Realism and Reality of Blood: City of God 10 Years Later

Fabio Akcelrud Durão, José Carlos Felix and Charles Albuquerque Ponte

Abstract: This essay investigates Fernando Meirelles’ City of God, ten years after its

release. The underlying reading hypothesis is that the film, instead of representing a

medium for expressing the voice of the oppressed and for raising people’s consciousness,

actually inaugurated a new era in the history of Brazilian cinema, one that manages to

combine an unheard-of degree of realist representation of popular reality with full mastery

over cinematic technique, including the appropriation of vanguardist discoveries. The end

result is, paradoxically, a heightened degree of domination through the image coupled with

political conformism. In the second part, the article offers a close reading of a three-frame

sequence in order a. to scrutinize the film’s internal logic of accommodating vanguardist

representation of criminality alongside conventional mainstream film and television

aesthetics, thus effacing any trace of historical tension between them, and b. the presence of

reality in the midst of extremely constructed filmic realism.

Keywords: City of God, Realism, Brazilian Cinema, Culture Industry.

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I

In City of God (Meirelles, 2002, BR) scene 20 (1h10min00sec to 46sec), Lil’ Zé

(Leandro Firmino da Hora) beats Blacky (Rubens Sabino) for having murdered his own

girlfriend inside the favela. The problem here was not the deed, but the location: one does

not kill people in one’s own neighborhood. In Rio’s shantytowns monopoly of violence

belongs to the drug dealers, hampered only by occasional raids of the police or attacks by

enemy gangs. Blood in this scene is literally revealing, because it encapsulates a very

complex question, that of realism and reality in Third World art in general and film in

particular. But before we can interpret how images comprising but a few tens of seconds

may prove to be so significant a good deal of contextualizing is necessary.

II

When reality is harsh and society clearly unequal, realism appears as the privileged

means to portray injustice and mobilize people for change. Suffering reinforces the sense

that truth exists; it acts as a gravitational force attracting representation to exhibit things as

they really are, as though the impact itself of apparent unfairness were enough at least to

start abolishing it. Realism, however, is a problematical term, one that comprises a host of

differing tendencies and nuances, not to mention a long history with its own ramifications

within all representational arts. As far as City of God is concerned, apart from the

eponymous novel by Paulo Lins on which the film was based, itself a breakthrough in

realism (Schwarz 1999; Durão 2007), two opposing sources must be mentioned. The first

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one comes from Sergei Eisenstein’s early and groundbreaking experimentations on film

montage, which laid bare the inherent artificiality of the medium and showed that realism is

not a synonym for spontaneity. Because perception is itself structured, realism is not an

enemy of technique, and because film possesses an almost unlimited potential for montage,

it is a privileged vehicle for social change.1 A contrasting position comes from Italian

neorealism, however historically contingent and relatively short its duration as a movement

might have been. As is well known, this was a pivotal chapter in the history of western

film, which set the tone for much of progressive productions after World War II. The

cinematic and the aesthetic accomplishments of directors such as Roberto Rosselinni,

Vittorio de Sica, and Luchino Visconti, which would subsequently be incorporated as

intrinsic features of guerilla or counter-cinema, derived to a great extent from their refusal

to resort to standard narrative codes and their adoption of a documentary-like style, which

included low budgeting, shooting on location, and, most importantly for us here, sole use of

non-actors. In addition, their works were based on the fundamental assertion that realist

films should not be restricted to an accurate exposé of reality’s unfairness, but should above

all prompt viewers to cross-examine their own lives and ask themselves how they

contributed to the reproduction of social life.

In the history of Brazilian cinema, an emblematic expression of realism emerged in

the 50s with Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ influential Rio 40 Graus (1955) and Rio Zona

Norte (1957), which can be seen as harbingers to the country’s most widely known film

movement: the Cinema Novo. The most concise expression of its aims is to be found in

Glauber Rocha’s famous 1965 manifesto “Aesthetics of Hunger,” which advocated

cinematic representation of the real Brazil, as opposed to ages-old alienated images of 1 See Eisenstein’s discussion on the method to produce a working class film (2003).

