{"id":78,"date":"2016-04-11T08:00:02","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T08:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/?page_id=78"},"modified":"2016-04-11T08:35:25","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T08:35:25","slug":"4-3-isaacs","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/4-3-isaacs\/","title":{"rendered":"4.3 Reality Effects: The Ideology of the Long Take in the Cinema of Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n"},"content":{"rendered":"
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BY BRUCE ISAACS<\/h6>\n

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Between 2001 and 2013, Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, working in concert with long-time collaborator, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, produced several works that effectively modeled a signature disposition toward film style. After a period of measured success in Hollywood (A Little Princess<\/em> [1995], Great Expectations<\/em> [1998]), Cuar\u00f3n and Lubezki returned to Mexico to produce Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em> (2001), a film designed as a low-budget, independent vehicle (Riley). In 2006, Cuar\u00f3n directed Children of Men<\/em>, a high budget studio production, and in March 2014, he won the Academy Award for Best Director for Gravity<\/em> (2013), a film that garnered the praise of the American and European critical establishment while returning in excess of half a billion dollars worldwide at the box office (Gravity<\/em>, Box Office Mojo). Lubezki acted as cinematographer on each of the three films.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

In this chapter, I attempt to trace the evolution of a cinematographic style founded upon the \u201clong take,\u201d the sequence shot of excessive duration. Each of Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s three films under examination demonstrates a fixation on the capacity of the image to display greater and more complex indices of time and space, holding shots across what would be deemed uncomfortable durations in a more conventional mode of cinema. As Udden argues, Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s films are increasingly defined by this mark of the long take, \u201cshots with durations well beyond the industry standard\u201d (26-27). Such shots are \u201cattention-grabbing spectacles,\u201d displaying the virtuosity of the filmmaker over and above the requirement of narrative unfolding. While the long take has fascinated (and continues to fascinate) numerous filmmakers working within and beyond the mainstream, Cuar\u00f3n is unique in modeling the long take as foundational to his filmic method. Although Andrei Tarkovsky, Martin Scorsese, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan have repeatedly and imaginatively explored the aesthetic capacity of the long take in their work, I argue that none can be designated \u201clong take\u201d filmmakers in the sense that I employ the concept here. Brian De Palma, one of the great long take directors, who frequently utilizes the Steadicam to track the complexity of space, is also a great exponent of expressive montage (Martin). I thus distinguish Cuar\u00f3n (and Lubezki as cinematographer) precisely because their aesthetic disposition is founded upon the effect of space and time uninterrupted by a conventional cinematic cut. This is a long take style that, as Bazin once argued of the neorealist filmmakers, confronts the aesthetic limitation of a contemporary normative editing system (Bordwell, \u201cIntensified Continuity\u201d 16-28). Against this normative model, Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s and Lubezki\u2019s overarching long take style is quite idiosyncratic.<\/p>\n

The long take serves a number of philosophical and aesthetic functions in film studies discourse. The desire for realism, the mark of the pro-filmic event, experiential immersion in the diegetic world, and spectatorial ambiguity have all filtered through competing discourses surrounding precisely what constitutes the long take (Bazin, \u201cEvolution\u201d 23-40; Rombes 38-40). In an image-based medium built on discrete sections of time, the radical artificiality of the medium is perceptually normalized through classical montage, which serves a very particular spatial and temporal regime. We see the harmony of spatial and temporal arrangement quite literally through<\/em> montage; montage is in this sense a revelation of that which is otherwise hidden from view, the diegetic \u201cwhole.\u201d In contrast, the long take, in its objection to the perceptual harmony of classical montage, manifests as an image of what Kristin Thompson has called \u201cexcess\u201d (\u201cCinematic Excess\u201d 513-24). The shot of marked duration exceeds not only the perceptual orientation of montage, but manifests its stronger, potentially more transgressive mark of excess in its unwillingness to conform to a generalized spectatorial regime. The long take is frequently, and certainly for Cuar\u00f3n and Lubezki, a liberation from the constrictive spatial and temporal regime of tradition. The further Cuar\u00f3n and Lubezki shift into the montage regime of contemporary Hollywood studio filmmaking, the more emphatic their subsequent departure from an aesthetic of classical montage.<\/p>\n

Following what Cuar\u00f3n deemed the aesthetic failure of Great Expectations<\/em> (McGrath), Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em> represents the formative development in the Cuar\u00f3n\/Lubezki signature collaboration. Long-take, hand-held camerawork with inconspicuous movement captures the harmonious relationship of objects within a single spatio-temporal field. Children of Men<\/em>\u2019s dystopian genre narrative is realized almost entirely in extraordinarily complex, highly visible movements synthesizing hand-held and Steadicam aesthetics; in fact, Cuar\u00f3n opted for a hand-held apparatus fixed to the body of the operator, thus in a literal sense animated by both the central weight of the body and the peripheral, contingency-based animation of the hand (Frederick). Gravity<\/em>\u2019s spatio-temporal field of the image (in this article I focus on the 13-minute opening long take) is digitally constituted through a virtual apparatus increasingly divorced from the material presence of the body (both that of the screen performer and the camera operator), the embodied technology of the apparatus, and the spatio-temporal field of the pro-filmic environment. Each film, I argue, not only affirms an aesthetic and philosophical style founded on the long take, but represents Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s and Lubezki\u2019s negotiation of the long take as a cinematographic signifier of transgression.<\/p>\n

These questions of aesthetic style are, as Udden argues, also questions of meaning, or questions of intent. \u201cWhat do these long takes imply?\u201d (27). But further, why the long take over some other potentially transgressive montage regime, such as the radical discontinuity cutting in recent mainstream action cinema (Stork)? In this chapter, I want to ask, what is the ideological function of the long take in Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s work with Lubezki, particularly as the products of their filmmaking collaboration become increasingly popular and they are compelled to negotiate the aesthetic, commercial, and cultural space of global Hollywood? Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s sojourn in Mexico for Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em> was precisely that: a departure as a precursor to return. This return inserted him and Lubezki into the heart of mainstream studio production with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban<\/em> (2003), effectively amalgamating a radically distinctive aesthetic style with the franchise ethos of contemporary Hollywood. Children of Men<\/em> (Universal) and Gravity<\/em> (Warner Brothers) are examples of what Mirrlees has labeled the \u201cglobal blockbuster,\u201d productions of enormous scale calibrated to return a specific profit percentage on investment (5). Within the mainstream globalized Hollywood milieu, I argue that the long take resonates as ideology within a complex production and consumption network over and above pure style.<\/p>\n

