrative cinema as a whole.(5) Indeed, one of the foundations of my

argument is that the disruptive character of Cuarón’s cameraworkresults from its frequent deviations from a still-present classicaltradition of representing space and time, a tradition that relies on ahandful of psychologically articulated characters as the locus andboundary for narrative. (6)

In the classical Hollywood cinema, David Bordwell asserts that the

visual style of classical films tends to be structurally subordinate to thenarrative aims of the story. Typically, both the narrative and style of theclassical film get oriented around two points: 1) the development ofthe psychologically based characters – namely, the specifiedprotagonists who have some kind of central struggle that becomes thedominant plot – and 2) the presentation of narrative information, plot

itself. In most cases, the function of technique, whether it be mise-en- scene, camerawork, editing –tends to be codified in such a way thatstyle appears to be “invisible” to many viewers (even when editorialnarration becomes “overt”, as in montage); in other words, films madewithin the classical narrative paradigm tend not to call attention totheir devices.

Thus serving as storytelling tools, visual technique such as camerawork

leads us to focus on the main characters, care about what they are30



experiencing, and make observations about what is happening tothem. (7) Within the classical narrative paradigm, visual style thereforebelongs lower on a hierarchy of priorities than narrative: visual formacts as a vehicle or a container through which narrative content isrendered as perceivable, visible and enticing to the spectator. Manyscholars have observed along these lines that the classical film cameracreates idealised viewing positions with which to observe thecharacters and receive cues by the film about what may or may notoccur to the characters next. (8)

Alex Woloch’s recent study of character in the early realist novel, TheOne Versus the Many , builds upon Bordwell’s classical hierarchy bysuggesting a political dimension exists in the construction andarrangement of characters in fictional works, including Hollywoodnarrative film. In every narrative, Woloch believes, fictional charactersrepresent both a real person “who exists outside the parameters of thenovel [or story]” and anartificial device “within the definitively

circumscribed form of the narrative”, serving a particular role orpurpose with respect to plot development. (9) Woloch observes that in17th 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 discursivetotality of the text— is unequally shared by different entities within the

fictive universe. Thus, in a realist text, there remains the classicaldichotomy between major and minor characters, but there is also,Woloch argues, a high degree of “narrational awareness.” Thisawareness foregrounds the lack of visibility given to minor charactersand points to their abstract exploitation within the plot, theircomparative lack of interiority and emotional depth as imaginarybeings.

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 notunheard of. Bordwell writes of films that make use of “artistic”narration or incorporate visual “excess” to strategically foregroundnarrative attention as a central concern, but he admits that theseexceptions are permitted only by genre. Realism in the classicalparadigm is generally considered to be one element of narrativemotivation among others, referring to “the representation of the storyin terms of verisimilitude and plausibility applying a set of rulesconsidered to be

‘realistic.’” (10)Nonetheless, Woloch asserts that the distributionalmatrix that underlies a narrative work, by its very nature, “alwaysentails a series of choices: each moment magnifies some characterswhile turning away from—and thus diminishing or even stinting—others.” This would suggest that, whether or not classical narrative filmdisplays realistic motivation, any character’s “structured positionwithin...the narrative space he occupies” acquires political

implications.

As early as the epic poem, the classical protagonist typically symbolizesa core of humanity, while the minor characters that exist around him orher serve only to elaborate or nuance the interior humanity andpsychological depth that the protagonist embodies. As such, torecognize a character as “human” or as significant within and beyond

the fictive totality, rather than a cog in the narrative machine, is todepend upon “his [or her] textual position and the descriptiveconfiguration that flows out from this position.” For Woloch, the markof a truly “realist” narrative, then, is one that reflexively highlights andproblematizes the ethical dilemma of granting humanity andimportance to some imagined beings over others, while “the ‘humanaspect’ 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 ofcharacterization” (12) is both a structural and political problemconstantly at play in other narrative forms, such as the classicalHollywood system of representation, then the concern for politicallyself-conscious narrative film would seem to be how to develop a set ofdevices within the narrative as well as visual armature which wouldconsciously register the socially marginalized elements of the narrativeorder. The disruption of narrative asymmetry would, in turn, break withthe classical norm that unconsciously marches through plot and

lavishly bestows attention upon heroes without a second thought. Cuarón’s may seem an odd choice for such an analysis of realist poetics

in film. Children of Men clearly borrows elements of science fiction andaction cinema, while demonstrating adherence to classical narrativetendencies (character and plot remain key foci throughout). And yet, atkey moments the film foregrounds classical hierarchy of character,marking it as radically unstable and thematically significant. This

occurs through the film’s realist and self-conscious use of camera andcharacter presentation.

