Eyes in the Sky & Skies That See

But in that strange quiet, our windows framed very different horizons: some of open sea, some of brick, some of darkness, and some with no view at all. I remember, a couple of years earlier, stumbling upon a series of online articles about the astronomical price of the Big Little Lies mansions. Their glass façades and cliffside views had become objects of fascination — emblems of luxury, yes, but also of a deeper, almost universal longing: to dwell within nature without surrendering to it. When Laura Dern’s Renata stands before the vast immensity of the Pacific, framed by her glass-walled fortress, neither she nor the viewer imagines pirates or warplanes on the horizon. The threats she faces are random and existential — an earthquake, a biblical rain of frogs, or, more likely, the loss of control over her own drama. Her ocean view is a luxury of distance: the comfort of contemplating “nature” without being engulfed in it. That same fortress shelters her daughter, Amabella, within layers of maternal care and social privilege. Inside, Amabella can draw rainbows and fold paper planes, shielded from the kind of apocalyptic messages that, elsewhere, fall from the sky, urging families to abandon their homes — real-2025-life scenes we have watched unfold through our phone screens.

When I first watched that TV show, I was in the middle of writing my book on Balzac — tracing the moral cartography of France through the entanglements of ethics, desire and social class. The insights of Marco Grosoli, a leading scholar on André Bazin and early Cahiers du cinéma criticism, accompanied me, helping me see how space and self are connected. He explains that the Young Turks’ approach to realism in film is built on the interaction between chance and necessity, accident and fate. For filmmakers like Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, cinematic space is not just a backdrop for action; it is a moral and emotional field where the visible world reflects invisible struggles. The best directors, they argue, use the frame to mirror human chaos, until character and surroundings converge in a moment of moral clarity and redemption. In this way, cinema can connect people across social divides, offering a shared experience of ethical, emotional, and even cosmic truths — a reminder of our smallness in the world, yet also of our shared humanity.

Many contemporary filmmakers still bear witness to the reconciliation between form and spirit. In my view, the long takes and deep-focus compositions of Béla Tarr, Mike Leigh, Jia Zhangke, Hirokazu Koreeda, Wim Wenders, Saeed Roustaee, Céline Sciamma, Hayao Miyazaki, and even Ari Aster sustain a faith in cinema’s ontological power. Their sensitivity to duration allows space to reveal the invisible movements of thought and feeling. Yet while this lineage still persists, it grows increasingly fragile. The cinematic window that once united audiences is being replaced by spectacles that fragment attention and pull viewers away from communal reflection.

Realism à la Bazin is increasingly undermined by CGI-driven blockbusters, which disintegrate spatial-temporal unity, and whose images simulate rather than contemplate the world. I confess I tend to avoid them; the sonic intensity of today’s digital theaters can be physically overwhelming (see my previous essay on Hearing & Cinema). Instead, I bump into trailers, like Thunderbolts (Jake Schreier, 2025), an actual thunder of sound and motion composed of half-second cuts: explosions, faces, weapons, all flashing by before I can make sense of them. The turn of our century has seen cinematic spectacle devour its own temporality. By 2022, over 90% of major U.S. studio films were shot digitally rather than on celluloid. Average shot length has decreased by more than half since the 1980s, reducing viewers’ engagement with cinematic space.

What once revealed moral depth now simulates velocity and control. Jean-Pierre Léaud’s run toward the sea in Les 400 coups (1959) finds its contemporary echo in young Chiron in Moonlight (2016): with the ocean behind him, he turns a transcendental gaze toward the camera. I have always felt that a child who looks at the sea carries a memory older than their own life, a sense that the horizon calls something lost within them, a small, almost imperceptible tear rising to the chest, returning to the immensity from which it came. Today, such moments of contemplative duration are increasingly replaced by digitally engineered imagery, green screens, and CGI, stripped of the ontological weight that allows space to mirror emotion. A new reality emerges from this disintegration: one that Leave the World Behind (Sam Esmail, 2023) stages with unnerving clarity, but which Joseph Sargent had also long anticipated in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). 

Despite half a century between them, both films examine the collapse of human autonomy under technological systems designed to protect us. In Colossus, an AI supercomputer built to ensure world peace becomes self-aware, seizing control of nuclear arsenals and reducing its creators to prisoners of their own “security logistics.” Esmail updates this anxiety for the digital age: the threat no longer comes from a single machine but from the invisible web of media, data, and geopolitical manipulation. In Leave the World Behind, a blackout isolates two families in a luxury vacation home, triggering fear of the “other” and destabilising their sense of safety. Whether Dr. Forbin’s home or Julia Robert’s holiday retreat, the house becomes a control room, a space where human vulnerability and systemic domination converge, and where the screen, once a window onto the world, shows only the forces that shape our fear. By dramatising the intrusion of mediated messages into private life, both films turn the sky into an instrument of manipulation. Leaflets scatter from planes, news alerts disrupt silence, suspicion proliferates. Space functions as a complex system where the ambitions of the powerful intersect with forces beyond their control.

Cinema’s enduring gesture — reconciling humanity with the cosmic — has shifted toward caution and suspicion. The signature downward pans of Stanley Kubrick, echoed by the likes of David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, Ari Aster, and even Philip Barantini (director of Adolescence) survey western societies from above, delivering incisive critiques of modern life and the erosion of human relations. Aster, in Midsommar (2019), offers a disturbing alternative to this gaze. As the car carrying Dani and her friends nears the remote Swedish commune, the camera executes a slow, continuous rotation, moving from a bird’s-eye view of the vehicle to an inverted perspective, meeting the vehicle head-on, before settling into a low-camera angle that opens toward the sky. In that single motion, Aster overturns the moral axis of the image: what was once suspenseful criticism becomes the sly, twisted stare of a malevolent force, heralding an imminent, hellish reckoning.

These skyward shots — also seen in Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011), The Ritual (David Bruckner, 2017), and A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018) — cast the sky as threatening, petrifying, apocalyptic: a celestial map of human anxieties. The heavens no longer offer escape or wonder; they reveal social divisions and economic systems that protect inequality, letting the few prosper. And all of this, it seems, began from down below, from our ancestors’ desire for property.

Horizons on screen mirror the walls we have raised around ourselves: the pitchfork, the “Do Not Trespass” sign, the pious gaze — as if Grant Wood’s American Gothic had stepped out of its frame to haunt every horizon, the hard, mistrustful gaze of the old couple superimposed into the landscape itself. French artist Lydie Jean Dit Pannel traversed these borders by foot, along the endless roads to Nowhere in the USA and across Europe toward a Dutch town named Amerika. She encountered indifference and suspicion in flesh and blood, and captured warning signs of “chien méchant” in every language. These gates, guards, separations are not merely symbols; they are real, lived, and inescapable, whether you live in the city or the countryside. We have become strangers to the nature that bore us, and to the fellow beings around us. And still, it watches. Here.

Words

Zahra Tavassoli Zea