9 Reviews from the Land of JBU Cinema: "Children of Men"

Written for various prompts in and out of my Cinema classes at John Brown this past semester, these reviews/analyses seemed to warrant inclusion here.

 

Nominated at the 79^th Academy Awards for its film editing, Alfonso Cuaron’s critically acclaimed “Children of Men” is at first glance admirable more for its handheld cinematography than for the work done on it in the editing suite. It is doubtless the single best example of handheld photography that I have seen, making ideal use of the much-contested “shaky-cam” technique to create immediacy without once sacrificing scene geography or visual sense.

And yet, since an Academy Award nomination so often means more than an Academy Award win, there must be something to the editing work that Cuaron and Alex Rodriguez completed before the film’s theatrical release. One may begin an analysis of the edits contained within “Children of Men” with discussion of the film’s numerous “oner” sequences – scenes shot and allowed to run for minutes at a time seemingly without cuts whatsoever. The most impressive of these include a bombing that opens the film, an attack on a car in the middle of the woods, and an elaborately staged urban warfare sequence that runs for an unbelievable 9 minutes in length. If you listen carefully, you can hear Orson Welles weeping with shame.

Further research may prove comforting to him, however: digital trickery was used to blend separate 3-4 minute shots together into one seamless whole. You can see this through only very subtle give-aways. The most obvious occurs during the aforementioned battle scene, when a few small droplets of blood that splashed on the camera lens mysteriously disappear halfway through the shot. 

It took me at least five minutes to register their absence, and to be honest I can’t quite remember whether or not there was an actual hard cut to another camera angle that marked the disappearance of those droplets. Ironically, I was so busy marveling at the sheer improbability of the shot length that if there were any edits to break it up, I must have missed them.

And therein lies the reason for the nomination. “Children of Men,” as far as I’m concerned, defines the concept of the “invisible edit.” Such edits are an essential component of its documentary-style verisimilitude. “Children of Men” seeks to create a complete illusion of reality, and for two hours, through its flawless use of subtly jerky cinematography and edits that carefully conserve directional camera movement from one shot to another, it succeeds in placing the viewer within a future world that is only a hair’s breadth away from existence in our own. 

From the outset, it is made clear to us that the camera, and therefore we by proxy, are a participant in this world and the story that drives Theo and the other characters. Rarely, if ever, is the camera ever standing still. It is always in motion, trailing the action, circling tense situations like a combat photographer might. But I digress; these are matters of cinematography. I will assert, however, that if the camera serves as our avatar, the edits here serve as our eye blinks. This film is rated R for graphic violence, and it lives up to its certification – but not necessarily because of content. There is blood, and there are deaths. But Cuaron is careful to never show more than he has to – and when the camera cuts away from a particularly violent image, it is timed to the exact moment at which we realize what we are actually seeing. Look, for example, at the opening scene: Theo has just narrowly escaped being a victim in the bombing of a coffee shop on a major London thoroughfare. He looks in shock back at the smoke, and the camera runs past him. Through the haze, we see the shape of a woman staggering towards us. She is screaming. And in the microsecond before the camera cuts to the black title card, we realize that she is carrying one of her severed arms. The camera cuts at the precise instant an observer might have squeezed his or her eyes shut from shock and nausea. It is not the image we see, exactly, or remember; it is the impression. And it is this visual shorthand, this form of truncation, which forces us to fill the rest in with our imagination, and thus magnify its intensity within our minds.

“Children of Men” is a film that thrives on impression. We never truly understand the politics of the society we find ourselves surrounded by, nor do we understand why humans, as Michael Caine’s character puts with characteristic delicacy, “can’t make babies anymore.” We see only glimpses on the ground – flashes of propaganda or gore or violence that say infinitely more than any narration. Cuaron and Rodriquez were nominated because they chose exactly the right elements to make the impression, and spliced them together in a way that lets us experience them as someone who is actually there.