In order to push against unselfconscious narration, the film deploysunusual camerawork – a formal aspect that has been well documented,though under-theorized in the context of the film’s narrationalprinciples and purpose. Becoming a mode of visual narration that tells

more than the characters themselves know, Cuarón’s camera createstension between characters and film-viewers, both in order to registerthe gap between character knowledge and the filmic narrator’sknowledge, and to dramatize the inequality of attention given over toa limited number of character-spaces in any act of narration.

From protagonist to minor character, and back again

33



As stated above, Cuarón’s film adheres to many aspects of classicalrepresentation (character and plot remain key foci throughout);however,Children of Men deliberately attempts to break with theclassical paradigm at several decisive points, turning toward aWolochian conception of realist self-consciousness at the level of thestory and visual style. As in the case of realist novels, several majorcharacters in the film are initially offered to viewers as the source ofnarrative information but are then devalued at different points in theplot, if not as narrationally insignificant, then as unreliable sources for

the viewer’s information (and, in some cases, they are killed off). Thecentral figure on which the film destabilizes the primacy of classicalcharacter is the protagonist Theo Faron.

The principal distinguishing characteristic of Theo is by far theskepticism he has toward the utopian projects that struggle aroundhim, attempting to preserve what little life exists before humanity’s

inevitable extinction. The utopian cause that receives the most interestfrom the people of futuristic London is the “Human Project,” a rumoredgroup of scientists trying to find a cure for infertility. Theo treats thisrumour with characteristic cynicism: “‘Human project.’ Why do peoplebelieve in this crap?” We later see Theo wake up in his apartment,alone. The stark mise-en-scene of his bedroom resembles a darkenedcave, 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 (“YouDecide When”). In a single image, Cuarón thus presents the self-destructive logic of London society as a whole, a choice between life or

34



suicide, and evokes the film’s larger problem of viewing: what do wesee, from where do we see?

So what sustains Theo in his unglamorous existence, where each dayfor him is the same (empty) as the last? Theo’s humanity emerges inWolochian fashion with reference to other minor characters. As Wolochnotes, the audience of a realist narrative is never privy to the entirespectrum of motivation and action, to the very “soul” of any individualcharacter. However, we do gain an “inflection” of implied humanity

depending on that character’s presentation within the larger character-system. “None of these characters gets elaborated in a vacuum,”Woloch writes, “even if the particular configuration of a character cantempt the reader to consider him outside or extract him from thecoordinated narrative; [rather] the space of a particular characteremerges only vis-à-vis the other characters who crowd him out orpotentially revolve around him.”(13) Importantly, several scenes

indicate that the critical attitude on Theo’s part is dependent on hisability to exploit others, minor characters, who evidently do not see theworld for what it is. For instance, while he no longer participates inpolitical activism, he supports his self-image as a lone resistor bycarrying out micro- subversions against his workplace. After Theo seesco-workers distraught by the tragedy of Baby Diego’s untimely death,he pretends to be too upset to stay at work for the day, even though heviews Diego as another undeserving celebrity. An astute spectator, heknows how to “act” from seeing others act first. He gets what he wantsout of his co-workers and his boss; he makes a lot of jokes and puns togive him the upper hand in a situation.

To borrow Woloch’s terms, other people “revolve around him,” not the

other way around. Or, to put it another way, Theo somehow sees35



himself as a “character” who achieves autonomy by a certain disregardtoward other human beings, the masses of people that form abackground of unknowingness for his superior knowingness. Aconsummate protagonist, Theo stands out from multiple character-spaces, manipulating the attention of those around him. However, asthe plot moves forward, the camera begins to assert more autonomyand, at various points, decouples itself from his superior-critical gaze.The model of the critical- interpreter/protagonist, detached from thesocial world, thereby becomes a foil to the alternative model of seeing

offered by the camera.