4

natural plenty, and an amicable folk – an alienation that continues to this day in a multitude

of films where social inequality is rigorously made invisible.2 In the fifties, this idealized

construction of the country was best exemplified by the production of the Vera Cruz

Company, which attempted to closely follow the Hollywood standards of the time, a role

that in the 70s would be adopted the powerful Globo Network. Thus, instead of self-created

idyllic clichés, instead of the bland life of the rich, the works produced by Cinema Novo’s

iconoclasts challenged other filmmakers to face Brazil’s constitutive primitivism and be

true to the violence the country both produced and required for its reproduction. The

antidote against quotidian, but unseen, aggression should be of the same kind: the

representation of existing brutality, which would also be necessary to the overthrow of the

economic and social system.

When it was first launched, City of God was rightly regarded as a watershed in the

history of Brazilian film. Its success was undeniable: it was viewed by 3.2 million

spectators in 2002 alone (Oricchio, 2003, p. 156), and received 32 international prizes.3

Many recognized in it the fulfillment of Cinema Novo’s highest aspirations, for here one

found an utterly realist representation of the daily life of drug dealers in a shantytown in

Rio. Their language was rendered with perfect accuracy and no concessions were made to

middle-class notions of moral propriety or decency. This was coupled with an unheard-of

mastery of cinematic technique, which managed to follow the high (and costly) standards of

Hollywoodian idiom.4 In sum, if acting could not be more ethnographically authentic,

2 This has not ceased to be the case today. Idealized representation of reality is very much present Brazilian comedy, one of the most active genres in the industry, but also in light drama as well. In Bruno Barreto’s Bossa Nova (2000), for instance, all apartment windows face Rio’s beaches and an high school English teacher lives in the most expensive neighborhood of the city. 3 http://cidadededeus.globo.com/premios.html. Access Feb. 6th, 2012. 4 The Hollywoodian idiom can be defined as a series of conventional codes and stylistic conventions established by the North American film industry in its first decades, which eventually became its modus

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persistent problems of Brazilian cinematography, such as registration of sound, seemed to

be once and for all resolved and formerly revolutionary techniques of editing and montage

appeared to make City of God both mercilessly true and broadly accessible. With the

benefit of hindsight, however, it became clear that these expectations were misguided, for

City of God did more than just fail to enhance critical consciousness; it opened up a new

horizon for mainstream representation, a more violence-based and sense-numbing, a more

alienating one. It is this unbalance between the initial hopes embedded in the film and what

it has become that needs to be explored.

The immediate launch of the film was a political event in itself. In the heat of the

presidential campaign, a soon-to-be elected Lula praised it for daring courageously

approaching the question of violence in slums at the same time that it refused to be

pessimistic. For “[i]n the place of defeatism, between the debris and the lacerated bodies,

what emerges is the twinkle in the eyes of Rocket [Rocket], a young boy saved by the

camera, with which he documents the hell that is City of God.” (“Screening of City of

God”, p. 115) Filmmaker and conservative cultural critic Arnaldo Jabor was equally

emphatic when he averd that “[w]e do not screen this film, it looks at us. […] The film is a

blow to our sense of normality. […] The tragedy of the Brazilian periphery was an ignored

earthquake, to which no one sent rescue squads. […] City of God breaks with the laws of

the normal spectacle; it betrays the cultural [sic] industry and throws into our faces not a

operandi. The conventionality of style and production in this kind of film aesthetics, perceptively described by Adorno in his critique of the cultural industry, sets a number of restrictions to individual expression in the making and watching of films. The norms that govern this dominant cinema production are commonly presented in two levels: i) technical devices, such as continuity editing and soundtrack composition; ii) a determinate kinds of narrative logic, for instance the development of the plot as a consequence of the character’s psychological motivations, and specific organization of cinematic space and time at the service of narrative. These two previous systems are interrelated in a hierarchical order, whereby narrative logic determines time and space. This order also accounts for variations in the model, which can be evaluated in terms of their purposefulness once they serve the narrative function.

