• 1 Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Conflicts of Planetary Proportion – A Conversation”, Journal (...)
• 2 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York, Schocken Books, 1968, p. 261. For the “planetary now”, se (...)
• 3 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 263.
• 4 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 255.
• 5 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 261.
• 6 For more on hetero- and chronotemporality, see Paul Huebener, Susie O’Brien et al., Time and Global (...)

2 The announcement’s intertextual references further interweave multiple timescales and modes of sensing that illustrate the film’s aesthetic and political practice of visualising what this special issue calls the “planetary now.” First, the idea that “the future was just around the corner” references a pervasive attitude of Western triumphalism that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent rise of neoliberal globalisation. This era, as Andrew Bacevich observes, prematurely celebrated the end of history and the “sense that a dazzling future lay just ahead.”1 The phrase ironically refers a miscalculated past and future gone awry to the audience’s present. Second, “a blast from the past” invokes Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “now [Jetztzeit]” or monadic time. In revolutionary times, Benjamin writes, the “past is charged with the time of the now which [is] blasted out of the continuum of history.”2 Benjamin’s “now” takes the form of a monad, a “cessation” of time that ruptures the linear and progressive flow of history.3 At this moment, he suggests, the past “can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised.”4 In the film, perhaps Cuarón’s own post-global Arcades Project, monadic or dialectical images appear as references taken from various visual sources and recompose the history of colonial modernity and the anthropogenic imagination. These multitemporal references interrupt “empty, homogeneous time” and arrest “historical progress,”5 the scourge at the heart of the Anthropocene. As this article suggests, Cuarón’s political aesthetics foreground the multidirectional heterotemporalities6 of the global in the planetary and make visible hitherto unimagined futures through the planetary now.

• 7 For illuminating discussions of its racialised and heteronormative biopolitics, its “cinematographi (...)
• 8 Counter-finality, akin to negative feedback loops, refers to Ian Baucom’s reading of Sartre’s under (...)

3 Since its release, Children has elicited a wide range of critical responses but, with the partial exception of Ann E. Kaplan and Julia E. Domingo’s assessments, it has rarely been read through its cinematic engagement with the Anthropocene and even less so in relation to the planetary.7 In what follows, I briefly discuss how the film employs investigative aesthetics to visualise and historicise the Anthropocene. I then track how current scopic regimes of the Anthropocene are indebted to earlier modes of representing anthropogenic violence and explain how the hypermobility of global war and news images serves a counter-final politics8 of policing human mobility, reinforcing social enmity, and normalising visual renderings of the Anthropocene. The last two sections examine how the film’s referential practice and use of a mobile yet investigative camera perform the planetary now and generate a countervisual practice of the Anthropocene.

• 9 For an early discussion of the film’s anamorphic structure, see “Žižek on Children of Men”, Septemb (...)
• 10 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom and the End of the World, Princeton, Princeton University Press (...)

4Firmly rooted in its own post-9/11 historical moment, the film’s plot, loosely adapted from P. D. James’s novel The Children of Men (1992), unfolds through a series of high-speed action scenes and requires Theo, a cynical, white, middle-class man traumatised by the death of his son during a flu pandemic, to rescue Kee from insurgency and counter-insurgency forces. The former, the Fishes, are headed by Luke (Chitwetel Ejiofor), who believes in armed resistance and orders Julian’s assassination. Caught in the midst of the Fishes’ “Uprising,” Theo must midwife Kee’s daughter, navigate their escape through the “Homeland Security Bexhill Refugee Camp,” and, while lethally injured, deliver both to the Tomorrow, a hospital boat believed to take mother and child to the Human Project (HP), a secret organisation dedicated to finding a cure for human infertility. This plot is fused with a densely mediated background that references the War on Terror, environmental degradation caused by centuries of extractive global capitalism, reproduction technology, Europe’s so-called refugee and migrant crisis, and the foot-and-mouth epidemic that ravaged the UK in 2001.9 Together, these images create a sense of planetary mourning and raise questions about how to visualise post-global anthropogenic devastation in ways that both avoid aestheticising the Anthropocene and heed Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s warning that “[p]rogress still controls us even in tales of ruination.”10

• 11 Zoe Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene”, in Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (eds.), Art and the (...)
• 12 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene”, Public Culture, vol. 26, no.2, 2014, 213.
• 13 For more, see the introduction to this special issue. My thinking is indebted to the work of Jason (...)
• 14 Mirzoeff, “Visualizing”, p. 220.
• 15 Allen Feldman, “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror”, Public Culture, vol (...)
• 16 Mirzoeff, “Visualizing”, p. 226.