The tension introduced by the moving camera suggests that Theo’scritical vision conceals more than it reveals. We come to understandthat, in contrast to the classical and dependable hero, our protagonist’sperspective is lacking as a means for story data. The camera’s ability todecouple itself from Theo, to pause and focus on other objects of

interest with no apparent narrative motive, serves also to “test” Theo’sclaims (inward or outwardly expressed) about his indifference andsuperiority, showing contradictions he has with the social worldaround him. At one point in the film, right before the Fishes terroristorganization kidnaps Theo, he leaves his apartment and wanders inthe streets of London. A police officer wipes graffiti off the wall, while agroup of people – poor, foreign-looking – are seen kept in cages,standing in long lines, being mistreated by the police officers. Theobriefly looks at what is going on, but then one of the police officerssays turn away, which he does. At this crucial moment, the camerabreaks 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 the36



object – not subject – of the camera, as the device becomes a moreactive observer. Rather than merely be a passive recipient of what isgoing on, as Theo can be with others around him, the camera finds anobject of its own attention, while also highlighting its inability to seeeverything. At the same time, the camera points to what lies beyondthe protagonist’s gaze; typically, what lies beyond is a poorly treatedhuman 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 character’s limited worldview; it shows,

it contradicts.

The effect of the camera capturing Theo act submissively toward thepolice, despite his claims to oppose the status quo, deflates the critical-interpreter’s desire for resistance. Hence, in spite of his deftmanipulation of certain character-spaces, Theo clearly offers noalternative 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 thatit produces comes back for the interpreter.

Theo loses any singular “symbolic core of humanity”, as in Woloch’ssense of the classical protagonist. He becomes more and more whatwe might call an “unreliable character.” Theo’s self-image as an

observer who lives outside ideology and refuses to go along with themasses is, in fact, the very same myth shared by the film’s leastdynamically “human” characters. Theo gets aligned with his cousinNigel (Danny Huston), whose unique character-space is defined by thesafe, almost sterile, confines of the government-subsidized art facilityfeatured later on. In the ultra-modern and high-security apartment that

overlooks the decay of modern London, Nigel collects the last37



remaining Picasso and Michelangelo artworks, the wondrous signs ofan earlier time.

Our entrance into his world is, however, decidedly unromantic. OnceNigel and Theo embrace, the viewer misses the intimacy (if any) thatpasses between them. The film then immediately cuts to an extremeclose- up of a zit located on the face of Nigel’s own son (or possiblylover), Alex. We then cut to a wider view: Alex playing a video game atthe 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 tellshim bluntly: “I don’t think about it.”

The vegetable-like Alex, much like L.B. Jeffries in Alfred Hitchcock’sRear Window , haunts Cuarón’s 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 ina trance. His alienation and elite status disqualifies his character associally disengaged and ethically unreliable. In another reflexive cue,the boy’s passivity and Nigel’s willful blindness are depicted inrelatively static shot/reverseshots and the rotation of camera to wideshots that frame the scene. Such visual choices stand in stark contrastto the fluid, handheld camera movements that seem characteristic of

so much of the film. The viewer is asked to question the seemingclarity provided by the sharp white décor of the apartment and by thetremendous height with which the building towers over London.Looking back on Theo’s apartment, the scene asks: “What type of viewonto the narrative, onto the wider character-system, does thisprovide?” By attempting to exit the character system, the pair of

38



characters shows how in the realist text, an elitist character trait tendsto be figured as a negative, rather than positive, value.

The vertical relationship afforded by the apartment therefore providesa visual “clarity” that is ultimately illusory upon further inspection. AsTheo 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 hazyskyline and some architectural flourishes of the “Ark of the Arts” facility

are visible from this high position, along with –significantly– amassive, floating piggy bank, surely a piece of art owned by the facilityand Cuarón’s own allusion to the broken dreams of Pink Floyd. Nigel’santi-social elitism corresponds with Theo’s tendency to turn awaywhenever foreign character-spaces filter into his own; through thisscene, Theo becomes unreliable or un-singular by association withNigel, in whom he shares significant traits.

This rich, but empty, composition suggests that the type of visionafforded by such social power is, in the end, only self-referential to thatpower. In other words, the window is less a window than a mirrorthrough which Nigel can have reflected back at himself the referents ofstatus and influence: financial wealth, signified in the ever-presentfloating piggy bank; and social stratification, implied in the

impossibility of the gazer to ever literally see what is “below.” Whatsupports this privileged vantage point is the multitude of character-spaces, the brutal sociopolitical realities on which the film’s mobilecamera focuses its gaze throughout. It is this mode of stasis, this visionof literal unseeing, embodied in the static facility, that the filmrepeatedly attacks by various acts of perceptual violence, inflicted on

both the characters and the film’s own spectator.39



By observing and ignoring certain of Theo’s actions, the film camerarenders him both an inadequate protagonist and (later) an inadequatespectator. This sets the “realist” foundation for the latter half of thestory when, importantly, Children of Men does not install a newprotagonist to replace the first, but instead opens the narrative spaceto “invisible” characters, revealing the problem of unequallydistributed narration. Following realist narrational principles, the onlyway that the viewer can locate symbolic humanity in Theo’s character isby virtue of not being attached to his point-of-view , but by seeing Theo

experience injustice, first- hand, in the socially entangled world aroundhim. The camera points to the social exclusivity of filmic narrative spacein those brief moments when it rejects classical protocol ofsubordinating visual style to the protagonists.

