Member-only story
After the Credits
Learning to Stand in Zero Gravity
Gravity (2013, dir. Alfonso Cuarón)
This is what happens when a genius director creates the masterpiece of his life.
‘At 600 km above planet Earth … life in space is impossible.’ In fact, this clichéd statement doesn’t mean much. It’s merely a device to make the audience perceive the screen as a flat surface. Having drawn the audience away from the backs of their seats and toward the screen, the director immediately reveals the Earth as seen from 600 kilometers above, on an overwhelming scale. It’s like opening a closed door right in front of you and finding an ocean stretching out beyond it. At just the right moment, the director kills the faint sound that had been playing. When sound disappears, people instinctively slow their breathing, and all their senses become focused on what they see. It’s a vivid sensation unlike anything felt before, like eating food in a pitch-black room where you can’t see an inch in front of you. All this happens within the film’s first 50 seconds.
A faint radio transmission comes through. Hearing, which had died, comes back to life, expanding the senses. As breathing slowly returns, we naturally move from being overwhelmed by the visual shock to marveling at the magnificent view. The text in the foreground and the vast field of…