5 Too large and abstract a phenomenon and concept, the Anthropocene spans the entire planet and cannot be properly seen. Whether a “hyperobject” (Timothy Morton) or, as Métis scholar Zoe Todd observes, a “charismatic mega-category” comprised of “variations of ‘white public space,’”11 the Anthropocene, according to film theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, “can only be visualized.” Given the Anthropocene’s elusive and macro-political scale, “the last moment of human agency” consists “in […] rendering [it] into an aesthetics […]. Perhaps surprisingly, to visualize the Anthropocene is to invoke the aesthetic.” Mirzoeff, however, is careful not to depoliticise how central the “Anthropocene-aesthetic-capitalist complex” has become to “modern ways of seeing.”12 For the purpose of this essay, I will not address the terminological controversy surrounding the Anthropocene but treat its representation as a category crisis of perception.13 As such, the Anthropocene arcs back to the dominant philosophies of Empire and the Enlightenment, during which, as Mirzoeff explains, “the conquest of nature [led] to a loss of perception [… and] the aesthetics of the Anthropocene emerged as an unintended supplement to imperial aesthetics [and thereby] anaesthetized the perception of modern industrial pollution.”14 This affective rift between colonial modernity’s machinery of progress, its delusion of mastery, and the numbing and oversaturation of the perceptive faculties is central to the ways in which Cuarón’s film visualises what I, via Allen Feldman, call the “scopic regimes” of the Anthropocene. Such regimes, he argues, designate “the agendas and techniques of political visualization […] that prescribe modes of seeing […] and […] render untenable other modes and objects of perception.”15 However, the film’s use of a handheld, mobile camera – a protagonist in its own right – and its meticulous cinematography, also track the politics of im/mobility that subtend and, ultimately, destabilise the Anthropocene’s scopic regimes and project a “countervisuality” of the planetary.16 In short, in the film mobility and the politics of perception are inseparable yet not reducible to one another.

• 17 See Jacques Rancière and Gabriel Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics, London, Continuum, 2004.
• 18 Kaplan, Climate Trauma, p. 72.
• 19 Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of (...)
• 20 Fuller and Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics, p. 4.
• 21 Fuller and Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics, p. 15.
• 22 Fuller and Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics, p. 12.
• 23 Alfonso Cuarón, “Did Children of Men Predict Populism Today?” Screenwriter’s Lecture. May 20, 2019. (...)

6 If visualising the Anthropocene constitutes an aesthetic and political practice that negotiates how the sensible is made available to common processes of sense-making,17 the film does so by assembling paratextual elements, documentary and news footage, photographs, and references that interweave various timescales. Although the film’s aesthetics can be read as its ethical project or postmodern “pastiche,”18 I suggest reading it in terms of the “investigative aesthetics” practiced by the multidisciplinary research team Forensic Architecture (FA), headed by architect and activist Eyal Weizman.19 Partly inspired by experimental filmmaker Harun Farocki, whose Eye/Machine I-III video installations visualised the targeting processes of intelligent weapons deployed during the Gulf Wars, FA weaves together, as Fuller and Weizman explain, videos, traces of organic and inorganic substances, “separate media elements, technologies of vision […] and detection” to interrogate the “intersection of politics and technology.”20 Their “aesthetic investigations”21 seek to make visible what is already there but often remains obscured and to connect disparate elements to undo received “interpretation[s] of the real.”22 It is this interest in rethinking and challenging what is real and counts as “evidence” of the truth that links FA and Cuarón’s practice. For, as Cuarón remarks, Children is not a science fiction film; nothing in the film “is news.”23 Rather, he says, Foucault and Eco’s discursive and semiotic philosophies helped him think about how reality changes in disintegrating democracies and authoritarian regimes and must therefore be contested and reassembled.

• 24 Alfonso Cuarón, Featurette: The Possibility of Hope, Documentary. 27 min. DVD. Children of Men. Uni (...)
• 25 Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Chicago, University of Chicago Press (...)
• 26 Jennifer Gabrys, “Becoming Planetary”, e-flux architecture, Accumulation, 2018. https://www.e-flux. (...)

7 Indeed, the film’s paratextual frame is specifically relevant for its investigative aesthetics and contemporaneity. It encompasses the 27-minute featurette “The Possibility of Hope,” included in the film’s 2007 DVD release, and a short documentary, “The Shock Doctrine” (2007), which Cuarón produced and co-wrote with Naomi Klein.24 The featurette offers interviews with such scholar-activists as Slavoj Žižek, James Lovelock, Saskia Sassen, and Naomi Klein, and addresses the consequences of anthropogenic climate change on human and planetary life as well as the need for new knowledge practices. Read together, these paratextual features complicate the relationship between real and fictional worlds, documentary and film, the mobility of images, and the immobility of humans and nonhumans. Thus, the film’s use of multiple media underscores its post-global contemporaneity and visualises how, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words, “the global discloses the planetary.”25 In this way the planetary emerges as a “practice” rather than an unalterable given.26 It is this contest over the perceptual and visual regimes of reality in the age of the Anthropocene, and thus over the right to envision and narrate the future otherwise, that is at stake in Cuarón’s film.

