All these years later and Alfonso Cuarón’s film seems even more apposite to our moment. First made in the oughts in the early days of the War on Terror, this political thriller uses mise en scène to propel exposition, a risky maneuver that Cuarón excels at.
The most startling aspect of Children of Men, however, is the pace of its opening moments.The story jump starts from the get go: from the explosion just after Theo learns of Baby Diego’s demise, til the escape from the Fishes’s stronghold.
Didn’t bring my phone b/c I wanted to fully inhabit the moment, but today we listened to the Rev. Horton Heat at Hardly Strictly’s Towers of Gold stage, where he played this song:
This prompt comes from the first sentence of Francis Bacon’s short essay “Of Revenge”: Revenge is a kind of wilde justice. It is a preliminary definition of the concept of vengeance, which Bacon sees as imperfect and not, ultimately, either moral or just.
The most obvious link for the prompt is Heinrich von Kleist’s 19th century novella Michael Kohlhaas, the story of a successful merchant who is exploited by the local Junker, who takes his horses, mistreats them, and savagely beats his servant. Kohlhaas’s case against the Junker is quashed because of the court’s corruption, and his wife dies when she attempts to act for him. Left with no recourse, he attacks the Junker’s castle and effectively declares war on the state. Kohlhaas’s appetite for vengeance leads to his destruction.
von Kleist’s novella functions in a similar way to Franz Kafka’s short story “Before the Law,” a puzzling story that seems something like an allegory, though it proves somewhat baffling for the reader. Both narratives are ambivalent: MK because of the odd introduction of the gypsy woman, a figure who introduces an irrational, even gothic, tone to the story, and BTL because of the equally ambiguous figure of the guard at the door and the moment when the Man questions even the fleas in the guard’s beard for advice. In both cases there is no direct meaning available to us; we are forced to contend with elements of narrative discourse that defy our expectations and our ability to make sense of the stories.
A true allegory that we’ve encountered thus far this semester would be the short film adaptation of Plato’s allegory of the cave, which dramatizes the difficulties of penetrating beyond mere appearance into the realm of truth. In this narrative prisoners are imprisoned in a cave, seeing only shadows and hearing only echoes. One prisoner is freed and exits the cave into the real world, which he experiences in all its immediacy. Excited by his discovery, he returns to the cave to tell his former fellow prisoners. But they cannot understand him and remain trapped.
The theme of entrapment is addressed again in Osborne’s 1998 short film More, which describes the struggles of a nameless inventor to create something beautiful within the confines of a deterministic system. His invention, Bliss, gives the illusion of beauty and happiness, but never fundamentally changes the world in such a way that these things actually exist. In the end, because his has not changed the system (structure), his efforts are fruitless.
Kohlhaas: We do not take.
We buy.
We pay
the one who owns.
And we accept no donations.
People give because they’re afraid.
War does not give us the right.
Demanding tolls…
Stealing…
That is what the lord does.
That is not what we do.
Come forward.
Your house was pillaged.
Show me the one responsible.
Do you have anything to say?
We are literally on the precipice. No question. Things are going to move fast.
analepsis 