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message but a sentence.” (in Vieira, p. iv) To be sure, there were dissenting voices, such as

rapper M.V. Bill, who criticized the film for giving the impression that the life in the favela

was reduced to that of drug dealers,5 or cinema critic Ivana Bentes, who claimed that

picture promoted a “cosmetics of hunger” that stylized poverty (Bentes, 2005). Others

objected to the fact that the shanty was isolated from society, which obscured the links

between piecemeal drug trade and wholesale commerce, involving as it does politicians and

powerful economic interests.

We will return to these arguments below; meanwhile one should note that these

severe critiques were not sufficient to counterbalance what was becoming a solid positive

consensus in the media regarding the film, but especially abroad, where movie critics

almost in unison categorized it as a gangster piece, comparing it to Scorsese’s Goodfellas

(1990) (see Shaw, 2005). Here was an artifact that seemed able to bridge the local and the

universal, Brazilian reality and Hollywood-like expertise, social critique and

entertainment.6 It is this prevailing view that must be contested. This will most profitably

be achieved by a. investigating the way actors were selected for the roles and b. by

analyzing distinctive technical traits in the film. But before describing how the cast of City

of God was chosen, a few words on Fernando Meirelles are in order. For it is important to

bear in mind that even though he had already directed two feature films, Menino

Maluquinho 2 (The Nutty Boy 2, 1998) and Domésticas (Maids, 2001), his background was

in advertisement as one of the owner of O2 agency, the most successful Brazilian firms in

5 See www.vivafavela.com.br. 6 See City of God reviews in: http://cidadededeus.globo.com/.

7

this business.7 He invested almost 3 million dollars from his own savings, which he since

then recovered with a good profit as City of God was launched by Globo Filmes itself.8

Much of the video-clip nature of the film, as well as the ease to deal with unprofessional

actors originated in Meirelles’ experience in turning commodities objects of desire.

The novel’s ethnographic spirit was adequately mirrored in the film’s cast.

Meirelles declared in several interviews that from the beginning of the production his aim

was to achieve a kind of realism that could rival the novel’s, and that this could only be

achieved on the screen through spontaneous acting: “I wanted the audience to look at Lil’

Zé and actually see the real Lil’ Zé, and not an actor playing a role. The idea was to have

these unknown actors in order to eliminate the filter, to let the spectator have a direct

relationship with the character.” (Meirelles, 2005, p. 15) It was with this spirit that he and

screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani approached the Nós do Morro, a drama group established

at the Vidigal slum, and started a long and strenuous audition process. The first step was to

recruit, camera at hand, interested members of various favela communities. Two thousand

people volunteered for the video test. From these, four hundred, aged 9 to 25, were chosen

to proceed to acting workshops. After a week of interpretation exercises they were further

narrowed down to 200 participants, which were then divided into eight groups and which

had classes twice a week for five months, from 9 am to 9 pm. Only after that were the

7 “Not only was O2 the largest firm in Brazil in its sector, but also it was twice as big as the second firm. In 2002, O2 produced 416 television commercials. Nowadays, one cannot watch television for half an hour without seeing at least one commercial produced by O2.” (Gatti, 2005, p. 45) 8 Meirelles case is not unique. In a country where the film industry collapsed in the early 90s, advertisement proved a fruitful default branch for audiovisual training. Even so, Meirelles’ existential grounds for doing film are worth pointing out in passing: “In 1998, I was 42 years old and my internal alarm went off frantically, warning me that my life as a commercial director was very comfortable, but not very satisfying. By chance, during this time, I read Paulo Lins’s City of God and decided to take on a new challenge: making a film based on this novel. I would be killing two birds with one stone: I would expose a view of my country that had shocked me when I read the book, and I would give my own life a boost.” (in Vieira, 2005, p.13)

8

definitive 60 main actors and 150 secondary ones defined, and only then were they told that

film was to be made.