The negotiation of the contemporary studio system further implicates the production, distribution, and exhibition itineraries brought about by the \u201cdigital turn\u201d (Runnel et al. 7-12). Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em>, shot in 2000 and exhibited through film projection, is in essence a \u201cfilmic\u201d film, bearing that special imprint of the pro-filmic on film stock, materializing through celluloid and developing chemicals, and the movement\/time of the film reel through a projector. Exhibited in digital form, the filmic material maintains a second-degree indexicality, an indexical relation once removed from the pro-filmic event but nevertheless maintaining that existential bond that Doane equates with indexicality (\u201cIndexicality\u201d 2). A film shot on film but screened digitally escapes the void of Rodowick\u2019s digital cinema bereft of all indexicality, without that pro-filmic world of the past being present to the image. Fittingly for Rodowick, shooting digital but reprinting to film for exhibition \u201cseems not to be able to return to digital movies the experience of watching film\u201d (164). Children of Men<\/em>, a digital \u201cfilm\u201d in terms of its compositional logic,[2]<\/a> as well as in the more significant context of the digital\u2019s non-indexical sign, contrives spatial and temporal regimes afforded by digital production and post-production technologies. As has been well documented, Children of Men<\/em>\u2019s magnificent long takes are in fact digital assemblages of discrete intervals comprising the \u201csequence shot\u201d[3]<\/a> we see on screen (Fordham 34; Udden 30-34); the sequence shot<\/em> as a spatial and temporal designation is only appropriate, in its purest sense, to filmic technology. The concluding hand-held\/Steadicam sequence that tracks Theo\u2019s (Clive Owen) passage through the prison riot was captured in several discrete segments, and in two separate shooting locations. Cuar\u00f3n was reluctant to reveal the digital compositional truth behind Children of Men<\/em> (Udden 32) simply because the filmic long take is long (in the Bazinian sense) only if uninterrupted by a cut or an otherwise invisible digital interpolation.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

In Children of Men<\/em>, the digital long take repackages the ontological basis and existential allure of the filmic long take. Cuar\u00f3n takes great pains to ground this digital duration in a discourse of filmic realism. As Udden suggests, Cuar\u00f3n sounds very much like Bazin when explaining his cinematographic style (27). In 2014, eight years after Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s obfuscation of the digital \u201ctruth,\u201d the objection to its artifice seems almost pass\u00e9<\/em>; the digital long take is artificial only if its obverse, the filmic-indexical long take, maintains its allure. In Scorsese\u2019s Hugo<\/em> (2011), digitality\u2019s discretized long take is celebrated as a composite captured on several sets, stretching time and space into a fantastic digital amalgam (Seymour). Gravity<\/em> (2013), a film that required years of digital pre-production development, has set a new benchmark in demonstrating the radical non-filmic capacity of digital cinema to depict discretized duration. Almost a decade after Children of Men<\/em>, who would experience Gravity<\/em>\u2019s long take as anything other than a digital image form? The contemporary spectator is increasingly aware of\u2014and sensitive to\u2014digital spaces and times. In fact, I would argue that digital duration is properly the experience of time (in the Bergsonian sense)[5]<\/a> inflected through an awareness of digitality\u2019s fundamental discretization. And this coming to self-awareness of \u201cthe digital\u201d is part of what we might productively call, projecting from Bazin, the \u201caesthetic of digital realism\u201d: an awareness of a spatial and temporal field exhibited as a digital \u201cwhole\u201d (Brown 72).<\/p>\n

Reading technology and style through an ideological lens recalls the series of articles (1971-1972) produced by Jean-Louis Comolli on a materialist mode of filmic analysis. Working against Bazin and Mitry, whom Comolli labeled idealist for ascribing to film a pure capacity for revelation, Comolli reads the evolution of film style as a function of the values, beliefs, and choices inherent in a hegemonic system: \u201cThus it is indeed an ideological discourse about (notably) the ideological place of cinematographic technique which the fixed syntagm \u2018for the first time\u2019 [Comolli is referring to Bazin\u2019s and Mitry\u2019s romance of film\u2019s technological \u2018first times\u2019] incessantly maintains\u201d (426). Film style and its evolution through technology, which has advanced in fits and starts since the late nineteenth century, is always already implicated in the question of why<\/em>: why the long take, why now, when the long take as an existential recourse to the real seems so outmoded by a montage of (increasingly digitally interpolated) attractions? While Bordwell has very convincingly argued against Comolli\u2019s own ideological reading of cinematographic style (On the History of Film Style<\/em> 159-163), still, Comolli\u2019s desire for a materialist criticism of style is surely shared by all who wish to understand the implications of a mode of cinematography emerging through the industrial, commercial, and cultural apparatus of digital technology. I share Steven Shaviro\u2019s position: \u201cI really do love traditional cinematography, as has been provided by Chris Doyle for Wong Kar-wai, or by Gregg Toland for Orson Welles . . . But I still feel it is important to come to grips with the ways that cinematography is changing in response to 21st-century digital technologies\u201d (\u201cThe new cinematography\u201d). These \u201cways,\u201d if I understand Shaviro correctly, are not only technological and aesthetic (for example, \u201cnew affordances provided by CGI\u201d), but ideological<\/em>, and thus profoundly implicated in how contemporary cultural meanings attach to new ways of contriving space and time in digital cinematographic images.<\/p>\n

The index as the site of an essential filmic substance\u2014the affecting present of a world past\u2014is profoundly limited in a contemporary digital image regime. Of course, I acknowledge the allure of the indexical image-sign of cinema, or photography\u2014for Barthes, the most provocative of all mediums (Camera Lucida<\/em> 97-100). But to wish to recuperate the index as the substance of \u201ccinema\u201d essentially means excluding contemporary digital filmmaking from the category of the \u201ccinematic\u201d; the digital image would have to be something else, it would have to mean other things, affect us in non-cinematic ways. We see this rejection of digital cinema in mainstream filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, and Martin Scorsese. This is Scorsese on the digital image increasingly pervasive in contemporary cinema production: \u201cMy big concern is that the image, ultimately, with CGI . . . I don\u2019t know if our younger generation is believing anything anymore\u201d (Side by Side<\/em>). For Scorsese, belief in the image is founded upon the index\u2019s imprint of a pro-filmic event\u2014space and time materialized in filmic form. But beneath this desire for belief in the indexical sign is a more complex ideology underpinning the contractual relationship between the producers and consumers of mediated experience. Why must the spectator unproblematically believe<\/em> in an image, or in the image\u2019s primal relationship to the pro-filmic event? We might productively advance on Scorsese\u2019s position to ask: in lieu of the affect of belief afforded by a filmic image, what forms of affective engagement are generated through the digital composition of a pro-filmic event? Even on a very basic iconographic and symbolic level, the digital sign points back<\/em> to an object referent (Lefebvre and Furstenau 103-104). Where then, in lieu of the sacred relationship to the index, does the affective (and ideological) contract of the digital sign cohere as a meaningful image?<\/p>\n

In attempting to read Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s and Lubezki\u2019s ideology beneath a cinematographic style, I engage the image of the long take (whether filmic or digital) as a composition of material properties and processes: as an image of the materiality of the pro-filmic event, rather than the event in itself. I construe materiality less as index\u2014that which is imprinted, preserved and unchangeable\u2014than as the image-exhibition of a \u201cnexus of finely interlaced force fields\u201d (Highmore 119). In the most basic terms, applicable to the vast majority of contemporary image experiences, I argue that the materiality of the digital image is located in the capacity of digital technology to shape its itinerary, to take the pro-filmic event and materialize it anew within a digital image regime. When viewed as materialization (whether through rendering and compositing, or more radically through full image creation), the digital image is always already the materialization of the world: its physicality in space and time, as well as the \u201cphysical actuality of culture\u201d (Highmore 119). Digital image materialization implicates the interlaced \u201cforce fields\u201d of technologies of production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption; the evolution of a digital cinematographic style; and the spectatorial modes that confront contemporary audiences. The iPhone image (see Figures 1-2, below), digitally reincarnated here, bears the special affect of what Barthes called the photograph\u2019s punctum<\/em>. Like Barthes\u2019s image, this casual capture of a time and place through an iPhone swells into the greater resonance of temporal experience\u2014an experience of inhabiting that<\/em> temporal moment. And yet, in contemplating this image within a fully digitized image environment (the iPhone image instagrammed), I no longer enter into a reverie situated in a hermetically sealed past, but rather, into a spatial and temporal network of undetermined image possibilities. Less than preserved past, the iPhone image affects the spectator as a discretized, infinitely dispersed whole.<\/p>\n

