Aesthetics for a dystopian reality

I dislike Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). Firstly for the clichéd moments in the film that I have come to expect from films which have an oppressive mood, like the moment in the car when the characters are having fun with a golf ball moments before Julian’s traumatic death- lightening the mood so that the shock can have more impact. Could see it coming, moved on.

Moving on- reading about artistic regimes, I think I have discerned that I just prefer films that don’t have this kind of obviously attempted grittiness and rawness to them. Films from the poetic, mimetic regime, as Rancière classifies art that is regulated around reality and imitation, don’t offer as much as his other defined types.

Rancière’s two other theorized regimes, an ethical one that builds on images, and an aesthetic regime that focuses on the form of the artistic method, are richer because they operate with the real but also beyond the realm of the real, invoking signs and signification, providing a space for many interpretations of meaning.

‘The aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres.’ (Rancière 23)

In contrast to Cuarón’s long takes, look at this single take from Godard’s 1968 La Chinoise. It’s not as long, but would have needed many things to come together at once for it to work, which is what Cuarón should be impressed by. And this, within the aesthetic regime, does assert ‘the absolute singularity of art’, while working with the ethical regime of images, showing that images have an affective potential, how they can key in to our consciousness as individuals and community spectators.

Virilio writes about the landscape of war becoming cinematic, war being an absolute performance, war being about the total visibility of large events and minute details. So does Baudrillard. So why, if we have access to wars through their representations in cinematic weaponry, do we need war films that capture reality. What do films offer with an invested interest in capturing the frame of war, the real time and space of battle? We are given affective contact to the events of war through their mediated representations on television, in the newspaper; through those images produced to ‘project a final image of the world‘ (Virilio). Even those films with little projected interest in capturing a realist aesthetic, like Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001), Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), don’t do much more than illustrate the technical proficiency of their filmmaking skills. We already know what war looks like via its actual existence in cinematographic forms.

As audiences we can gain more from a film’s significatory meaning, from its mobilization of symbolic details, than from its place in the continuum of (mediated) realness. The affective strength of Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) builds on not images or representations of actual nuclear explosions, but on images of the city post-event. Memories of death are revealed by the discord between images of the past and the present, between one state and another, meaning communicated through the composition of images and signs rather than merely images of battle. It seems to me rare that one could delve beyond fictional images of battle to find further meaning. So, look at the representation of ideas rather than events.

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