Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Future in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men

On the aesthetics of intermedial referencing in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006)

Basura, cultura, democracia en el Madrid del siglo veintiuno

Essay on waste and urban space in present-day Madrid

Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film

Building on existing film and urban histories, this innovative volume examines Spanish cinema through contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space, the built environment, visuality and mass culture from the industrial through to the digital age. Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film brings together the scholarship of an international and interdisciplinary group of film, architecture and urban studies scholars thinking through the reciprocal relationship between the seventh art and the built environment. Some of the shared concerns that emerge from this volume include the ways cinema as a new technology reshaped how cities and buildings are built and inhabited since the early twentieth century; the question of the mobile gaze; the role of film in the shifting relationship between the private and the public; film and everyday life; monumentality and the construction of historical memory for a variety of viewing publics; and the impact of the digital and the virtual on filmmaking and spectatorship

Children of Men\u27s ambient apocalyptic visions

Alfonso Cuarón\u27s Children of Men (2006) is part of the long stream of films that respond vividly to social crisis and the hovering threat of human annihilation and that have sought to reimagine the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic myth. But I will argue that it represents a unique take on this popular genre that I call the ambient apocalyptic. The film\u27s sense of pervasive crisis is not linked to a singular apocalyptic event and it redraws the tropes of many popular post-apocalyptic films. Cuarón intricately builds into nearly every scene referential signals to specific current political realities. He does this, however, without overburdening his film with either apocalyptic literalness or undisturbed certainty. He uses a layered referential style that seeks to create a kind of visionary realis