• 27 Gérard Genette, “Introduction to the Paratext”, New Literary History, vol. 22, no.2, 1991, p. 261.
• 28 Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon, Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity, Lanham, Rowma (...)

8Children opens and ends with a black screen, which, on both occasions, constitutes a stunning moment of arrested vision and mobility. A paratextual and meta-critical device, the screen functions as a “threshold” between what can be seen on it, the screen itself, and the historical situatedness of the viewer.27 It is accompanied by a fast newscast voice-over comprised of a volley of headlines: “Day 1000 of the siege of Seattle […]. The Homeland Security Bill is ratified […]. British borders will remain closed […] the deportation of illegal immigrants will continue” and, finally, “Diego Ricardo, the youngest person on the planet” has died. Following these eerily contemporaneous headlines, the black screen fades into the film’s establishing shot and reveals a crowd in a coffee shop, framed by two TV screens, transfixed in shock as they focus on the report of Baby Diego’s killing that dominates the news. The high-angle shot foregrounds the power of the camera and the vulnerability of the people it surveys and immobilises until Theo enters the scene and ploughs through the inert crowd. This opening not only juxtaposes a globally mobile media regime with its petrified spectators, but also questions the audience’s mediated sense of reality, both off- and onscreen. By relating the film’s audience to the hypnotised onscreen crowd, this metacritical opening scene compels the audience to take, according to Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon’s understanding of the relationship between film and mobility, “a mobile view on” an “[im]mobile world.”28

• 29 Sean Cubitt, “Ecocritical Media Arts and the War on Terra”, Media-N, vol. 17, no.2, 2021, p. 28.
• 30 See also, Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Kindle, Durham, Duke University Press, 2019, loc. 2104.

9 The black screen, then, is significant for several reasons. First, it acts as an investigative tool in that it arrests the flow of images and therefore operates in a monadic way, visualising the audience’s historical present and possible futures. Second, as film theorist Sean Cubitt explains, black screens operate symptomatically and evoke a void, a constitutive exclusion or absence, that “lies beyond image and symbol” and, as such, “is […] cinema[’s] […] ultimate truth.”29 Put differently, the absence at the center of the black screen generates a perceptive disjuncture between screen and viewer. It ruptures the flow of images and unsettles the normative demand to see without seeing, a demand central to Anthropocene visualisations. Third, in Children, the screen’s symbolic void both reflects the structuring absence that propels the media politics of the War on Terror (e.g., the production of elusive enemies) and foreshadows the constitutive absence that characterises Kee’s baby, technically a CGI-animated doll, marking it as a Lacanian objet petit a that drives the film’s narrative. The opening scene, then, visualises the silence, void, and impotence at the center of a fearful society shell-shocked by global media warfare, which increasingly divorces the people’s capacity to reason from their modes of perception30 and thus illustrates how the scopic regimes of systemic violence regulate different modes of mobility, immobility, and perception.

• 31 W. J. T Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present, Chicago, University of Ch (...)
• 32 Mbembe, Necropolitics, loc. 2071.
• 33 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller, London, Verso,  (...)
• 34 Mitchell, Cloning Terror, p. 12.

10 The remainder of this section explores how Children transforms the “war of images,”31 which typically interlaces global war with biogenetic reproduction technologies, into a counter-final warfare against life itself. Rather than following the film’s plot, I focus on four examples that will help clarify the operative logic of the visual regimes of anthropogenic violence. The first one addresses how the hypermobility of news media and images normalises an apocalyptic vision of a futureless present. The second and third examples briefly show how the tropes of extinction and enclosure inadvertently foster human exceptionalism and render the powerful invisible. The last example examines how the film visualises what Mbembe calls the “war of attrition.”32 First, then, riding a public train to meet his friend Jasper (Michael Caine), a former activist, John Lennon look-alike hippie, and political cartoonist, Theo is accosted by a torrent of war images – culled from news footage of the War on Terror – bursting from multiple screens installed in each car and omnipresent in the city. The feverish speed of images of global cities under siege culminates in the phrase: “The World has collapsed. Only Britain soldiers on.” Although the screens depict horrible images of planetary devastation, their sheer speed, as we know from Paul Virilio’s work,33 reduces the viewers’ field of vision, blinding them to what can be seen. Similarly, screens on buses incessantly criminalise immigrants and refugees, inciting the population against them. Signaling a state of absolute surveillance and enmity, the public screens perpetrate a “form of psychological warfare designed to attack […] the social imaginary, […] to breed anxiety […] and […] self-destructive behavior.”34 Subsequently, fear and despair become social norms, as the film hauntingly dramatises through Quietus, the state-sponsored suicide kits given to citizens and ironically named after Hamlet’s suicide soliloquy.

