Scopic Regimes of the Anthropocene: War, (Im)Mobility, and the Planetary Now in Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006)
Although Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopic film Children of Men (2006) received much critical attention, its prescient engagement with the planet’s current anthropogenic transformations has been largely overlooked. Drawing from the work of the art and activist collective Forensic Architecture, this essay ar...
Enregistré dans:
| Dans: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/transtexts, |
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| Auteur principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Anglais |
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Transtext(e)s Transcultures
2023
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| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | Although Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopic film Children of Men (2006) received much critical attention, its prescient engagement with the planet’s current anthropogenic transformations has been largely overlooked. Drawing from the work of the art and activist collective Forensic Architecture, this essay argues that the film’s “investigative aesthetics” and its complex orchestration of mobility and immobility destabilise the apocalyptic scopic regimes of the Anthropocene while imagining shared planetary futures for all life on the planet. On the one hand, the film develops a critical genealogy of normalised visualisations of anthropogenic violence and reveals how, since the Columbian Exchange, a continuous and asymmetrical “war of attrition” (Mbembe) has been waged against human and nonhuman mobility and life itself. On the other hand, the film’s use of a mobile camera and its cinematography of referencing generate a countervisual practice of the Anthropocene and envision the heterotemporality of the planetary now. |
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