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Figure 1 – The iPhone image<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 2 – The iPhone image Instagrammed<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The ontological foundation of the digital image seems to me the special resonance of the pro-filmic world as a series of material signs in transition: the physical ephemera of the world captured in an image, and then the affective potential of such ephemera on the spectator. In recent affect-based theory, the viewer\u2019s body is privileged as the site of this material encounter; this is the embodied spectatorship of Sobchack (Carnal Thoughts<\/em>) and Rutherford (What Makes a Film Tick<\/em>), among others. But in my use, in the specific context of the digital sign, material also connotes the materiality of pro-filmic time and place (a historical actuality) and all it encompasses\u2014the substance of an always already ideological whole. My approach here follows Dudley Andrew\u2019s recent work in What Cinema Is!<\/em> (2010), in which he rejects the value-based distinction between a filmic and digital cinematographic mode. Andrew suggests that \u201ccinema must press forward into the new century, by taking into itself<\/em> the subject matter that surrounds it, increasingly a new media culture\u201d (94; my emphasis). I attempt to reveal digital cinema\u2019s \u201ctaking into itself the subject matter that surrounds it,\u201d focusing on the myriad ways in which new cinema materializes the world as a digital construct.<\/p>\n

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Beyond the Indexical: <\/strong>Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9<\/strong>n<\/strong><\/em> and <\/strong>Children of Men<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Cuar\u00f3n and Lubezki employ several different kinds of long takes across Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em>, Children of Men<\/em>, and Gravity<\/em>, and indeed, within each film. Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em> uses a plethora of what Peter Bradshaw calls \u201cunobtrusively long takes.\u201d In the opening sequence in which we\u2019re introduced to Tenoch (Diego Luna), one of the film\u2019s protagonists, the camera moves freely within a single room, holding the action long after the spectator has anticipated a cut. The camera is imbued with the capacity to move where it chooses, to depict background and foreground in concert, to erase the traditional perspectival hierarchy of the object\u2019s relation to the spatial field. The frame is held in a medium-long shot, yet it is never stable; it is never an objective shot depicting the narrative action of a sequence. Captured entirely with a hand-held apparatus that jitters with the movement of the body and hand of the operator, the long take evinces the indexical relationship to the pro-filmic event (the camera operator is shooting film), but here, as in many of the spatial environments that constitute Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em>, the technology of film is not the ontological basis of \u201cintegral realism\u201d (Bazin, \u201cThe Myth of Total Cinema\u201d 21). Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s film certainly approximates the neorealist style through long takes and depths of field, but in this instance the Bazinian real is less a matter of indexicality than of a materialization of the real within an image. Surely what Bazin desired in the style of the filmmaker, whether Welles or Renoir or Rossellini, was an ethical<\/em> commitment to depicting the material properties of the real; and as such, materiality was part of both \u201cthe real,\u201d and an \u201caesthetic of reality\u201d (Bazin, \u201cAn Aesthetic of Reality\u201d). Realism in Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em> is less a matter of an a priori<\/em> real than the materiality of a physical environment: the bodies on the bed, the background space of the room and its contents, the contents of the receding room beyond, all contained harmoniously in a freely accessible, densely populated space. The long take and emphatic presence of the hand-held apparatus intensifies the materiality of place, time, and a spectatorial subjectivity within the pro-filmic environment.<\/p>\n

Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em>\u2019s story about border crossing and transgression is depicted in several sequence shots that expand the purely physical pro-filmic event to encompass a wider historical\/political milieu. Julio (Gael Garc\u00eda Bernal) and Tenoch literally pass through a transformational moment in Mexican political history (evincing a generational apathy that Cuar\u00f3n seems to be criticizing) by seeking out car keys from Julio\u2019s sister at a demonstration. While the boys are unconcerned with the political exigencies, the hand-held camera is granted access to a complexly integrated spatial field, dissociating from the narrow perspective of the protagonists to reveal a diversely articulated mass of protesting bodies (Figures 3-5, below). The camera encompasses separate narrative frames\u2014the boys\u2019 ensuing road trip and the political demonstration\u2014within a spatial and temporal whole, moving between the two without encumbrance. This sequence demonstrates Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s aesthetic of the long take as a form of spatial revelation. Foreground and background, rather than discrete frames within a traditional perspectival hierarchy, materialize as a physical and \u201cacculturated\u201d whole. Captured in duration through the hand-held camera, fixed in its movements to the body of the operator and increasingly drawn to the crowd, political history and its subject materialize within the diegesis, implicating the road-trip narrative as merely one (and not necessarily the primary) affective field. This long take strategically documents a narrative diegesis while revealing a historical past that is now made present to the spectator.<\/p>\n

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Figure 3 – Frame grab from Y TU MAM\u00c1 TAMBI\u00c9N (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2001)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 4 – Frame grab from Y TU MAM\u00c1 TAMBI\u00c9N (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2001)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 5 – Frame grab from Y TU MAM\u00c1 TAMBI\u00c9N (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2001)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

History\u2019s materiality\u2014what \u017di\u017eek refers to as the \u201cbackground\u201d of the frame\u2014is emphatically foregrounded in the use of the long take in Children of Men<\/em>. The shot of excessive duration is now more elaborate and challenging, and more overtly situated as Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s and Lubezki\u2019s signature cinematographic style. Unlike the image of duration captured and exhibited through filmic material in Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em>, in Children of Men<\/em> Cuar\u00f3n employs what I refer to as a digital compositional logic. Freed from the burden of an indexical mapping of the pro-filmic environment, this image materializes the \u201cnexus of finely interlaced force fields\u201d (Highmore) in increasingly impossible temporal stretches. The opening long take is succeeded by the astonishing complexity of a car chase captured through a \u201cdoggie-cam\u201d (Fordham), which is bettered again in the final act in one of the most complex and awe-inspiring sequence shots in cinematic history (Frederick).<\/p>\n