• 35 Mirzoeff, “Visualizing”, p. 217.
• 36 Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible. Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory, Chicago, The Uni (...)
• 37 Allen Feldman, Archives, p. 5.
• 38 Haraway, Staying, p. 35.

11 The hypermobility of global news media compresses time and space into a falsely unified world-image (“Britain soldiers on”), so that destruction appears to be habitual, presentist, and amorphous. This operative logic of global news images is also, and not surprisingly, at work in what Mirzoeff calls “Anthropocene visuality,” which “allows us to move on, see nothing, and keep circulating commodities,”35 the very purpose of the public visual display of propaganda. Interminable global war, then, requires visual and symbolic “regimes of […] matter-of-factness”36 and a “self-indemnifying trajectory”37 that stunt the audience’s faculties of perception. In fact, the rapid succession of images of war, persecution, and destruction displayed on the public screens visualises and normalises dominant narratives of the Anthropocene,38 including, in Donna Haraway’s words, a “self-fulfilling narrative of apocalypse,” impending mass death, and extinction. Such narratives are dangerous because they enforce a sense of inevitability, insecurity, uncertainty, and crisis that legitimises pre-emptive, total acts of destruction to prevent presumed future attacks and securitise one’s territorial sovereignty. This self-perpetuating practice and rhetoric of warfare and fear anticipates the dominant end-of-time narratives of the Anthropocene, generates uneven communities of stasis and enclosure, and is premised on the false reasoning of counter-finality.

• 39 Mbembe, Necropolitics, loc. 1990.

12 The second example turns to the trope of extinction. The topic is raised through a joke Jasper tells Theo. At a “big dinner for all the scientists and sages of the world,” hosted by the Human Project, Jasper says, everyone is “tossing around theories about […] why women are infertile.” They ask “an Englishman […] why we can’t make babies anymore,” who responds, “I have not the faintest idea, but this stork is quite tasty, isn’t it?” The irony is obvious. In the name of progress, the highly gendered and racialised development and control of biogenetic and reproductive technologies (which progressed alongside war) has unwittingly caused infertility. This counter-final act of science reflects scientistic hubris, the commodification of life itself, and an algorithmic understanding of life, measured in the metrics of vital statistics (e.g., Baby Diego lived for “18 years, 4 months, 20 days, 16 hours, and 8 minutes”). In this context, the HP’s quest for a scientific solution to infertility remains complicit with the counter-final logic of technopositivism39 and comprises a benevolent yet normative response inherent in technocentric solutions to the Anthropocene, one, as is evident in the tragic irony of Jasper’s joke, that continues to rely on human exceptionalism.

• 40 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Kindle, Vintage Canada, 2008, p.  (...)
• 41 Mirzoeff, “Visualizing”, p. 217.

13 The third example turns to Theo’s powerful cousin Nigel, a plutocratic member of Britain’s government, who directs the euphemistically named “Ark of the Arts.” Serving as his private museum and refuge, the Ark is housed in London’s City of Westminster, now a “Green Zone” which, in Naomi Klein’s language of “disaster apartheid,” separates the rich from those corralled into the “Red Zone.”40 On his way to visiting Nigel, Theo passes St. James Park, where the rich flaunt their privilege of mobility outside public surveillance cameras, and then stops at Admiral’s Arch, a reference to Britain’s maritime history of imperial piracy and the entrance of the Ark. When Theo arrives, Nigel stands in front of Michelangelo’s David sculpture and welcomes him with the words “Lost the Pietà, got destroyed before we got there.” In Nigel’s possession, the David no longer protects civil rights, as it did in Florence from 1504 to 1873, but signifies corruption and war profiteering. Pretending to save the arts and, by extension, Western civilisation as a universal good, Nigel extracts artworks from war-ravaged countries. His thin veneer of altruistic benevolence barely conceals the deep-seated nihilism with which he objectifies art into decorative commodities, such as Picasso’s Guernica, which adorns his dining room. Nigel’s Ark encompasses a counter-final project because it requires war to loot art as fetishised corporate booty. Nigel and his son Alex – a cursory reference to the socially dissociated protagonist of the same name in Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange – lead largely virtual lives invisible to and detached from the public. A telescope, unobtrusively placed in their dining room, suggests that they shape their reality through a top-down perspective based on a distorted and distanced view of their environment and a deeply racialised worldview of Britain’s claim to sovereignty. To Nigel, the imperial project continues; he remains blind to the connection between colonialism’s extractive politics and the destruction of the planet’s ecosystems. He embodies, in Mirzoeff’s words, the sort of “Anthropocene visuality [that] keeps us believing that somehow the war against nature […] is […] right, […] beautiful and […] can be won.”41

• 42 Mbembe, Necropolitics, loc. 588.
• 43 Mbembe, Necropolitics, loc. 2098. For more, see Mbembe’s discussion of “negative messianism” and th (...)