The theater workshop was not just a means to select and train actors. It was also a

testing ground for the script itself. As Meirelles observers, in a passage that deserves to be

quoted in full:

As soon as they grasped the mechanism of improvisation, we started to go

through the scenes in the script, but without letting them know that they were

scenes of the film and without giving them the dialogues. We would only tell

them what the situation was, and they would develop it. I would keep a

notepad in hand, jotting down the good ideas, interesting sentences and new

situations created out of the proposed conflict. I would send these notes

regularly to Bráulio, in São Paulo, and he would incorporate the new ideas

and speeches in the text, until he came up with a new draft of the script.

(Meirelles, p. 18)

Actors were then in a sense subjects and objects of the action. At work here there is an

interesting the mixture of spontaneity and dramatic technique, and it would not be an

exaggeration to say that ethnographic accuracy was literally fabricated. What should be

stressed, however, is the maintenance of the division of labor, for the favelados had no

access to the intellectual part of work, neither the initial conception of the story (however

much it would be changed), nor the vision of the whole. But one should hastily add that the

ideal of teaching people to become themselves on screen was in fact not absolute new, for

Fátima Toledo, a Brazilian acting coach whose participation in the casting of City of God

9

cannot be overlooked, had herself developed an original method to extract realistic

performances out of non-professional actors, especially for television9. In sum, if

Mantovani’s Oscar-nominated script, which saw no less than 13 different versions, was

very much the result of the intuitions and reactions of tens favelados, their intimacy with

their own milieu, it did not allot them space for composition proper. Such space was rather

given to Hollywood screenwriter Alexander Payne, who advised Mantovani after they met

at a workshop promoted by Brazil’s Sundance Institute.

And it is exactly to the film’s composition that we now turn. At least six important

features can be mentioned here:

a. the lack of self-consciousness on the part of the camera. In spite of (or precisely because)

of masterful editing, the camera never calls attention to itself, to the fact that it is shooting,

that it is a tool: it virtuosely erases itself thus hindering any thought of editing

manipulation, and enhancing the illusion of the wholeness, however fractured, of the reality

represented. What once had been the result of radical perspectivism is now incorporated in

the flow of images. A good example is the 360o camera rotation around Rocket on scene 2

of the DVD (4 min 43 sec to 50 sec), which ends the admirable introduction of the film

with the runaway chicken. The procedure is symbolically effective in portraying Rocket’s

in-between position the drug dealers and the police, crime and legality. In this sense, it

could lead to reflection – perhaps showing the similarity between both spheres – and the

camera could literally be its instrument. But this potential is not actualized, for the same

9 Afterwards, the film’s success boosted Toledo’s work within Brazilian mainstream film industry. Her method became synonymous of realistic performance, and a number of recent Brazilian films that were extensively debated for drawing upon similar issues and themes as City of God, such as Elite squad (2007), and Linha de Passe (2008), profited from it. All had their leading actors were coached by her and were extremely successful in terms of box office and international prizes.

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rotation that offers a full, simultaneous view of opposed forces, also provides the link for

the past as it encircles Rocket with increasing speed. In sum, the whole work of camera

movement and editing is daring without being really challenging, innovative but not

revolutionary, eye-pleasing but not eye-opening.

b. the nature of music. In City of God, the sound underlines the image and does produce

any tension in relation to it.10 And yet, as in the case of the camera, the music is highly

competent. One cannot reproach the film for choosing an inaccurate musical medium, for

the samba performed is really one of the kinds of music produced and consumed in the

peripheries of Rio de Janeiro. The problem is that samba, or chorinho, or even the later

funk is associated with happiness and joy, which can be observed for instance during the

flashback to the sixties (23min50sec to 24min30sec), which brings about a discontinuity

between the nostalgic song about the happy life in the favelas and the police’s periodic

violent raids. Again, that which could generate criticism by means of the clash between a

barbaric world and reconciling sound is neutralized, and music in the end helps shaping the

images so as to make them more enjoyable.

c. photography. City of God is a film in which, for all its unbridled violence, mercilessly

shown, the colors in themselves are not aggressive. In most of it brown and grey are the

prevailing tones, and only very seldom do vivid red or any other shocking pigment appear

as dominant. Almost all hues are welcoming to the eye, especially in interior locations.