Camera movement and the appearance of a

‘supernumerary’ groupIn contrast to principles of classical Hollywood cinema, the camerainChildren of Men does not remain wholly subordinate to thepresentation of Theo; rather, it asserts the necessity of recognizingwhat he and other characters refuse to see. The moving camera seeksout the contours of the character-system, “the arrangement of multiple

and differentiated character-spaces;” in turn, the rejection of classicalprotocol transforms the unified narrative structure into somethingmore contingent, only partially organized.

We thus begin to doubt Theo’s critical diagnosis of the world aroundhim, while the narrative space of attention begins to widen and allowsthe spectator more choice in what to see, freed from the protagonist’s

gaze. In an early scene, Theo rides the train home from work, falling40



asleep by a window. As before, the window in Cuarón’s films tends tobe a symbol for a viewing screen; its presence acknowledges, meta-cinematically, that the diegetic scene on the train resembles a viewingsituation like our own. However, by falling asleep, Theo cannot use theframe before him: if the train window becomes a sort of frame onto theworld he fails to look through, we are meant to notice this ethicalfailure. While he dozes off, a mass of unidentified young people –hooligans? – run up along the train tracks and throw garbage at thewindow, startling Theo awake. As it happens, we glimpse graffiti on the

walls beyond the train tracks: a scrawl of handwritten letters proclaimsthe mysterious “HUMAN PROJECT” that is so important to the plot.

The reappearance of the words “Human Project” helps to establish thesense of deep social conflict, the multiplicity of character-spaces thathave failed to make their relationships with each other fully visible, buthave in the process troubled the closed unity of the narrative space. Inthe same maneuver, the camera gives space and attention to

unrepresentable beings, the mass of hooligans, who serve but toattack Theo’s narrative authority, self-consciously calling into questionnarrative attention in the first place. Such narrational intervention doesnot “give voice” to the traditionally neglected, but rather indicates two-fold agencies of the seeking camera in Cuarón: 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 Cuarón’s

film, both the hooligans and the babbling old woman foreground theinstability of the filmic viewing space in which narrative actionunfolds: they have no traditional dialogue or functional relation to theprotagonists, beyond simply that of disrupting the closed unity of thatspace and interrogating the ‘properly’ subordinate relation of camera

to specified agents. They therefore exist outside the spectrum of41



‘humanity’ and ‘utility’ that generates both major and minorcharacters. In effect, if anything (inanimate objects, text) or if anyone isfree to interrupt the steady progression of plot events by capturing thecamera’s seeking eye, then we, as an audience, have troubledetermining who or what should occupy our narrative attention at all.Or, as Woloch writes of Dostoevsky’s similarly realist poetics, “allcharacters are potentially overdelimited within the fictional world andmight disrupt the narrative if we pay them the attention they deserve.”(14)

The audiovisual presence of these imaginary beings who, contrary toWoloch’s paradigm of literary character, do not strictly serve as eitherhuman personalities or as artificial devices that reveal informationabout the plot or protagonist, calls to mind the fundamental divisionof “noisemaker” and “speaking subject” that remains a problem forpolitical philosophy since Aristotle’s Politics.(15) As noisemakers, theunnameable beings intrude on social asymmetry without being added

or “counted” as speaking or acting participants of that space. In thepolitical writings of Jacques Rancière, it is significant that theappearance of a “supernumerary” people, the group that cannot beaccounted for by the dominant parameters of the community,represents the properly political act: “politics comes about solelythrough interruption, the initial twist that institutes politics as the

deployment of a wrong of a fundamental dispute.” (16)The dispute putforward by “noisemaking beings” within the film’s narrative discourse,then, has to do with the initial classical hierarchy or “mis-counting”around narrative point of view: the separation between speaking andnonspeaking “characters,” the separation between camera andnarrative aims as a creative collaboration within classical style, and therelationship of the viewer to all the elements contained in and outside

the film frame.

