Scopic Regimes of the Anthropocene: War, (Im)Mobility, and the Planetary Now in Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".