Once again, the temporal leap into the sixties serves as a good example to examine the

10 See here Adorno and Eisler’s comments in Composing for the Film (2007) on the need for progressive cinema to bring about a tension between cinematic image and sound.

11

choices of color, which dissolve the tension in a time represented with some nostalgia, as

becomes clear with the very agreeable change of palette, from the cold bluish present to a

nostalgic ocher past.11

d. nostalgia in the storyline. As in the book, the film has a tripartite division, but the

treatment of the past is a very different one, for in Meirelles’ work the establishment of the

settlement City of God becomes idyllic, which justifies renowned Brazil critic Lúcia Nagib

(2006) to propose the underlying mythic structure of heaven, purgatory and in the film.

There is certainly something preposterous about considering the beginnings of the favela as

heaven, but City of God does present its part soothing colors and peaceful music, thus

suggesting that the world was good when the poor were not violent and acquiesce to keep

their place.

e. identification with Rocket, the main character, who narrates the story and eventually

manages to get out of the favela to become a reliable worker. One of the most important

compositional choices in the preparation of the script was to reduce the over 200 characters

of the novel to a couple of tens. What in literature appeared as the voice of the slum as the

result of the intertwining of several different stories, now is articulated around one single

person. The good fortune of the individual here overshadows the fact that for the

community everything continues to be rigorously the same. Identification is a result of a

narrative strategy of focalization, which has been a trademark of Hollywoodian film and

11 For a good description of City of God’s cinematography, see Oppenheimer (2005).

12

has been incorporated by most so-called independent productions12. It works by means of a

narrowing of focus into one being, thereby detaching him or her from the rest of the

environment, which then is converted into a background, and creating empathy between the

character and the audience. In City of God, chapter 32 of the DVD is emblematic. Having

photographed policemen receiving bribes, Rocket decides to send to the newspaper instead

the pictures of Lil’ Zé’s corpse perforated by tens of bullets. In his words: “The picture of

the hood will get me the job. This one will make me famous. It’ll even make the cover of a

magazine. I won’t have to worry about Lil’ Zé anymore. But the cops?” The choice is

presented as one between fame and self-preservation, dangerous ambition and prudent

conformism. But this is a dilemma as projected by Rocket’s eyes, which tend to become the

viewer’s. For the real issue at stake is not professional success or even security in itself, but

the option for an individual project. Exposing the policemen could have been part of

political action aimed at changing reality; it could be circulated anonymously among

political parties and protest groups. This possibility is simply repressed in the film and the

following scene, where Rocket is talking to his friend Stringy serves only to strengthen it.

Here the hero confirms that he managed to get a job as photographer at a newspaper13:

Not a job, an internship/

It pays a little, doesn’t it? /

A little. /

What about the lady journalist? Was she a good lay? 12 It is no wonder that Danny Boyle’s Slamdog Millionaire (2008) was immediately compared to City of God. Ironically, despite the resemblances between both, what critics strictly failed to notice was that such similarity reveals a powerful and inescapable process of standardization from which even the so-called independent films seem not to be able to escape. 13 Note the interesting en abîme structure at work here, for if the camera, absent in Lins’ novel, was the means for social climbing for the character in fiction, it was so also for the actors in reality.