14 The final example considers the film’s representation of refugees as a visualisation of an ongoing “war of attrition” whose predatory practice reaches back to the genocides and ecocides of the Columbian Exchange and the colonial “wars of brutalization,”42 both crucial moments in the planet’s anthropogenic transformation. The visual regime this war requires is a collective blindness towards plainly visible suffering, for which Children offers a repeatedly displayed image of caged – thus, structurally criminalised – refugees. Walking past them, Theo keeps his gaze to the ground and remains deliberately blind to their hypervisible yet literally arrested presence. To him, refugees are, as Mbembe describes their current media representation, “a kind of hollowed-out entity […] in which we seek to bury the fantasies of an age terrified of itself and of its own excess.”43 In contrast to Theo, the camera lingers behind to watch how militarised police personnel and war dogs hunt people and evict them from their homes while a bulldozer moves their belongings into garbage containers. This public and symbolically overdetermined spectacle references Nazi concentration camps, the hunt for fugitive slaves, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prison cages, and holding cells at the Mexican border. Together, these references evidence the planet’s rezoning into a carceral geography of radical abandonment and immobility.

• 44 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene, Durham, Duke University Press, 2019, p. 4.
• 45 Mbembe, Necropolitics, loc. 2052.
• 46 Mbembe, Necropolitics, loc. 2070-2075.
• 47 Mbembe, Necropolitics, loc. 2091.

15 The “war of attrition,” however, designates not a single or dystopic future but the multi-temporality of anthropogenic warfare. Its simultaneously slow and accelerated violence, caused by bio-chemical, nuclear, and conventional weapons, sediments in the planet’s geology and alters human and nonhuman lifeforms. Making the planet uninhabitable and compelling massive human and nonhuman migrations, the war of attrition presents what Elizabeth DeLoughrey calls “an allegory of the Anthropocene” and, as such, offers “a future retrospective” of the planetary now.44 In Children, the images of the bulldozer, a tool of global terraforming, of infertility and refugees, the toxic landscape and ubiquitous presence of smoldering animal carcasses – the miasmas of global capitalism – assemble evidence of a pervasive warfare directed against life itself. As Mbembe explains, the “war of attrition” refers to a systematic politics of containment, enclosure, and “borderization.”45 “[M]ethodically calculated, [it] is a war against the very ideas of mobility, circulation, and speed.” It “targets great swaths of humanity adjudged worthless and superfluous, whose every organ must be specially incapacitated in a way that affects generations to come.” Thus targeted, the body acts as an archive made to “witness […] a terrible devastation, […] all those pulmonary diseases, […] traces of uranium on [its] hair, […] fetal malformations.”46 The examples discussed in this section suggest that the hypermobility of digital images, reproductive technologies of progress, turbo- and disaster capitalism, and the war on mobility drive the various and interrelated trajectories of anthropogenic warfare. The latter depends on visualising the Anthropocene through a dehistoricised visual grammar of apocalyptic counter-finality designed to stunt the perceptual apparatus and inculcate a diffused sense of reality. Indeed, it obscures how anthropogenic warfare “creat[es] a segmented planet of multiple speeds.”47

• 48 Fuller and Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics, p. 12.

16Children is filmed entirely with a handheld camera, including some close-ups and prominent long takes, suggesting that Cuarón and Emmanuel Lubezki, Cuarón’s former collaborator and cinematographer, have an aesthetic investment in verisimilitude. This, I argue, is not the case. In fact, in the film, the handheld camera, assuming both an intra- and an extradiegetic position, is at once the film’s hidden narrator and its chronicler. This position is conditioned by the camera’s unrestricted mobility, its itinerant, mediating, and promiscuous eye. From beginning to end, the camera frequently wanders off, witnessing and documenting what lies outside the purview of the characters. For instance, taking an eye-level perspective, it explores Jasper and Janice’s home, their photos and memorabilia. Meandering between photographs, newspaper clippings, cartoons, and Theo’s family pictures, it registers Jasper and Janice’s political activism, especially her work as an investigative photojournalist who tracked the causes of infertility and criticised Britain’s refugee politics. Pausing in front of the news headline “MI5 Deny Involvement in Torture of Photojournalist,” the camera does not cast a voyeuristic but an investigative and historicising eye. It “notic[es],” in Fuller and Weizman’s terms, “unintentional evidence” to prove that Janice’s present catatonic paralysis, an embodiment of the war of attrition, is precisely the result of torture.48 In doing so, the camera registers the history of political opposition otherwise erased from or vilified in the dominant regimes of visuality and public memory.

• 49 “Žižek on Children of Men”, 2007.
• 50 Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence, London, Verso, 2020.
• 51 Mirzoeff, “Visualizing”, p. 214.
• 52 Sharon Sliwinski, “Shooting in the Dark. A Note on the Photographic Imagination” in Shawn Michelle (...)
• 53 Mirzoeff, “Visualizing”, p. 226.
• 54 Sliwinski, “Shooting”, p. 324.
• 55 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 255.