Referring to the conventional quest narrative of Children of Men<\/em>, \u017di\u017eek suggests that \u201cthe true infertility is the very lack of a meaningful historical experience . . . And it is clear that the true, most radical impact of global capitalism is that we lack this basic, literally, world view, a meaningful experience of totality.\u201d This encompassing of a world viewed in its totality is clearly one of Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s aesthetic motivations in both Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em> and Children of Men<\/em>. The long take reveals a material reality that is grounded in the meaning of a totalized historical experience. In Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em>, an innocuous long take covering a busy dialogue exchange in a car suddenly departs from the narrative foreground to depict a pictorial background: a police roadside stop victimizing a group of locals, symbolic of a wider, long-practiced, and endemic social repression of the individual (Figures 6-9). Such political \u201cbackgrounds\u201d are steadfastly present in Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em>, but it is the casualness of the hand-held gaze, in even more casual duration, which need not fixate on this brief interruption to the narrative, that is most striking as a depiction of historical experience. And Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s historical snapshot is not a discrete historical event. Rather, a materialist analysis reads this history as process<\/em>, as encompassed within a process of becoming. Thus, the sequence shot\u2014that does not cease in its revelation of the pro-filmic world simply because it is cut from the field of vision\u2014materializes also as the constant evolution of historical forces. The image speaks to both past and future, internal to Mexico\u2019s national context, while speaking outwardly toward the threat of a globalizing \u201cideological despair of late capitalism\u201d (\u017di\u017eek). Ironically, 20th Century Fox (Mexico) distributed the film, which recouped 40 million dollars worldwide on an art-house budget of 5 million, in part paving the way for Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s and Lubezki\u2019s return to Hollywood.<\/p>\n

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Figure 6 – Frame grab from Y TU MAM\u00c1 TAMBI\u00c9N (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2001)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 7 – Frame grab from Y TU MAM\u00c1 TAMBI\u00c9N (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2001)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 8 – Frame grab from Y TU MAM\u00c1 TAMBI\u00c9N (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2001)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 9 – Frame grab from Y TU MAM\u00c1 TAMBI\u00c9N (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2001)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I argue that in Children of Men<\/em>, with Cuar\u00f3n and Lubezki now filtering the image through a digital production apparatus, time and space are even more emphatically material<\/em> concerns. The human world is dying as women are infertile; the environment no longer has the capacity to replenish itself; state apparatuses are totalitarian and repressive. Within this globalized dystopia, Theo wears a jacket that celebrates a utopian past-time of the London Olympics 2012, still six years away during the film\u2019s production. The image of a future-historical event functions both as a glib joke about the contemporary fetish for empty (globally produced and consumed) spectacle, and as an image of a lost utopia, registering quite literally for Theo and the spectator as \u201closs.\u201d In 2027, a dystopian London is revealed through the material detritus of a diseased city: a hierarchical and class-conscious place where refugees line streets in cages, environmental degradation is pervasive, and garbage is strewn openly in public space. The opening long take (a set of two discretized digital durations) first follows Theo, then freely dissociates from its primary object (the film\u2019s protagonist) and displays the world as a background encapsulating narrative foreground. The image of the city, seen through the gaze of an autonomous apparatus, is neither an image of attraction nor a narrative cue; it is, merely, the revelation of the materiality (physical\/historical\/ideological) of a London city street in the near, though very recognizable, future.<\/p>\n

It is clear when viewing Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em> and Children of Men<\/em> through a materialist lens that each film demonstrates a profound ethical commitment to depicting a material historicity. Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s depiction of road trips in both films demonstrates a desire to recuperate history as the experience of subjectivity and difference. This ethical commitment to the material real is surely greater than any ontological field founded upon an indexical relationship between object and image. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that digital cinematographic and editing practice presents the technology to more emphatically represent materiality. And in a world in which digital code contaminates, and then gradually subsumes, analogical form, paradoxically, the world as historical materiality<\/em> becomes all the more alluring, all the more affecting. Of course, Manovich has convincingly demonstrated the logic of Vertov\u2019s filmic image that exceeds the real. In revealing what is hidden from the subjective gaze, Vertov\u2019s technological image exceeds the world viewed through the subjective senses, exhibiting the cinematographic world as more than the world the spectator inhabits (293-308). But for all of Manovich\u2019s ingenious argument for the analogy between Man With A Movie Camera<\/em> and the contemporary digital moment, Vertov was nevertheless constrained by the all-encompassing technology of celluloid. He was shooting film and cutting frenetically within the material parameters of that medium. Following Elsaesser and Hagener, I argue that in the emergence of cinema as a digital image itinerary, the materiality of the pro-filmic event is potentially intensified through \u201cits re-embodied manifestation of everything visible, tactile and sensory\u201d (174). The digital image, in effect, potentially re-materializes<\/em> the world in image form.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A Mark on the Digital Lens <\/strong><\/p>\n

In my reading of Children of Men<\/em>, materiality registers as a non-indexical image phenomenon. Of course, my desire for a material real and its historical totality clearly recuperates a Bazinian realist myth. Yet in the era of what Shaviro has already called \u201cpost-cinema\u201d (Post-Cinematic Affect<\/em>) we increasingly need new ways to conceptualize the material real through an experience of non-indexical signs. We have to find new ways of living with images.<\/p>\n

One such new way of being with the digital image materializes in the bravura sequence shot in the final act of Children of Men<\/em>. To begin, we must give up our desire for the ontological and existential plenitude of duration: Cuar\u00f3n and Lubezki efface a series of cuts from the spatial environment, compositing separate image durations as a singular spatial and temporal whole. Theo, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), and her newborn baby flee Bexhill prison as a riot breaks out. Within the diegesis, the riot serves as precursor to a future national, and potentially global, revolution. Cuar\u00f3n and Lubezki frame the escape in a long take captured in what I will call the embodied hand-held apparatus, fixed to both the hand and body of the operator. The camera follows Theo for the duration of the sequence, but here again, as in the hand-held aesthetic in Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em>, the apparatus in its radical autonomy within the environment exceeds both the eye of the protagonist and the traditional viewing subject. At 1:26:32,[6]<\/a> midway through the sequence shot, blood (a broken squib) splatters onto the lens of the camera. Apparently Lubezki or the operator called \u201ccut\u201d to reset for the next take (Frederick). In filmic-indexical terms, the marking of the lens constitutes an ontological rupture; the natural impulse is therefore to cut\u2014to cut that section away\u2014and reconstitute the insularity of the pro-filmic event. But the sequence shot was not cut, Clive Owen and the other actors remained oblivious to what had happened, and the action continues with blood clearly showing on the lens.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