42



Such formal reflexivity, I argue, attempts to move beyondcomparatively “infertile” or unselfconscious classical representationthat would allow imaginary human beings to be exploited by narrativeasymmetry. As a result of visual style, many narrational strategies ofclassical cinema become newly conspicuous, displaced onto non-normative devices, such as minor characters, objects or mise-en-scene,taking attention away from the psychologically based characters so theviewer is able to perceive differently and imagine further hypothesesabout 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 thesereasons, the realist aspect of the film occurs around seeing andnarrating from different points of view, as in those key moments wherethe visual style comments on narrative discourse as well as invites theviewer to recognize the imaginary beings as viewing agents similar tothemselves, 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 film’s narrative discourseand visual style – can reorient the critical conversation away from well-trodden binaries of political versus non-political film by delving moredeeply into crucial questions of character and narrative attention. Byway of conclusion, I would like to clarify the larger implications of thisstudy.

The purpose in juxtaposing these fairly distinct and currently under-

synthesized thinkers – Bordwell and Woloch – was to show how the43



formation of character, alongside the use of camerawork, functions asan important dynamic in differentiating classically and realisticallyconstructed film narratives. Bordwell and Woloch’s insights reveal thatthe narrative architecture of a particular film is fraught with value judgments and strategic choices that encourage spectators to evaluatecontent, people, places, and things within (and beyond) the frame inparticular ways. In this sense, the distributional matrix of the classicalcinema has a vertical relationship of narrative and character at theexpense of visual style; however, once perceptible camera movements

cannot fit into the classical guidelines, the realist film highlights theinequality of character-space that gets produced when visual style isrendered “invisible,” along with minor characters, only to prop up theprotagonists. To be sure, making the system of social representation“visible” does not lead to narrative unintelligibility, but it doesforeground questions of character agency and the ethics of privilegingone viewpoint overwhelmingly to the exclusion of others.

Moving forward, film scholars may be able to unsettle well traversedproblems in the field if we insist on analyzing narrative film fromwithin the critical standpoint of what Woloch describes as“socioformalism”, in which the analyst explores the rapport betweenartistic 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 techniquesassociated with Bordwell’s classical paradigm – even those asseemingly banal as the choice of shot distribution, the camera’ssubordination or relative autonomy to characters, distinctions betweenmajor and minor characters, etc. – would be shown to carry importantimplications around questions of community and belonging.

In order to expand critical discourse on Children of Men and narrative44



cinema as a whole beyond “political- film” versus “unpolitical-film”oppositions that have dominated the film’s reception so far, thesocioformal approach usefully rethinks the relationship betweenpolitics and aesthetics in the cinema around narrative point of view, inaddition to production, economic, and ideological considerations.Doing this leads us to another set of terms and questions: How doesany film embody a political structure in its narrative discourse? Whatfilmic narrational devices can be used to politicize the act ofstorytelling? How does the use of camera movement trouble audience

expectations of character identification? Finally, what image of thespectator are we left with?

Endnotes

1. See: Slavoj !i"ek, “Children of Men: Comments by Slavoj!i"ek.”http://www.childrenofmen.net; Kirk Boyle, “Children of Men and

I Am Legend : the disaster-capitalism complex hits Hollywood.” JumpCut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51 (2009). 13 Nov. 2009http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/ChildrenofMenLegend/ text.html;Terryl Bacon, and Govinda Dickman. “‘Who’s the Daddy?’: TheAesthetics and Politics of Representation in Alfonso Cuarón’sAdaptation of P.D. James’s Children of Men.” Carroll, Rachel ed. Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities. London,Continuum, 2009.

2. In the supplementary material of the Children DVD, !i"ek borrowsthe psychoanalytic term “anamorphosis” to characterize Cuarón’sattention to objects in the foreground as well as in the background ofthe diegetic space. For !i"ek, such an anamorphic technique is a

suitable means for representing the “Real” of unrepresentable45



structural violence – a reading that evokes the Lacanian-psychoanalyticnotion of the Real- as-stain that pervades the subject’s symbolic field,yet cannot be encountered directly. Similarly, film scholar Kirk Boyle,whose analysis of Children borrows heavily from !i"ek’s insights,argues that the camera “focuses a critical eye on ‘real world’ socialcrises by foregrounding Children’s background”.

