Cuarón: Gravity (2013)

Six years in the making, Gravity explores what happens when a routine satellite repair job goes wrong. Apart from a few fleeting, radio transmitted voices, there are only two characters – Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a medical engineer, and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), an experienced astronaut – who have to make their way from one piece of space junk to the next, in the hope of encountering some way of communicating with or returning to Earth. While other science fiction films have included gravity free sequences, none have considered what might happen if the camera itself were also operating free of gravity with quite the same meticulousness as is displayed here. And, from the opening shot, it’s clear that Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lebzecki have embraced the fundamental paradox of shooting a film under gravity-free conditions – namely, that the very language of cinematic continuity depends on the discrete bundles of space opened up by gravity. Most immediately, that means that conventional editing doesn’t really make sense, since, in a zero-gravity situation, spatial orientation is relative, with the result that camera angles are also relative - and a great deal of the film’s terror comes from the inability, at key moments, to establish any schematic relation between the different angles and perspectives that are forced upon the characters. More dramatically, perhaps, in a zero-gravity situation, camera mobility doesn’t mean quite the same thing as it does on Earth. Or, rather, the film clarifies that the fantasy of the mobile camera was always a fantasy of zero-gravity – precisely what’s spectacular about cameras that break away from the constrictions of human mobility is the way in which they reimagine space as offering fluid, homogenous movement in all directions. In space itself, however, that fantasy is simply hard, physical truth, with the result that the film comes close to being composed of a single, unbroken take, but only because of the conditions it’s replicating. And in some ways, that’s precisely what’s terrifying about it – as soon as it becomes possible to even conceptualise a physical situation that you could actually experience from the perspective of a single, mobile camera, you realise that absolute continuity is not continuous in any recognisable, earthbound sense at all. In other words it's only the constrictions of gravity that make us feel mobile - without gravity, mobility, and camera mobility, ceases to exist. In its place, Cuarón presents something like camera motility, perhaps explaining why the only sequence set on Earth takes place largely underwater; there's an organic affinity between zero gravity and the camera that's quite terrifying when extended to us. Yet it’s precisely his willingness to surrender himself to camera motility that allows Cuarón to evoke the sheer extension of space, the inadequacy of 3D glasses, in a film that manages to feel shot on location, despite being devoid of any location.