17 Zooming in and out of the photographs at both Jasper’s house and that of the refugees who shelter Theo and Kee in Bexhill, the camera’s undisciplined eye critically addresses the lack of “meaningful historical experience” suffered under global capitalism.49 The anachronistic presence of the photos, their mesmerising effect on the camera, is instrumental to Cuarón’s aesthetic and political project. They evidence and retrieve the traces of individual lives and public dissent as a practice of being human and planetary. More specifically, by insisting on and, in fact, claiming a particular moment in time, they refuse the instantaneous and chronotemporal operation of global media images, namely, their compression of time and space that contributes to the destruction of actual space. Instead, these photos focus on lived experience, social life, individual and communal loss, recognising what can be seen as grievable events and lives.50 In contrast to the ideological, two-dimensional defamation of refugees, these photos claim, as Mirzoeff might argue, “the right to look,” to make visible the bodies that were not meant to be seen.51 These photos could be read as instances of souveillance, i.e., of personal, digitalised recordings to expose habitual acts and cover-ups of acts of surveillance and political violence. Yet, serving neither as disciplinary tools nor as an inadvertent source of big data, these analogue photographs exceed the binarism of surveillance and sousveillance. Rather, always already bearing the trace of something other, as Sharon Sliwinski argues via Walter Benjamin’s notion of photography’s “optical unconscious,” photographs are a medium of “unconscious communication” that surpasses “conscious intentionality.”52 If the scopic regimes of the Anthropocene mobilise an apocalyptic imaginary to reveal an end-of-time world as a universal state of affairs without remainders or doubts, the various traces left in the photographs constitute a form of “countervisuality.”53 The traces reflect and initiate a series of unexpected “social relationships,”54 for instance between Kee, Janice, Theo, and Miriam, the former teacher and doula, that locate political subjectivity in what is left behind. “[F]lash[ing] up at a moment of danger” and refuge or stillness55 in the midst of Kee and Theo’s escape, these photos fragment and broaden the viewer’s field of vision and, curiously, interpellate the camera’s roaming eye into a position of political agency and responsibility. It is not surprising that the camera’s discovery of photographic archives coincides with moments of communal care, mutual affection, and connection that visualise Kee, Theo, and Janice as political subjects.

• 56 Eyal Weizman and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Dictionary of Now #2 – Forum,” Uploaded by HKW 100 Years of N (...)

18 Not unlike Antonioni’s, Godard’s, and Welles’s subjective camera, Cuarón’s handheld camera conveys the historical urgency of the present. Cuarón, however, develops the handheld shot into an aesthetic and investigative method concerned with the politics of the image and its visualisation of multiple and coeval temporalities. Indeed, if photography introduces a moment of stillness that arrests the flow of time and invites the viewers to ponder metacritically what they do not see, actually filming or moving the photo reanimates its indexical, historical relationships and initiates a temporal shift. In this context, it seems most striking that Cuarón’s mobile camera facilitates, as Weizman argues in a lecture on the anthropogenic present, an “inversion of time” through which to detect and draw from “the traces of a destruction that is yet to come” in order to change and bear “witness to the future” (my emphasis).56 This act of witnessing the future retrospectively is central to imagining the planetary as an aesthetic practice. It enables us to visualise the planetary via the global, and it is the condition and goal of both FA’s “investigative aesthetics” and Cuarón’s method of cinematographic referencing. The remainder of this section analyses two key scenes that employ referencing for different purposes, followed by a brief discussion of Cuarón’s long take.

• 57 See, Sayantani DasGupta, “(Re)conceiving the Surrogate: Maternity, Race, and Reproductive Technolog (...)
• 58 Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, On Decoloniality, Durham, Duke University Press, 2018, p. 4.
• 59 Yussof, A Billion, p. xiii.

19 In the first scene, Kee stands in the middle of a barn surrounded by cows and assumes the pose of Botticelli’s Venus in his painting The Birth of Venus (1480s) to reveal her pregnancy to Theo. While others have convincingly situated Kee’s pregnancy in the historical present of the medical, scientific, and economic commodification and incarceration of the black female body and its reproductivity,57 my reading takes a slightly different perspective. By simultaneously referencing Christian iconography, the Italian Renaissance (in need of a black re-naissance), and the exhibition of Sara (Saartjie) Baartman (1789-1815), the Khoikhoi woman scandalously named “Hottentot Venus,” the scene locates Kee in the multiple temporalities of colonial modernity, in modernity’s patriarchal “colonial matrix of power,” while her black presence subtly “undoes […] this matrix.”58 Given that colonial modernity’s rise is premised on the Columbian Exchange and the beginnings of slavery, colonial modernity dramatically altered the planet’s geological and biospherical composition and, as Kathryn Yussof contends, compels a thorough critique of the “racial blindness of the Anthropocene.”59 In Children, this critique unfolds through a triple close-up of Theo later in the revelation scene and through Kee’s comment that “they cut off [the cows’] tits […] only leave four. Four tits fit the machine. It’s wacko. Why not make machines that suck eight titties?” In addition to invoking the dehumanising system of chattel slavery, Kee’s words stress the subordination of all life to the technological and economic expediency of extractive global capitalism.