The mark on the lens is not a mark of \u201cthe digital itinerary\u201d per se<\/em>; such ruptures in the diegesis, while uncommon, occur in celluloid production. For example, in the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan<\/em> (1998), Spielberg\u2019s documentary style encompasses this ontological slippage between diegetic and non-diegetic apparatus (Figures 10-11). But Spielberg\u2019s marks are carefully choreographed, and indeed, rationalized by a reduced color ratio in the image, hand-held camerawork, and frenetic discontinuous cutting. In my viewing of Saving Private Ryan<\/em>, the affective encounter with the mark on the lens occurs within a clearly articulated, highly formulaic visual and aural style. Spielberg\u2019s mark on the lens<\/em> is displaced to a generalized location within the diegesis, the arrival at Omaha Beach. The affect of the mark thus resonates within a generic historical field and its well-trodden, familiar representational aesthetic. In displacing the mark from the frame to the diegesis, Spielberg\u2019s image renders the apparatus again invisible, and strategically subdues the potential transgression of the ontological rupture.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Figure 10 – Frame grab from SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (Steven Spielberg, 1998)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 11 – Frame grab from SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (Steven Spielberg, 1998)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But consider the radical difference of the mark on the lens in Children of Men<\/em>. First, in the Cuar\u00f3n-Lubezki sequence shot, the mark appears accidentally, at 1:26:58 (Figures 12-13, below). The pro-filmic event is marked through what Doane has called \u201ccontingency,\u201d a spontaneous opening up of a field of \u201cthe new\u201d (Emergence<\/em> 100); in spontaneously opening into the pro-filmic environment, the mark re-materializes<\/em> that environment. Second, unlike Saving Private Ryan<\/em>\u2019s mark, which is choreographed within a complex montage itinerary (a montage of distraction!), in Children of Men<\/em>, the mark is subjected to the weight of its own duration: the diegetic\/non-diegetic rupture is held for 1 minute and 18 seconds before its erasure through a digital splice. The curious affect of this mark incorporates the base materiality of the pro-filmic environment (physical matter marking the lens, and in turn materially marking the physical environment), as well as<\/em> the discretized nature of the digital mark as a spontaneous irruption within the pro-filmic field. Discretization\u2014the material logic of digitality\u2014could in this sense be construed as an infinite field of \u201cmarking the real,\u201d reconstituting the pro-filmic environment through production and post-production processes. The impulse to cut for director or cinematographer is thus weakened, and the digital mark in duration instead opens onto new and potentially richer ways of accessing the pro-filmic event.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Figure 12 – Frame grab from CHILDREN OF MEN (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2006)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"
Figure 13 – Frame grab from CHILDREN OF MEN (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2006)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cuar\u00f3n could have removed the mark by searching for that one perfect take. But why search for an indexical sign\u2014the sign of the uncontaminated real\u2014in an era of discretized image production? He could have removed the mark in digital post-production. But again, why erase the mark when leaving it within the frame merely re-materializes the pro-filmic environment, when it is merely one further adornment of a wonderfully rich digital cinematic background? In its open display within the frame, the mark on the lens in Children of Men<\/em> is precisely not an ontological rupture, but a symptom of the logic of digital discretization.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Abstraction and Virtuality in <\/strong>Gravity<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

In this article, I have read the long take as a material phenomenon, shifting in its aesthetic register freely between film and digital technologies of production and consumption. Materiality connotes the actuality of a place and time, as well as what Highmore has called the \u201cinterlaced force fields\u201d that emanate from it. In concluding this reading, I turn to the opening 13-minute sequence shot of the most critically praised Cuar\u00f3n-Lubezki collaboration, Gravity<\/em>. In contrast to much of the critical reception of Gravity<\/em>, I argue that the dominant image of the film\u2019s spatial field is not that of the unfathomable depths of space\u2014and certainly not the kind of threatening spatial void conventional in the science fiction genre. Rather, the center of Gravity<\/em>\u2019s sequence shot is the Earth, the gloriously simulated globe in a constant virtual rotation. While the field of the shot incorporates several discrete narrative frames\u2014Lieutenant Kowalski\u2019s (George Clooney) spacewalk, Dr. Stone\u2019s (Sandra Bullock) work on the Hubble telescope, Engineer Shariff\u2019s actions in the background[8]<\/a>\u2014each frame is composed only to subsequently reframe<\/em> into a strategic revelation of the digital globe. Such strategic re-framings occur at 7:40-7:48 and 8:25-8:55.[9]<\/a> At 8:25, Kowalski turns from Stone to gaze upon the Earth: \u201cYou\u2019ve gotta admit one thing: you can\u2019t beat the view.\u201d It is an awestruck murmur in contemplation of nature\u2019s sublime image of the world (Figures 14-16).<\/p>\n

\"\"
Figure 14 – Frame grab from GRAVITY (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2013)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 15 – Frame grab from GRAVITY (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2013)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 15 – Frame grab from GRAVITY (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2013)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

A number of very interesting cinematographic signs are deployed here. Kowalski not only gazes up at the Earth, but the resplendent image is reflected in the glass of his helmet, presenting a doubling of the object. Cuar\u00f3n makes this doubling emphatic through a continuity trick: the eye of the virtual camera begins on Kowalski, moves left to right, relegating Kowalski to off-screen space, only to pick up Kowalski again, now at the right of screen. Kowalski\u2019s repositioning occurs without a cut in the image, revealing the discombobulating multi-directionality of zero gravity space. In this movement of the cinematographic eye, the Earth is both an image in itself and the reflection of a subjective gaze; we see and, simultaneously, see ourselves seeing. There are several ways we might read the affect of this doubled spectatorship. On the one hand, the Earth becomes an autonomous object, a spectacle image divorced from the operation of story and character, or indeed, a field of signification. It seems foolish to ask what this image means<\/em>. Instead, as the eye moves from left to right, we encounter a spatial and temporal field of revelation, nature\u2019s impossible image. This is Kowalski\u2019s view, which is literally the object of his seeing. But in its doubling through a digital effect\u2014the object as reflection\u2014the Earth signifies as an abstraction<\/em>. The reflected Earth is an image of colors, contours, and textures, the virtuality of space, movement, and time, and less so the materiality of a planet and its people, or the aesthetic design of a God-creator. This is an Earth rendered in what Manovich might call the digital brushstroke, and as spectators we happily fetishize its discretized perfection. In the era of expanding virtual technologies of production, you can\u2019t beat that digital cinematic view.<\/p>\n

Gravity<\/em>\u2019s image of the Earth in this 13-minute sequence shot represents a paradigmatic transformation of the long take cinematographic style utilized in Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s and Lubezki\u2019s earlier films (Bergery). Consider what I have called the materiality of the long take in Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em> and Children of Men<\/em> alongside the following description of Gravity<\/em>\u2019s virtual cinematography:<\/p>\n

The only real elements in the space exteriors are the actors\u2019 faces behind the glass of their helmets. Everything else in the exterior scenes\u2014the spacesuits, the space station, the Earth\u2014is CGI. Similarly, for a scene in which a suit-less Stone appears to float through a spaceship in zero gravity, Bullock was suspended from wires onstage, and her surroundings were created digitally. (Bergery)<\/p>\n

Digital \u201csurroundings\u201d are not merely pictures, but entire image fields composed of movement and time. Thus, the image of the Earth in rotation encompasses not only that image as a pictorial form (colors, textures, shapes, etc.), but more significantly, the image animated in relation to material bodies within the frame. In the digital duration of Children of Men<\/em>, I argued that the digital splice in fact presented an emphatic materiality of a physical and acculturated world in excessive duration. In each of Children of Men<\/em>\u2019s sequence shots, Theo\u2019s body is a material object within the discretized duration, affecting his environment while also being affected by it. The cuts are obfuscations only in an image regime desiring an indexical bond with the pro-filmic environment, which the digital image itinerary clearly does not. But in Gravity<\/em>, the affect of the body (whether Stone\u2019s\/Bullock\u2019s, or what I will refer to as the body of \u201cThe Earth\u201d) is toward inertia, a mode of suspension within the animation of a digital surrounding. The relatively inactive body (at least within a wider spatial and temporal field), rather than the site of embodiment<\/em>, that is, infused with the body\u2019s capacity to affect its material surroundings, is background to the foreground of a virtual image field. Visual Effects Supervisor on Gravity<\/em>, Tim Webber, explains, \u201cwe created a virtual world and then worked out how to get human performances into that world\u201d (qtd. in Bergery). In contemporary virtual cinematography\u2014nowhere more brazenly deployed than in Gravity<\/em>\u2014digital surroundings significantly affect the material body and its capacity for articulation, while the affect of the material body is significantly diminished.<\/p>\n

