Scopic Regimes of the Anthropocene
War, (Im)Mobility, and the Planetary Now in Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21799570 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Heike Härting (Planetary Science Institute, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1771-2084 • E-ISSN: 2105-2549 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/transtexts.2218 |
| OpenAlex | W4387304901 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
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
Aesthetics · Anthropocene · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Astrobiology · Astronomy · Environmental ethics · Futures contract · Planet · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Philosophy · Architecture
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |