Children of Men, Virilio, Ranciere…

ON PAUL VIRILIO…

Virilio argues that since WW1, there has been “no end to the enlargement of the military field of perception” (69). The technological advances in warfare have led to more importance being placed on the “seeing” in war rather than simply the geography of personnel. Virilio argues that this mediation of war has resulted in “derealization”: “The sense of weightlessness and suspension of ordinary sensations indicates the growing confusion between ‘ocular reality’ and its instantaneous, mediated representation” (73). Here, Virilio is discussing the changing experience of the soldier as the technology of visualisation advances but we can extend the conversation to talk about the audience’s experience of war images in the cinema. The question we might pose in regards to Children of Men is: How does technology inform the aesthetic regime being used in the film and how might this effect the audience’s perception of war?

Children of Men uses many fluid, long takes as evident in this clip:

The technology and CGI required to make these kind of shots possible was not evident to me until I saw this documentary:

Felicity took Cuaron’s intention of “taking advantage of the element of real time” as an intention to hide the process of filmmaking itself. Then in the lecture Felicity noted that, ironically, the long camera takes caused a shift in our perceptual activity to “camera consciousness”. She argued that the technology utilised in the making of Children of Men shifts the viewer’s focus to the technique of the film. I agree with Felicity that the long takes create a camera consciousness but I don’t think this is unintentional. The blood splashing on the camera felt to me like Cuaron deliberately reminding the audience of the camera’s presence. However, I don’t agree with the suggestion that filming the war scenes in long takes is so distracting as to sap the image of meaning. Yet that seems to be a reaction from some such as at Life Out Of Balance (see previous post). What seems to be at the root of these criticisms is a fear of technology.

I don’t see Cuaron’s aesthetic as reducing war images to spectacle. Rather Cuaron’s use of technology is akin to that of French New Wave directors. The development of lightweight cameras, faster film stock, lights and sound equipment made possible the French New Wave’s adoption of long fluid takes in their films, for example this seven minute tracking shot from Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End (1967):

The French New Wave’s innovations were meant to break cinematic convention, to “shock the audience out of submission and awe“. Children of Men’s long shots are certainly striking and achieve something beyond mere technical admiration. Cuaron elaborates more on what he was achieving in this Charlie Rose interview:

At the 18.00 mark, Cuaron says that in the film he wanted to make sure that “character is as important as social context” and that “editing to seek for an affect” was to be avoided.

Contextualizing the narrative becomes even more important in our perception of war. Media representations of war are often manipulated to de-contextualize the narrative. Take the Iraq war. The United States has attempted to control the war narrative as a simple “war on terrorism”. Contextual “details” such as the civilian death toll have to be suppressed in order to maintain this narrative. A most recent example of this is the decision by the financiers of Brian De Palma’s latest film Redacted, to censor the film’s ending which features photos of slain Iraqi civilians. (Article here).

At this point, I have to criticise some people directly extending Virilio’s argument about photographic technology and war from soldiers to distanced civilian spectators. Here’s a typical quote from Life Out of Balance:

Apparently people think Children of Men is a great example of storytelling through images, particularly with Baby Diego. Well, not really. Cuaron just uses the media as a narrative device, and people don’t talk about it because they, and the movie’s audience, are all huddled around a screen uncritically watching a television station’s pre-packaged Baby Diego Montage. And this is of course part of Virilio’s point – the more “real” and “transparent” war seems to become, the more immediately immediate to everyone, the more unreal it actually becomes.

First point. The scene involving the Baby Diego montage is not a mere narrative device. It is a satire of the public’s willingness to succumb to the media’s distracting emotional manipulation. It is not really important that Baby Diego died but the people care about this story more than they care for, say, the treatment of refugees by their government. Many critics have likened the public mourning of Baby Diego in Children of Men to the very real public mourning of Princess Di.

Second point. Media and technology should not be seen as making war “unreal”. If anything, war needs to become more transparent, more immediate in order for people sitting in the comfortable West to give a damn. Take this photo by Nick Ut:

Or for a more contemporary example, read this opinion piece on the current Burma situation. Or watch this raw footage of a Japanese journalist being executed during a Burma protest:

Cuaron uses the long take to linger on background details. In these moments the camera is not narrative-driven. Here are some such moments from the long take scene in the top video clip where Theo is rescuing Kee and her baby from activists/terrorists:

Superficially, this scene is the climax of Theo’s character arc from passive, apathetic anti-hero to active, politically engaged hero. But it is these lingering moments in the long take which have a particularly affective impact. They remove the audience from focusing on the protagonist’s personal journey, while evoking past conflicts through history and shedding light on the economic, cultural and political contexts that inform Theo’s spiritual growth. Slavoj Zizek comments on Children of Men that

It’s the paradox of what I would call an amorphosis: If you look at the thing too directly – the oppressive, social dimension – you don’t see it. You can see it in an oblique way only if it remains in the background.

Background and foreground provide commentary on each other. In this way, the film operates in a very similar way to Y Tu Mama Tambien except that where that film confined itself to exploring the social dynamic of Mexico, Children of Men reflects a globalised world in which third world is increasingly impacting on Western subjectivity through the media and immigration. What would be the effect of editing, ie, cutting from Theo to the above shots, would be a tendency towards a more dialectical aesthetic, enacting a “single-track message delivery” (Frampton, 191). Instead, what Children of Men gives us is an impression of war with connotations of past war events, provoking fluid thought, creating an ambiguous space in which new structures of thinking about conflict may be formed.

NOW A LITTLE ON JACQUES RANCIÈRE…

I want to respond here to what Eloise from World Aesthetics wrote about Children of Men which I mentioned in my last post (most probably because I have an irrational love of the film). Eloise wrote that she didn’t like the film because it fell into Rancière’s poetic, mimetic regime. I feel that this argument involves a misreading of Rancière’s writings on artistic regimes. Discussing the link between aesthetics and politics, Rancière argues that there are three major regimes of identification with regards to art: The ethical, the poetic/representative and the aesthetic regimes. The artistic regimes he describes are not categories into which a piece of artwork may fall. Rather, they are forms of discourse we use to ascribe value to and identify the substance of any artwork. Children of Men does not “fall” into the poetic/representative regime. Rather, under the poetic/representative regime one would ask questions like: Is this an accurate depiction of global politics? Do the characters behave plausibly?