The paradigmatic transformation in contemporary digital cinematography is toward the virtual apparatus and its unique cinematographic properties, increasingly a foundational part of high budget production. The desire among a great deal of contemporary filmmakers, Cuar\u00f3n and Lubezki included, seems to be for \u201ccomplete dimensional freedom,\u201d or what is described as \u201ctrue space operation\u201d (Bergery). Mike Jones argues quite similarly of virtuality\u2019s \u201cpure and unique cinema . . . [that] delivers an experience that is cinematically autonomous, [and] unable to be obtained from any other art form\u201d (242). But surely virtuality does not configure spatial freedom as much as spacelessness<\/em>, or a virtual field without material properties. I read Lubezki\u2019s notion of \u201ctruth\u201d (Lubezki, qtd. In Bergery) as the expression of a category of the real and its materialization in space and time. There is nothing new here in the desire for the foundational \u201ctruths\u201d of space. In the early 1920s, Murnau had already imagined<\/p>\n

[t]he fluid architecture of bodies with blood in their veins moving through mobile space; the interplay of lines rising, falling, disappearing; the encounter of surfaces, stimulation and its opposite, calm; construction and collapse; the formation and destruction of a hitherto almost unsuspected life; all this adds up to a symphony made up of the harmony of bodies and the rhythm of space; the play of pure movement, vigorous and abundant. All this we shall be able to create when the camera has at last been de-materialized (qtd. In Eisner 18).<\/p>\n

Murnau sounds very much like a champion of new virtual cinema, with its de-materialized environments and apparatus. Except, in Murnau, mobile space is not virtual space. Mobile space affects\u2014and is affected by\u2014bodies<\/em>. Mobile space reveals \u201cthe formation and destruction of a hitherto almost unsuspected life.\u201d Murnau\u2019s de-materialized apparatus opens into a \u201charmony of bodies\u201d in perfect and permanent mobility. Murnau\u2019s mobile space is thus a revelation of the materiality of the body and its relationship to a material environment.<\/p>\n

But against the desire for the materiality of mobile space that surely gave rise to the first camera movements in the late 19th century, to tracking and dolly shots, to the crane movement, the Steadicam and hand-held cinematographic devices\u2014the purely virtual space encompasses the digitally animated frame as well as<\/em> the material relationship between the frame and the real bodies situated within it. Virtual backgrounds move<\/em>; virtual backgrounds act upon bodies, situating them, affecting them. Space and time in the virtual environment are strategically calibrated to move around<\/em> the body, creating an illusion of zero gravity, or discombobulating directionality. Light animated through pre-visualization within a virtual digital environment affects the \u201cnaturalistic light on the faces\u201d of actors (Lubezki, qtd. in Bergery), and so on. The unique affect of virtual space is, as Mike Jones suggests, \u201crooted in a depiction of fantasy and the impossible\u201d (236), depicting bodies in a field of movement and time bereft of the material affect of \u201cthe body.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kristin Thompson\u2019s recent essay on Gravity<\/em> emphasizes its \u201cstrong classical story\u201d that privileges \u201cexcitement, suspense, rapid action, and the universally remarked-upon sense of immersion alongside the character\u201d (\u201cGravity<\/em>\u2014Part 1\u201d). I agree with Thompson here: alongside its paradigm-shifting virtual cinematography, Gravity<\/em> is an astonishingly formulaic narrative film. In Stone\u2019s \u201crebirth after despair\u201d (Cuar\u00f3n, qtd. in Thompson, \u201cGravity<\/em>\u2014Part 1\u201d), the spectator encounters conflict (physical, emotional, and existential\u2014the inciting incident occurs precisely when it should, at the 9-10 minute mark) and undergoes a series of neatly calibrated trials to deal with that conflict. The journey toward home and mastering the trauma of the past (the death of a child is especially affecting) articulates with great clarity the reconstruction of the individual common to mainstream American cinema. Stone\u2019s character arc is therefore toward groundedness<\/em>, and the reassurance that all is well again.<\/p>\n

Within this narrative field, I read Gravity<\/em>\u2019s ideological subtext as the rebirth of a subject in relation to a newly realized virtual image of the Earth. Implicated in this ideology of self and world is a technological evolution in cinema production that has fundamentally altered the medium of moving images; this is an Earth recreated through a virtual apparatus. Mirrlees is thus correct to read the contemporary global blockbuster as an integrated production and consumption mode (7-10). Virtuality is a high-end production field attached to new modes of digital image creation and consumption. In such high-end productions, virtual cinematography has rolled out through the industrial and commercial mechanisms of contemporary American studio practice, and it is thus part of a wider economy of contemporary Hollywood and its hegemonic dominance of global cinema cultures.<\/p>\n

What is this view of the Earth, that so astonishes Kowalski and the spectator? De-materialized, spaceless and timeless, Gravity<\/em>\u2019s virtual Earth resonates as the image of what Henri Lefebvre called \u201cabstract space.\u201d This is contemporary global Hollywood\u2019s virtual world object that seeks to \u201cerase the felt or intangible distinctions between places . . . fragmenting space into sites of specific use in order to make it increasingly controllable and marketable\u201d (Nick Jones, \u201cQuantification and Substitution\u201d 254). I have used the term \u201cmateriality\u201d to refer in part to a mode of spatialized representation, the image that captures and represents the material \u201creal.\u201d Such spaces, which I argue are the basis of Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s and Lubezki\u2019s cinematographic style in Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em> and Children of Men<\/em>, constitute a field of \u201c\u2018architectonic\u2019 determinants . . . [in which] pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements but also representational spaces<\/em> and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives\u201d (Lefebvre, The Production of Space<\/em> 230; original emphasis). Following \u017di\u017eek, I have argued that such places and times\u2014a history as material process\u2014open onto a \u201cmeaningful experience of totality.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Gravity<\/em> is bereft of such historical processes. Historical place and time are virtualized as two convergent moving image simulations. First, we have Kowalski\u2019s view of nature: de-historicized, de-materialized, disembodied. Kowalski\u2019s virtual Earth exceeds our capacity to ground its materiality in an actual here and now, the here and now of Mexico City in Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em> or the dystopian London in Children of Men<\/em>. Second, there is the Earth of Stone\u2019s return, an ideal, utopian world upon which she is grounded. Intriguingly, Cuar\u00f3n chooses to depict this Earth as a state of nature, a pristine, timeless land, as if encountered for the first time (Figures 17-18, below). The arrival simulates both a first encounter with the native, and the discovery of a pre-colonized world. In this encounter, Stone\u2019s rebirth is precisely not materialized within a space as historical process, but within a utopian imaginary virtualized as an undifferentiated whole. This is a ground Stone encounters without people and cultures. I read this journey toward home and rebirth as the regeneration through conflict of a global (American) subject in a borderless, undifferentiated world. The virtualization of this world is made all the more emphatic, and all the more ideal, through the duration of the long take. As astonishing as it is in the opening sequence, duration\u2014even digitality\u2019s discretized duration\u2014is merely one more virtual tool, one further simulated form within a de-materialized field.<\/p>\n