13

The change of topic from work to sex, with all its chauvinism, is appeasing; it helps to end

the question of Rocket’s choice, which is dissipated in male bonding. For all the novelty of

scene, characters and language, the ideal of social mobility, Horatio Alger-style, is exposed

as valid in Rio’s shantytowns.

f. the production of shocks and the imposition of a high-speed rhythm. It is true that in City

of God lack of camera consciousness and identification with the main character would not

in principle exhaust the film’s critical potential. It could be argued that the story is complex

enough not to take clear sides and not to avoid dissonance, conflict and ambiguity. But this

is true only insofar as the film’s tempo is not taken into account. Once one pays attention to

the fast cuts and frenzied camera movements, one realizes that perfect color and sound are

here united to hyper-slang and explicit violence in a homogenous whole that fosters

reactions of enjoyment somewhat akin to those of any American thriller. City of God would

then be sufficiently close to allow for identification, but distant enough to provoke

excitement, the thrill of shock. There is simply no time left, no holes in the narrative, to

allow for thinking or critical judgment.

City of God then can be seen (literally) as an inverted tour de force, as it were. It is

not the case that the film manages to create a masterpiece from an unwelcoming setting;

quite the opposite, it manages to produce, from the most blatantly dystopic reality, an

object of leisure, amusement and diversion. And this was not achieved owing to faulty

technical means, which would distort representation, but by unheard-of technical expertise

in the history of Brazilian cinema. If this negative evaluation could have struck critics as

14

too strict and ungenerous ten years ago, now it is corroborated by what City of God

became, namely the reference and inspiration for a whole series of neo-favela pictures.

The list is significant and includes the Globo TV series (2002-2005, created Meirelles and

Kátia Lundt) and feature film Terra dos Homens (2007, dir. Paulo Morelli); Seja o que

Deus quiser (2003, dir. Murilo Salles); O redentor (2004, dir. Cláudio Torres); Maré -

nossa história de amor (2008, Lúcia Murat); 5X favela - agora por nós mesmos (2010, dir.

Wagner Novais et al.), among others. More importantly, the problematic blockbusters

Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad) 1 and 2 could not possibly be produced without Meirelles’

film as a precursor. The same can be said for the recent intriguing 2 Coelhos (Two

Rabbits, 2011), a film that combines immense criminal violence with cartoonish language

and MTV and advertisement aesthetics. Thus our conclusion at this point: far from being a

vehicle through which the oppressed received a voice, far from being a means for the

emancipation of the favelados, City of God opened up a new horizon of representation for

the Brazilian culture industry. The result of the crystallization of this new genre is that it

has become even more difficult to have a really fresh approach to slum communities, one

which could effectively detach itself from the realist schema (Adorno, 2008) that has been

so firmly shaped in the recent history of film. In view of this, the urgent task becomes one

of recuperating reality14 in perfected but codified realism.

14 In one specific instance reality made itself felt vis-à-vis the workings of realism, and, as will be seen below, in a negative fashion, namely through the impossibility the for the production crew to shoot at Cidade de Deus itself, as it was originally planned. After a couple of days it became clear that the relations between drug dealers, police and population were too unstable to allow for continuous work with expensive equipment.

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III

It is precisely the film’s technical mastery that calls for close reading as an attempt

to find revealing details that could undermine from the inside the supremacy of

construction. There is an interpretative program in this. Non-computerized films by

definition contain in themselves more than what they can master. Radically slowing them

down in order to show what was always there, visible but unseen, may be a source of

inspiration for other media, either slower ones, as literature, or faster, like TV or the

internet. For us, the scene of Blacky’s beating will be important for three reasons. First, as a

nodal point of the plot and the trigger of a crucial irony: having prevented Lil’ Zé from

killing Blacky, Benny (Phellipe Haagensen) will be accidentally shot to death by him in his

own farewell party from the favela. The story’s message is clear: for those involved in drug

dealing and crime finding a way out is not an easy thing to do. In the second place, the

fragment is significant in the way it encapsulates a dynamic of appropriation and

domestication of progressive filmmaking. Then, to conclude, the frames will be considered

according to how a dialectics of the construction of blood may show the appearance of

reality in the midst of realism.

In the first picture, after the beating starts and Lil’ Zé kicks Blacky, we see him

from the frame of another room.

