Children Of Men Vs Blade Runner

Every decision that a director makes is done for a purpose. The director of Blade Runner (1982), Ridley Scott, THX 1138 (1971), George Lucas, and Children of Men (2006) by Alfonso Cuarón each set up their films with landscapes and strategically filmed around these landscapes in order depict a message beyond the storyline.

Scott’s Blade Runner is a hybrid film that combines aspects of film noir, a detective and a science fiction film. Scott manipulates the landscape and setting to match the film noir label. The film parallels Metropolis in the sense that both films revolve around class level to physical position in a city. The lower class is in the lowest level in the city and the upper class is at the highest level in the city. Scott plays

with lighting to portray the lower class world as a dark and shadowed place. There is no natural light brought into the scenes. Any light provided to the commoner city is generally artificial and brought in through LED signs and cracks through the walls or the blinds. Characteristic of film noir, Scott frames many of the scenes behind bars or door frames. Whenever inside of a room, the blinds were strategically closed in order to embody the darkness of external structures and landscapes. The setting of the lower class city is shown to be polluted and overcrowded. There are always high angle shots that look down the broken down skyscrapers. It constantly rains down below, allowing the water to fill up the empty shells of the buildings. This corresponds to the decay of social order and capitalism. The overall lower class world is the result of human failure. The upper level houses the privileged and the landscape is divergent from the landscape of the lower city. The upper class city includes a lot of natural light. When Deckard visits the upper level corporation, he claims that there is too much light (Scott, Blade Runner). The building is built like an Egyptian temple that is covered in bright yellow and gold; a polar opposite to the dark and dimly lit world of the lower class. The two levels of class and cities represent the power struggle between gender, race and class. There is a lack of white people in the lower class city and a high population of immigrants. Whereas the upper class is devoid of any people of color or female humans.
In THX 1138, Lucas critiques the conformity people are faced with when confined to a communistic and capitalistic society.

The film is set in a society where everything is in uniform control. The color white is a running theme for the lack of individualism. All of the rooms Lucas shows are white and set up in similar ways to preserve uniformity. Also, all the character’s wear white throughout the film. This removes human individualism, shining light on the director’s critical view of communism. Lucas composes his shots to be filmed as a frame within a frame. The film begins with an image of an old commercial within a television and then in the next cut we see surveillance of our characters through a screen. Everything in this world is surveillanced by machinery. With this surveillance, we have close up shots of the characters throughout the film to preserve the idea of the system watching them. The use of filming a frame within a frame desensitizes the subject within the inner image. For example, when THX 1138 is held captive, the workers fiddle with the control frequencies and cause THX 1138 pain and offer no concern or help. Lucas brings the idea that once things become an image, they lose their meaning. This is the reason we can watch gore and pain in silence in movie theaters. The conformation commentary is extended into the white jail where THX 1138 was placed in. While the rest of the film was boxed in with frames within frames, Lucas now films in a manner that

distorts direction and dimension. As the characters are walking, there are cuts that show them walking left then right and so on. There are no more walls, there is no horizon, and there are no boundaries. When there are no walls or escape, there is no desire for them to escape but once there are walls and boundaries, the characters regained the desire to leave the jail.
Cuarón makes it vital for the audience to pay attention to how he composes each shot in Children of Men.

Cuarón’s cinematography techniques focus on differentiating the events shown in the foreground versus the events shown in the background via deep focus photography. The foreground follows the story of our anti-hero while the background follows the story of the world. The two stories of the foreground and background clash in the bus scene where Kee’s water breaks. In this shot, Theo comforts the only pregnant woman in an infertile world, while in the background, Cuarón shows the audience how poorly the refugees are being treated. Following his hand-held camera, as the bus rolls out of the camp we see a long-shot, in deep focus, showing the refugees being thrown into cages and how they are tortured and forced to undress and walk in strict formation. This imagery is a historical reference to our involvement in WW2 and the war against terrorism, including the immoral interrogation techniques and general dehumanization of people. Cuarón constantly plays with the depth of field and focus in order to show us another story while still following the main story in the

foreground.
The camera actively breaks the subjective point of view to give us an objective one in order to show us the sub-story in the background. The camera becomes preoccupied with the story in the background and pans elsewhere in the middle of the action of the foreground. For example, when Theo’s friend kills the cops, the characters leave the bodies and drive off without the camera man. While they drive off, the cameraman stays behind to capture the corpses lying on the asphalt in order to contemplate the loss of life the conflict in the film creates. The camera is not objective to one story; it is there to give the audience an unbiased view of the all the scenes around it.
The background shows us our foreboding future, a world in which people are oppressed and have given up their search for answers. The setting is similar to a polluted city; which positions viewers to be connected to a setting that relates to our own. Although, the audience is following the story of the foreground, is it important to watch the way Cuarón frames his shots and tracks different scenes within the background in order to understand the true message of oppression within the film.