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Figure 17 – Frame grab from GRAVITY (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2013)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 18 – Frame grab from GRAVITY (Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, 2013)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The object of virtual duration for Cuar\u00f3n and Lubezki seems to me part of a wider virtual image-rendering of global, capitalist space, which enables Hollywood to export its hugely popular narratives within a global cinema industry. In my reading of Gravity<\/em>, \u201cThe Earth\u201d bears the technological, aesthetic, and ideological signature of late capitalist American studio film production, \u201csustaining the global market dominance of Hollywood and its cross-border trade in blockbuster films\u201d (Mirrlees 7).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Andrew, Dudley. What Cinema Is: Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge<\/em>. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print.<\/p>\n

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography<\/em>. London: Vintage, 2000. Print.<\/p>\n

Bazin, Andr\u00e9. \u201cThe Evolution of the Language of Cinema.\u201d What Is Cinema? Volume 1<\/em>. 23-40.<\/p>\n

—. \u201cThe Myth of Total Cinema.\u201d What Is Cinema? Volume 1<\/em>. 17-22. Print.<\/p>\n

—. What Is Cinema? Volume 1<\/em>. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967. Print.<\/p>\n

—. \u201cAn Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Neorealism and the Italian School of Liberation.\u201d What is Cinema? Volume 2. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. 16-40. Print.<\/p>\n

Bergery, Benjamin. \u201cFacing the Void: Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC and his Collaborators Detail their Work on Gravity<\/em>, a Technically Ambitious Drama Set in Outer Space.\u201d American Cinematographer <\/em>94.11 (2013). Web. 15 Mar. 2014.<\/p>\n

Bordwell, David. \u201cIntensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film.\u201d Film Quarterly<\/em> 55.3 (2002): 16-28. Print.<\/p>\n

—. On the History of Film Style<\/em>. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Print.<\/p>\n

Bradshaw, Peter. \u201cY Tu Mama Tambien<\/em>.\u201d The Guardian <\/em>12 Apr. 2002. Web. 28 May. 2014.<\/p>\n

Brown, William. Supercinema: Film Philosophy for the Digital Age<\/em>. Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2013. Print.<\/p>\n

Chitnis, Deepak. \u201cWe Don\u2019t Talk Like That.\u201d The American Bazaar<\/em> 7 Oct. 2013. Web. 18 May 2014.<\/p>\n

Comolli, Jean-Louis. \u201cTechnique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field (Parts 3 and 4).\u201d Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader<\/em>. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 421-43. Print.<\/p>\n

Cuar\u00f3n, Alfonso, Dir. Children of Men<\/em>. 2006. 2-Disc Special Edition. DOP Emmanuel Lubezki. Perf. Clive Owen, Clare-Hope Ashitey, Julianne Moore. Universal, 2007. DVD.<\/p>\n

—. Gravity <\/em>3D. 2013. DOP Emmanuel Lubezki. Perf. Sandra Bullock, George Clooney. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 2014. Blu-Ray.<\/p>\n

—. Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n <\/em>(And Your Mother Too). DOP Emmanuel Lubezki. Perf. Maribel Verd\u00fa, Gael Garc\u00eda Bernal, Diego Luna. 20th Century Fox (Mexico), 2001. Film.<\/p>\n

Denson, Shane, Therese Grisham, and Julia Leyda. \u201cPost-Cinematic Affect: Post-Continuity, the Irrational Camera, Thoughts on 3D.\u201d La Furia Umana <\/em>14 (2012): <http:\/\/www.lafuriaumana.it\/index.php\/archives\/41-lfu-14>. Archived at: <http:\/\/bit.ly\/1cAYgqy>. Web. 13 May 2015. Reprinted in this volume.<\/p>\n

Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive<\/em>. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Print.<\/p>\n

—. \u201cIndexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction.\u201d differences <\/em>18.1 (2007): 1-6. Print.<\/p>\n

Eisner, Lotte H. Murnau<\/em>. London: Secker and Warburg, 1973. Print.<\/p>\n

Elsaesser, Thomas, and Malte Hagener. Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses<\/em>. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.<\/p>\n

Fordham, Joe. \u201cChildren of Men<\/em>: The Human Project.\u201d Cinefex<\/em> 110 (2007): 33-44. Print.<\/p>\n

Frederick, Dave. \u201cChildren of Men<\/em>\u2014George Richmond. Bsc, Soc – 2012 Society of Camera Operators Historical Shot Award Recipient.\u201d Vimeo 2012. Web. 17 Apr. 2014. <http:\/\/vimeo.com\/40314279>.<\/p>\n

Gravity<\/em>. Box Office Mojo. Web. 8 Jun. 2014. <http:\/\/www.boxofficemojo.com\/movies\/?id=gravity.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Great Expectations<\/em>. Dir. Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Cooper. Warner Bros., 1998. Film.<\/p>\n

Guerlac, Suzanne. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson<\/em>. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006. Print.<\/p>\n

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban<\/em>. Dir. Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n. Perf. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint. Warner Bros., 2004. Film.<\/p>\n

Highmore, Ben. \u201cBitter after Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics.\u201d The Affect Theory Reader<\/em>. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 118-37. Print.<\/p>\n

Hugo<\/em>. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Perf. Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen. Paramount, 2011. Film.<\/p>\n

Jones, Mike. \u201cVanishing Point: Spatial Composition and the Virtual Camera.\u201d Animation <\/em>2.3 (2007): 225-43. Print.<\/p>\n

Jones, Nick. \u201cQuantification and Substitution: The Abstract Space of Virtual Cinematography.\u201d Animation <\/em>8.3 (2013): 253-66. Print.<\/p>\n

Joubert-Laurencin, Herv\u00e9. \u201cRewriting the Image: Two Effects of the Future-Perfect in Andr\u00e9 Bazin.\u201d Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and its Afterlife.<\/em> Ed. Dudley Andrew, with Herv\u00e9 Joubert-Laurencin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 201-05. Print.<\/p>\n

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space<\/em>. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991. Print.<\/p>\n

Lefebvre, Martin, and Marc Furstenau. \u201cDigital Editing and Montage: The Vanishing Celluloid and Beyond.\u201d Cin\u00e9mas: Revue<\/em> d’\u00c9tudes Cin\u00e9matographiques <\/em>[Journal of Film Studies<\/em>]. 20.1 (2011): 61-78. Print.<\/p>\n

Man With a Movie Camera<\/em>. Dir. Dziga Vertov. 1929. Film.<\/p>\n

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media<\/em>. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001. Print.<\/p>\n

Martin, Adrian. \u201cA Walk Through Carlito\u2019s Way<\/em>.\u201d Lola<\/em> 4 (2013). Web. 18 Jan. 2014. <http:\/\/www.lolajournal.com\/4\/carlito.html<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

McGrath, Charles. \u201cA Circuitous Route to Outer Space: Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n Discusses His Films.\u201d New York Times <\/em>3 Jan. 2014. Web. 3 Jun. 2014. <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/01\/05\/movies\/awardsseason\/alfonso-cuaron-discusses-his-films.html?_r=0<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Mirrlees, Tanner. \u201cHow to Read Iron Man<\/em>: The Economics, Geopolitics and Ideology of an Imperial Film Commodity.\u201d Cineaction<\/em> 92 (2014): 4-11. Print.<\/p>\n