16

17

Then the camera comes back to a near close up:

18

The scene ends with Blacky leaving the shanty.

In a film highly praised by its meticulous technical care, the juxtaposition of the

three frames uncovers a truth that is valid for the work as a whole. From the point of view

of content, of what is being represented, the beginning of the sequence subverts the

traditional order of action development by placing the climax of the action right in the first

scene, thus suggesting to the audience that there might be few or no limits in the treatment

of violence. Nonetheless, such promise does not last much, for what first appeared to be a

daring representation of gratuitous violence is rapidly softened by Benny’s interference in

favor of a less drastic resolution for the conflict. In the course of the action, therefore,

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Benny acts as a power of restraint and humanity that at the same time makes violence more

bearable to the viewer. As in the film as a whole, the ending here, albeit provisionally, is a

happy one.

But this is mirrored in formal terms by the disposition of the frames, in the kind of

screen formats utilized. In terms of framing, no doubt, all three captures can be read as

oppressive, considering the fact that the screen is not used in its entirety, which suggests

that the violence of the gangs, personified by Lil’ Zé, must be seen from a hidden position,

that such violence is ubiquitous and thus oppresses the community as a whole. An attentive

look reveals that the first frame capture inverts the conventional dimensions of the screen

established by Hollywood mainstream cinema, for the traditional horizontal axis is

reframed by the door into an extreme vertical, making the actual violence a central, but not

exclusive place in the background scene. Meanwhile, the foreground occupies a prominent

position not only by framing the action as in a portrait, but by including elements of the

setting, such as the pictures of a naked woman (which, framed by horizontal and vertical

lines, resembles a piece of film regularly cut out from unwelcome scenes during the editing

process or, in many cases, requested to be excluded by censorship), a shattered wall and

scattered debris all over the place. The contrast of light, an extreme balancing between

brightness and darkness also testifies to the picture’s sense of realism. The chiaroscuro in

the scene’s photography, in which the excessive white coming from the light bulb is

restricted to the background room, produces a sense of realist three-dimensionality and

reminds one of the kind of spotlight used during torture sessions. Equally noteworthy is the

pipe tube allocated conveniently in a position that prevents any view of the gun, working

somehow as a band, covering certain eyesore parts, frequently imposed by censors onto

those films/scenes considered morally inappropriate or too wanton and obscene. In a

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nutshell, in view of all these elements comprised in this single frame, it is tempting to read

it as alluding to the daring guerilla anti-cinema aesthetics for which City of God was widely

and mistakenly taken.

By contrast, the second capture points to the opposite direction as it stands as a

typical instance of mainstream film screening: the white table flattens the image, bringing

about a characteristic widescreen cinemascope-like frame. The immediate outcome of such

radical inversion exposes one of the major efforts of Hollywoodian aesthetics: the control

of any repulsive or shocking scene so as to keep the film tolerable to viewers. If the

extreme close-up projects the core of the violence to the screen as a whole, it already

represents a taming of the first capture, inasmuch as the cleanliness of frame, with its

extensive whiteness and brilliance encircling Blacky, appeases the brutality of the action by

eliminating all the peripheral debris of visual information which composed the first frame.

The close-up creates a misleading effect regarding the development and enhancement of the

scene’s violence, thus reinforcing City of God’s dialectics between reality-oriented and

conventional film aesthetics. The abrupt approximation of the camera and the positioning

of blood at the center of the action can be easily taken as a movement towards a maximum

of the violence. But the use of such a standard screen format as cinemascope, though brief,

in fact assuages the impact of the action represented in the previous frame by confining the

harshness of the violence within the limits of a screen format familiar to the viewers.