3. See “‘Who’s the Daddy?’: The Aesthetics and Politics ofRepresentation in Alfonso Cuarón’s Adaptation of P.D. James’s Children

of Men” by Terryl Bacon and Govinda Dickman. Contrary to!

i"ek’ssuggestion that anamorphic film technique subverts ideological

complacency, they believe the use of overly immersive cameraworkand ‘remediated’ images of TV stereotypes, consisting of namelessimmigrants and decontextualized masses of Muslim protestors, is infact highly typical of the Hollywood blockbuster tradition, masking thecomplex reality of geopolitical crises in order to literalize the

reactionary white-male fantasy of the threatening, non-whiteForeigner.

4. William Whittington,“Sound design for a found future: AlfonsoCuarón’sChildren of Men.” New Review of Film and Television Studies9.1 (2011): 3-14. Whittington’s otherwise astute analysis of the closeassociation 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 aless sympathetic, technically-oriented account of Children, see JamesUdden, “Child of the Long Take: Alfonso Cuarón’s Film Aesthetics in theShadow of Globalization.” Style 43.1 (2009): 26-44. Udden citesindustry interviews with Cuarón’s cinematographer to expose the

widely celebrated “documentary-style” long-takes as, in fact, not46



documentary-like at all, but artificially composed with complex CGediting and elaborately designed set pieces. Such production-focusedtreatments of Cuarón’s cinematic style nevertheless reduce thefunction of camerawork to simple illusionism and historicalconvention; no more than a strategy of Hollywood productdifferentiation. Also see Zahid R. Chaudhary, “Humanity Adrift: Race,Materiality, and Allegory in Alfonso Cuarón’sChildren of Men.” CameraObscura 24.3 (2009): 73-110.

5. See Paul Julian Smith, “Heaven’s 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 havein situating the political status of the camera work in Cuarón’sfilmography. Smith notes: “Cuarón himself is eager to disassociatehimself from what he calls a ‘cinema of denunciation’ – the explicitlypolitical output of an earlier generation of engaged auteurs such asFelipe Cazal’s Los Motivos De Luz (1985)...or Paul Leduc’s Dollar Mambo

(1993)”. Smith ends up equivocating between criticism and admirationfor Cuarón‘s “artfully artless” film, concluding that perhaps the mostnoteworthy aesthetic achievement of the film is its fresh sense ofconfidence: “Cuarón is willing to risk being branded as superficialbecause his film is entertaining, treacherous because it draws on USculture, and reactionary because it deals with bourgeois characters.”

6. In recent years, a number of critics have called into question theenduring descriptive value of the “classical narrative cinema” conceptthat was popularized in film studies by the scholarship of DavidBordwell. Eleftheria Thanouli argues in Post-Classical Cinema: AnInternational Poetics of Film Narration for expanding the taxonomy ofnarrational modes beyond the handful that Bordwell identified earlierin his career (historical-materialist, artistic, classical, and so on). Such a

limited number of narrational modes, in Thanouli’s eyes, seems47



inadequate for capturing recent trends in film. I have chosen not toadopt Thanouli’s terminology to explore Children of Men because itwould seem to assert a coherent, unified and relatively stable aestheticnorm from which the narrative and visual aspects flow out and informeach other. In the case of Children of Men, I argue that audiences onlyregister the destabilization of the narrational matrix by thecamerawork as significant technique if it is seen as anamolousdeviations 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 practiceaccording to certain widely used and historically resilient narrationalprinciples and procedures. In critical circles, Hollywood classical styletends to be described with such terms as “transparent,” “smooth,” or“invisible,” words that help us understand that the style itself strivesfor narrative clarity, not wanting to call attention to itself but to presentstory data in as efficient and timely a manner as possible. Bordwell

notes further that the camera should be considered as distinct butobviously privileged material for the construction and presentation ofstory information, as a device among others that aims to generate abounded and coherent space and time for the narrative to organizeand develop itself. If, Bordwell observes, “on the whole, classicalnarration treats film technique as a vehicle for the syuzhet’s

transmission of fabula information” (emphasis mine), then the primaryaim of the camera in classical style would be both to attract andmanage the viewer’s attention toward the characters who struggle tocomplete a particular task over the course of the film, and moreindirectly, to generate a viewing position of “the ideal invisibleobserver, freed from the contingencies of space and time but thendiscretely 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 spectator’s attention,” Bordwell,Staiger, and Thompson note that the classical notion of the spectator asthe 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, isorganized outward from the spectator’s eye.” Classical film andtraditional media (namely painting) have reinforced this impression ofthe all-powerful, mythic spectator, whose gaze is privileged as

totalizing and God-like, implying that humanity occupies the center ofthe universe. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, TheClassical 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 theSpace of the Protagonist in the Novel . Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2003. p. 13

10. Quoted in Eleftheria Thanouli, Post-Classical Cinema: AnInternational 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 withthe power of speech. Speech is something different from voice, whichis possessed by other animals...Speech serves to indicate what isuseful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and what is unjust.”(Quoted in Jacques Ranciére, Dis-Agreement: Politics and Philosophy .