• 60 Ian Baucom, History 4° Celsius, p. 26.
• 61 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. xii.

20 In this scene, the human and nonhuman body, as well as the earth itself, serve as exploitable resources; whether this is done in the name of prosperity, progress, or political power is of little relevance. A counter-final act, fitting cow teats to milking machines contributes to the virulent spread of diseases, such as foot and mouth disease (FMD), and increases viral and bacterial infections of the cow’s udder. As a mode of extraction, industrial milking also contributes to the planet’s ecocide, which increases global warming and provides favorable conditions for the survival of the FMD virus. In this context, Kee’s miraculous pregnancy may be read as a planetary event. For, as Ian Baucom insists, the planetary emerges at the conjuncture of historical “forces of profound violence and unfreedom” and the “forcings” of the planet’s volatile and unpredictable operations.60 As an unexpected eruption of life, the pregnancy constitutes a form of planetary forcing that perplexes Kee, to whom motherhood is neither holy nor glorifying but unsettling, full of perils and uncertainty. Her agency consists precisely in her ability to live with uncertainty, re-insert her body where it was not supposed to be seen (e.g., in the white-washed history of Renaissance art), and seek out new solidarities outside the political factions that treat her baby as “a political flag.” The scene’s multi-layered referents constitute what Gilles Deleuze calls a “time-image,” that is, the visualisation of co-existing, non-chronological “distinct durations.” Here, the “single event” of Kee’s revelation “belong[s] to several [temporal] levels” and inverts time to witness the future.61

• 62 Baucom, History 4°, p. 92.
• 63 For more on the refusal of a salvation narrative in the context of black history, see Coates, Ta-Ne (...)

21 What then is Theo’s role in the film? Following the revealing of Kee’s pregnancy, Theo is struck with awe, heightened by John Taverner’s original score “Fragments of a Prayer.” If it were not too obvious, one could argue that Theo suddenly appears as the white savior turning Kee into a racialised spectacle. Yet a series of ambiguous close-ups complicates such a reading. In the first close-up, the camera is not directed at Kee but positioned behind her, looking at Theo through her eyes, making him the object of her and the camera’s gaze. The second close-up is an eye-level shot moving from Theo to Kee, who recedes from his vision while asking him for help. The third close-up focuses on Theo while Luke tries to remove Kee from Theo’s view. Interestingly, the camera avoids imposing its gaze onto Kee but acts as an interlocutor as it focuses on Theo, whose white privilege has hitherto allowed him to not see what is in front of him and take an apolitical, nihilistic stance. But Kee’s self-exposure confronts him with the impossible and forces him into a mutual look that “decompose[s] and recompose[s]” him and throws him back into history.62 Kee’s look, then, both reclaims her political subjectivity, beyond victimisation and resistance, and demands that Theo’s be understood beyond altruism, redemption, and self-sacrifice.63

• 64 Udden, “Child”, p. 27.

22 Like his close-ups, Cuarón’s long takes are as ambiguous as they are consistent with his artistic project of referencing. At once the “stylistic fabric of abject spectacles” and a display of Hollywood virtuosity, James Udden observes, in Children, the long take establishes Cuarón’s auteur status and achieves a hyper-realistic and transgressive effect, reminiscent of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.64 Yet rather than creating an illusion of the continuity of space and time, Children’s long takes disrupt the flow of time. The most elaborate example shows Kee and Theo’s flight from Bexhill, Kee’s capture by Luke, and her subsequent rescue by Theo from an embattled building. Almost seven minutes long, this shot is framed by a strategically placed close-up, the Pietà scene, and several wide shots organised in an ABAB intercutting pattern to highlight the shock of the combatants when they recognise the cry of a baby. The political and aesthetic impact of the scene, however, depends on the hypermobility of the embodied camera. The scene’s reference to highly controversial real-time images taken by embedded cameras during the Gulf War is unmistakable. In fact, the deliberately hyperrealist and hypermobile character of this long take, including accidental blood splashes on the camera lens, underscores both the filmic manipulation of reality and the devastation of omnicidal warfare.

• 65 Udden, “Child”, p. 32.
• 66 Weizman and Fuller, Investigative Aesthetics, p. 108.