Riley, Janelle. \u201cCuaron, Lubezki Talk Mistakes, Long Takes and How Peter Gabriel Made Gravity<\/em> Possible.\u201d Variety <\/em>13 Feb. 2014. Web. 2 Jun. 2014. <http:\/\/variety.com\/2014\/film\/awards\/cuaron-lubezki-1201102584\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Rodowick, David Norman. The Virtual Life of Film<\/em>. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. Print.<\/p>\n

Rombes, Nicholas. Cinema in the Digital Age<\/em>. New York: Wallflower, 2009. Print.<\/p>\n

Runnel, Pille, et al. The Digital Turn: User\u2019s Practices and Cultural Transformations<\/em>. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013. Print.<\/p>\n

Rutherford, Anne. What Makes a Film Tick?: Cinematic Affect, Materiality and Mimetic Innervation<\/em>. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Print.<\/p>\n

Saving Private Ryan<\/em>. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Matt Damon. Paramount, 1998. Film.<\/p>\n

Seymour, Mike. \u201cHugo<\/em>: A Study of Modern Inventive Visual Effects.\u201d fxguide<\/em> 1 Dec. 2011. Web. 8 May 2014. <https:\/\/www.fxguide.com\/featured\/hugo-a-study-of-modern-inventive-visual-effects\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Shaviro, Steven. Post Cinematic Affect<\/em>. Washington, DC: Zero, 2010. Print.<\/p>\n

—. \u201cThe New Cinematography.\u201d The Pinocchio Theory<\/em> 4 Mar. 2014. Web. 9 May. 2014. <http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=1196<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Side by Side<\/em>. Dir. Christopher Kenneally. Tribeca, 2012. Film.<\/p>\n

Sobchack, Vivian Carol. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture<\/em>. Berkeley: U of California P Berkeley, 2004. Print.<\/p>\n

Stork, Matthias. \u201cVideo Essay: Chaos Cinema: The Decline and Fall of Action Filmmaking.\u201d Press Play<\/em>. 22 Aug. 2011. Web.<http:\/\/blogs.indiewire.com\/pressplay\/video_essay_matthias_stork_calls_out_the_chaos_cinema<\/a>><\/p>\n

Thompson, Kristin. \u201cThe Concept of Cinematic Excess.\u201d Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings<\/em>. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 513-24. Print.<\/p>\n

—. \u201cGravity<\/em>, Part 1: Two Characters Adrift in an Experimental Film.\u201d David Bordwell\u2019s Website on Cinema<\/em> 7 Nov. 2013. Web. 25 Feb. 2014. <http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2013\/11\/07\/gravity-part-1-two-characters-adrift-in-an-experimental-film\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Touch of Evil<\/em>. Dir. Orson Welles. Perf. Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles. Universal, 1958. Film.<\/p>\n

Udden, James. \u201cChild of the Long Take: Alfonso Cuaron\u2019s Film Aesthetics in the Shadow of Globalization.\u201d Style <\/em>43.1 (2009): 26-44. Print.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. \u201cChildren of Men<\/em> Comments by Slavoj \u017di\u017eek.\u201d Bonus Features, Children of Men.<\/em> 2-Disc Special Edition. Universal, 2007. DVD.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> In this article, I attribute a \u201cvisual style\u201d (rather than a more traditional \u201cauteurism\u201d) to the collaboration between Cuar\u00f3n and Lubezki, which of course further incorporates the creative and technical input of several production departments.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> It is important to distinguish between several registers of contemporary digital film production in the Cuar\u00f3n-Lubezki collaboration. I am describing Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/em> as a \u201cfilmic\u201d film in which the production of the image is primarily a function of film stock production processes: the image is produced exclusively through film stock, post-produced in a manner approximating the editing rationale of film-stock editing, and exhibited on theatre screens through celluloid projection. Conversely, I describe Children of Men<\/em> and Gravity<\/em> as \u201cdigital films,\u201d to refer to the digital itinerary of the production image. While both Children of Men<\/em> and Gravity<\/em> utilize film stock in production, following the critical formulation of David Rodowick, film stock is now always already incorporated within a discretized data field of \u201cdigital intermediates and images combining computer synthesis and capture\u201d (164).<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Here I draw on Bazin\u2019s formulation of the \u201csequence-shot\u201d (\u201cplan-s\u00e9quence<\/em>\u201d), a long take that captures an entire sequence of action without a cut. For a fascinating reading of the evolution of the term in Bazin\u2019s writing, see Herv\u00e9 Joubert-Laurencin.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> For a provocative discussion of digital cinema\u2019s deceptive long takes, see Rodowick, 163-174. For Rodowick, the digital image, whether shot digitally or digitally composited through computer programs, \u201cis not \u2018one\u2019\u201d (166), but a myriad of compositional materials masquerading as an imagistic whole.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> For an excellent overview of Bergson\u2019s philosophy of temporal experience, see Guerlac. She offers the following provocative summation of Bergson\u2019s project: \u201cAt the turn of the century, Bergson urged us to think time concretely. He invited us to consider the real act of moving, the happening of what happens (ce qui se fait<\/em>), and asked us to construe movement in terms of qualitative change, not as change that we measure after the fact and map onto space . . . Bergson thinks time as force. This is what he means by duration\u201d (1-2).<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Time code refers to Children of Men<\/em> (DVD, 2-Disc Special Edition). Universal, 2007.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> For a comprehensive and compelling account of the function of the digital camera across a range of contemporary films, see Denson et al. Denson suggests that the \u201cunlocatable\/irrational camera in [digital films] \u2018corresponds\u2019 (for lack of a better word) to the basically non-human ontology of digital image production, processing, and circulation.\u201d In addition, I would also locate this ontology of the digital image in its basic correspondence with a non-material pro-filmic environment.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> On first seeing Gravity<\/em>, I was astonished at what I perceived to be the grossly stereotypical depiction of the Indian-American male, derived in part, I would suggest, from the characterization of Apu in The Simpsons<\/em>. For a similar reading, see Chitnis.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Time code refers to Gravity<\/em> 3D Blu-Ray release, Warner Bros., 2014.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Bruce Isaacs<\/strong> is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney. He has published work on film history and theory, with a particular interest in the deployment of aesthetic systems in classical and post-classical American cinema. He is the author of the monographs The Orientation of Future Cinema: Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Toward a New Film Aesthetic (Continuum, 2008), and is co-editor of the special journal issue, The Cinema of Michael Bay: Technology, Transformation, and Spectacle in the \u2018Post-Cinematic\u2019 Era (Senses of Cinema, June, 2015). He is currently working on a large-scale project on genre cinema, examining aesthetic points of contact in the work of Sergio Leone, Dario Argento, Brian De Palma and Quentin Tarantino.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Bruce Isaacs, \u201cReality Effects:\u00a0The Ideology of the Long Take in the Cinema of Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n,\u201d\u00a0in Denson and Leyda (eds),\u00a0Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016). Web. <http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/4-3-isaacs\/<\/a>>. ISBN 978-0-9931996-2-2\u00a0(online)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY BRUCE ISAACS     Between 2001 and 2013, Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, working in concert with long-time collaborator, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, … Continue reading 4.3 Reality Effects: The Ideology of the Long Take in the Cinema of Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-78","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P7eBQu-1g","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1328,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/78\/revisions\/1328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}