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 1)

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16. Jacques Ranciére, Dis-Agreement: Politics and Philosophy .Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 13

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A M a s t e r C l a s s i n 5 S c e n e s F r o m

Gravity Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki

The best cinematographers often form a long-lasting, creatively fruitfulrelationship with an A-list filmmaker — think of how Steven Spielberguses Janusz Kaminski, for example, or how many iconic shots RogerDeakins has set up for the Coen brothers — but few are as fortunate asEmmanuel Lubezki, the 49-year-old Mexican director of photographywho can count both Alfonso Cuarón and Terrence Malick among his

closest collaborators. Oscar nominated five times, the gifted Lubezki(nicknamed "Chivo" by his friends) has strung together somestunning, impossible shots for his buddy Cuarón, including thewowser of a scene that opens their new space epic, Gravity . At the sametime, he has a talent for making those technically difficult shots looknatural and tossed-off, a trick he puts to good use in his gorgeously

filmed projects with Malick. How does he do it? Let Lubezki himselfexplain, by way of five superb sequences he's shot for both directors.

Before Lubezki worked on Cuarón's breakthrough film, Y Tu MamáTambién, the two men collaborated on Cuarón's initial Spanish-language projects and his first two studio movies: the family film ALittle Princess and a remake of Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke

and Gwyneth Paltrow. "I knew Cuarón since before film school, and I'dworked with him at least a dozen times," Lubezki told Vulture. "Manytimes, we went to the movies together, and we'd talk about film,music, girls ... everything!"

Y Tu Mamá was borne from those youthful conversations, and itsdocumentary-like look ran counter to the work Lubezki had done forCuarón on Great Expectations. "Y Tu Mamá También was a little bit of a

reaction to our previous film, which had been incredibly planned and51



overstylized," Lubezki admitted. "The experience had been not greatand the final product wasn't as satisfying as we wanted it to be. Iremember in those first few movies, we were very, very precise aboutthe color palette we wanted to use: It was narrowed down to justgreens and a few other colors. [With Y Tu Mamá,] we wanted to dosomething else that would get rid of this dogmatic sense of our work."

You could hardly find a less dogmatic moment than one in thisvirtuoso third-act sequence: After a very long, drunken conversation atthe bar between the two lead boys (Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna)

and their older companion (Maribel Verdú), Verdú heads to the jukebox, then dances flirtatiously with the omniscient camera on herway back to the table. (The long sequence is shot in a single take, asoon-to-be-hallmark of Lubezki's work with Cuarón.) "When we wererehearsing, I remember Maribel looked at the lens for one second, andI 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 ménage à trois,another single-take scene that few crew members were present forbesides Cuarón, Lubezki, and his actors. Lubezki says the threesome,one of the last scenes filmed for the movie, was warm, intimate, andthe complete antithesis of the chillier sex scenes he'd shot betweenHawke and Paltrow on his previous film. "You know, I met Diego Lunawhen he was born, and Gael when he was a little kid," he said. "What Ican say is that it's a relationship you don't usually have here in Americaon what I call 'Burbank movies.' You don't get that close with the actorsor the crew when you're shooting here on a big studio movie. Again, itwas 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 theactors are uncomfortable and the set is cold."

The Tree of Life

Lubezki's second film with Terrence Malick is filled with so manystunning, beautifully lit images that it's hard to believe how many ofthem were captured on the fly, as in this sequence, where Lubezki'scamera chases Jessica Chastain's young sons as they run around theirhouse. "I was able to shoot a movie like Tree of Life because I had doneY Tu Mamá También," said Lubezki. "The camera needed to capture thatsense of freedom and joy and life you have when you're young. But itwas very, very difficult, and it required a great camera operator and anincredible focus-puller and another person helping me expose as Imoved through the rooms."