23 It is, of course, possible to argue that the camera’s hypermobility is complicit with the totalising experience of global modernity and its hallmarks of war, speed, and mobility. However, as Udden shows, Cuarón’s long takes are, in fact, meticulously staged and edited “faux long take[s],” which is vital to Cuarón’s aesthetics and politics of referencing.65 For example, when Theo and company run past a wailing woman who cradles her shot son, the camera slows down, focusing on the woman to emphasise the scene’s reference to Michelangelo’s Pietà, the sculpture that Nigel could not “save” and that Cuarón saw in a photograph of the Bosnian war. What is fascinating about Cuarón’s faux long takes is the focus on cinematographic orchestration and virtuosity, thus, on the very practice in which truth claims are visualised. Cuarón’s faux long takes are indeed investigative in that they not merely “take […] apart” a certain discourse of power and time but “assemble truth claims from a collage of fragments”66 across various temporalities and theatres of war. Thus, Cuarón’s Pietà broadens the field of vision to accommodate multiple iconographies of suffering and im/mobility that can be read relationally as clues towards articulating and visualising a shared ethos of the planetary now.

• 67 Chakrabarty, The Climate, p. 198.

24During the long take, the image almost freezes when the crying of Kee’s baby causes a momentary ceasefire. The intercutting wide shots and random close-ups of mesmerised soldiers, insurgents, and refugees imply a reconnection and respite from the chaotic pace of war. Bordering on the theological and outright sentimental, this scene nevertheless invokes a sense of “wonderment,” “reverence,” and danger that Chakrabarty perceives as an affect of the planetary.67 But this moment of wonderment is attached less to the baby, given that the camera hides it from view, than to the collective recognition of a shared loss, understood as the condition of possibility of a new common organised around the planet’s habitability. Once the battle resumes, Marichka (Oana Pellea), a refugee who communicates visually, takes Kee, her daughter, and Theo to a rowing boat. On their way, the camera observes faintly visible imprints of hands on the wall, reminiscent of both the Lascaux palaeolithic pictographs and the human shadows left behind after the Hiroshima explosion, thus subtly expanding the film’s countervisuality of the Anthropocene. The final shot is a close-up of the Tomorrow that keeps the rescue scene in suspense. For, as the boat emerges from the fog, it looms large, almost menacingly, in the frame, towering over Theo, now dead, and Kee adrift with her baby in a small rowing boat.

• 68 Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect, Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2004, p. 278.
• 69 “Žižek on Children of Men,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbgrwNP_gYE, accessed 7 January 2023.
• 70 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake. On Blackness and Being, Durham, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 50.
• 71 Sharpe, In the Wake, p. 50.

25 Not heeding Cubitt’s warning that “the meaning of a film rarely resides in its conclusion,”68 Žižek sees the “rootlessness” associated with the boat metaphor as the film’s ultimate meaning.69 Within Cuarón’s practice of referencing, however, the boat equally invokes the “macro-uterus”70 of slavery and global infrastructures of human trafficking. According to Christina Sharpe, the ship references slavers as prisons, tombs, and “floating laboratories” of medical research, as well as present-day “US military medical ship[s],” not unlike the Tomorrow.71 At best, the boat metaphor turns out to be a caveat and master trope that signifies Kee’s uncertain future. As a time-image, it signifies the entangled temporalities of the planetary now, indicating on the one hand the right to free movement and, on the other, the looming dangers of perpetual enclosures.

• 72 Mirzoeff, “Visualizing”, p. 230.
• 73 William Whittington, “Sound Design for a Found Future: Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men”, New Revie (...)
• 74 Mirzoeff, “Visualizing”, p. 213.
• 75 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, Durham, Duke University Press, 2017, p. 179.

26 The film’s investigative aesthetics constitutes a countervisual practice that contests “Anthropocene visuality” and insists on “the right to see what there is to be seen and to name it as such.”72 Kee does exactly that when, early on, she returns Theo’s gaze, asking him: “What the fuck are you staring at?” and calling him a “wanker” and “a drunk.” In contrast to Kee’s, Theo’s perceptual apparatus seems dulled, more so since an earlier bomb explosion left him with a persisting ringing in his ears that has diminished his ability to hear certain frequencies and perceive the world in nuanced ways. The ringing in his ears is a fragment of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1961), a repeated investigative audio clue or trace that calls for a critical and relational understanding of the planetary now.73 In an easily overlooked scene following Julian’s murder, we see Theo walking through the forest, finding consolation in the presence of the trees. As he listens to their murmurs, the camera’s view wanders into the sky, perceiving the world from deep below the trees’ invisible roots to their breathing crowns. The scene implies that to destabilise the “Anthropocene-aesthetic-capitalist complex,” one must summon the full range of the body’s sensorium.74 Thus, Children’s investigative aesthetics and its complex orchestration of im/mobility destabilise the scopic regimes of the Anthropocene and mobilise all the “reserves of life”75 to imagine resurgent planetary futures.