It also meant that Lubezki had to keep following the children if theydecided to run out the front door. Though most cinematographerswould require a few hours to reset their equipment for an outdoorshoot, Lubezki simply kept filming in long, continuous takes. "If Ihadn't done Y Tu Mamá, I would have been terrified about thedifference in exposure between interior and exterior, about thedirection of the lighting at certain moments, the overexposure from

the windows," said Lubezki. "It took me a long time to get to that pointwhere I could accept that. I had to be a more mature cinematographerso I could be less mature in my work." That freedom, Lubezki said, wassomething 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 themovie 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 thebest images are.' Once he said that and allowed me that freedom tofail, I was free of all those rules and regulations that were imposed bygoing to film school and reading all those manuals."

Children of Men

And here we come to Lubezki's most famous work, a virtuoso take fromCuarón's dystopian classicChildren of Men, where a car containingClive Owen and Julianne Moore is attacked, the entire siege takingplace in one single shot. "On Y Tu Mamá También, we started exploringshots that are longer, where the camera is moving around the actorsand there are no cuts and you feel like you're there," said Lubezki."When Alfonso started talking to me about the scene in Children ofMen, 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, Iwas thinking that way, until I realized it was absolutely the wrong wayto 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 itwas to really be in the car with the actors."

In order to pull off the scene, then, Cuarón and Lubezki jerry-rigged

the car so that some of the seats would rotate in and out, seamlesslyallowing the camera (operated from the roof of the vehicle) to gowherever it needed to. But make no mistake, that car was reallymoving, and the shoot was dangerous and unprecedented. "It wasvery, very scary," admitted Lubezki. "At that time, we didn't have muchsupport for doing those very long scenes, because the other people

54



around us were used to cutting and doing these scenes in a veryBurbank way. They'd say, 'Why bother? What a waste of effort.'"

Any little screw-up could scuttle the whole four-minute take, so howdid the actors feel once they'd nailed it? "Oh my God!" laughedLubezki, remembering. "In reality, we could not shoot it more than twoor three times, because the scene is so long and the choreography is socomplex that it takes hours to reset between takes. So we did our firstattempt, 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 neverseen 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 (BenAffleck) and his two loves (Olga Kurylenko and Rachel McAdams),Lubezki shot most of the movie in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, whereMalick grew up. And yes, To the Wonder boasts plenty of Malick'strademark magic-hour shots of people frolicking in tall grass, as in thissequence, 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 notforced, it's not that he's trying to make it pretty — it's his backyard! It'slike Woody Allen shooting in New York; why do you see these tallbuildings 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, where55



things look bigger than what they are. You experience life in a muchmore powerful way. And we felt like capturing this moment with abigger negative, with more resolution, was going to help you feel alittle bit of what he's going through in that moment."

Nearly all of Affleck's dialogue was subtracted from the film inpostproduction, 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?'" Whenasked, Lubezki laughed off the remark. "I think everybody knows thatthe 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 afound moment. So yes, the camera sometimes pans away from theactor, 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 Cuarón have beenstunning, but they're dwarfed by the mammoth opening to Gravity , a

twelve-minute single take in outer space that begins with a satelliterepair mission gone wrong and ends with Sandra Bullock's astronautcast terrifyingly into the void. "I have to say something about that:Cuarón tried to make the shot much longer!" said Lubezki. "I felt alittle bit like the Inquisition, coming in and saying, 'Cuarón, this is toolong.' It felt contrived, like we were pushing it. I don't like it when amovie 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 carscene was one shot with no cuts. If people notice that, it's like they'renoticing my trick, you know what I mean? I'm doing it so people willget immersed in the movie, not to show off."

Though Lubezki has gone on to lens a few other films since Gravitywrapped principal production, he admitted, "I just finished working onthis shot a couple weeks ago! It took many, many years." Duringproduction, Cuarón and Lubezki shot Bullock suspsneded in a nine-

foot cube surrounded with LED lights; they then worked to compositethose images of the actress with the outer-space setting duringpostproduction. "It's basically lighting the movie with computers, notunlike lighting a Pixar film," said Lubezki. "I did it from my housewhile most of the CG gaffers were in London."

So why the single take? "Cuarón told me, 'I want to it be the mostimmersive movie we've ever done,'" explained Lubezki. "It was

incredibly difficult to make. We wanted this movie to feel asnaturalistic as possible, and that's really hard to do in CG." With theirshots growing ever grander, should we expect the next movie Lubezkishoots for Cuarón to consist only of one unbroken two-hour take? Thecinematographer laughed at the notion. "If the audience starts tosense your trick, it's good to stop the trick at some point and startagain," he said. "It's like erasing your tracks, so that the people cannottrace and follow you."

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