In the third frame the composition of the point of view becomes something closer to

a TV frame, which corresponds to a further domestication of violence and a suitable way to

conclude the sequence. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of the TV

screen as the sole moving image format for a great part of the Brazilian population. And it

is not by chance that this kind of screen concluded the sequence, a “happy ending” in

21

framing as well. In this sense, the progression of the three frames from the daring anti-

cinema guerilla aesthetic to TV-screen format can be read as an instance of the film’s own

internal logic in its capacity to absorb a variety of film codes and conventions. As the

action unfolds, however, any cinematic device, composition or arrangement that was first

introduced in the narrative as a novelty or as something non- or anti-conventional is

eventually adapted to and adjusted into a standard pattern. City of God is impressive in its

striking ability to manipulate such transitions and skillfully perform such accommodations

both in terms of form and content.

To sum up, the series of frames starts with the impact of an image marked by the

irregularity of all elements of the mise-en-scéne, as way to convey the ideia that reality’s

harshness resides not only in the cruelty of the action itself (the beating of Blacky and his

potential death), but it is endemic to its surroundings as well (the disarray and disorder of

the decadent setting captured by the viewpoint of the frame); it then progresses to the

standard symmetry and cleanliness of mainstream film codes in which the enhancement of

the action leaves little or no room for the sense of realism previously established by the

conjunction between action and setting; it finally reaches the balance and adjustment of the

ubiquitous TV-like format where the representation of violence and brutality operates

according to particular, strong pre-established conventions. As in sex scenes in x-rated

films regularly exhibited on cable-TV, cruelty in this media format can be fully exploited

without ever being shown in its entirety.

And yet, mastery in the disposition of visual material here is not absolute.

Subverting it there a mistake in continuity, a goof, that is significantly revealing. To be

sure, goofs are far from belonging to the nobler elements of film theory; the claim that they

can be cognitively relevant would more likely than not be met with surprise, if not

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suspicion, by critics. For goofs are generally regarded as the pastime of obsessive viewers,

who perhaps want to prove their superiority in relation to the object they have in front of

themselves, an object towards which they may easily entertain love-hate feelings. Further,

because of their ordinary nature goofs are normally not thought of as emphatic. Virtually all

films have something in them that went wrong, to point that the aficionado may eventually

rightly see as a goof something that was not. Two claims can be put forth here to suggest

otherwise. In the first place, goofs demand a different kind of seeing. Anyone who has

spent time looking for them (or even trying to verify them) is acquainted with the

unbearably slow speed they impose on the viewer. The absurdly the frame-by-frame pace

seems to generate another kind of object altogether, something in between a painting and

actual moving pictures. This experience as such is one that deserves to be pondered. In

addition, however, one should be able to differentiate goofs according to the kind of

meaning they engender, for if in many cases they are but a curiosity – only revealing, say,

the incompetence of an actor who does not stop breathing after being dead – in other

instances they may produce a determinate of sense that is relevant to what is at stake in the

film itself. This is what happens with the goof discussed below, which may be regarded as

generating a true dialectics of blood.

As Lil’ Zé beats Blacky one can see in the first frame that he is bleeding and his red

shirt is abundantly wet. He has just been struck with a revolver on his head, and the blood

takes a little while to flow. It is only on the second caption that it gushes out. But as Blacky

leaves the shanty, no marks of blood, either on his forehead of his shirt can be discerned.

Thus the dialectic of blood in the scene: on the one hand, there is the perfect construction of

the cut on Blacky’s forehead parallel to the real time of the action, on the other, the

disappearance of the blood stains. The goof then exposes a seminal flaw, a loophole in the

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most perfect technical rationality. By laying bare the device (as the Russian Formalists

would put it), it shows more than only holes in the whole. Thus our conclusion: if the blood

presented in the scene was realistically manufactured, and perfectly so, mobilizing as it did,

masterful editing and cinematic ingenuity, it was not the blood of reality. In overcoded

realism the blood of reality cannot be represented as such and that is why its absence on the

shirt and forehead of the inhabitant of the slum may stand as a sign for what would be the

real thing. Since, as we now saw, the great majority of the actors recruited for the film have

come from favela communities themselves, in the errors of the film they emerge as they

really are, in such a way that they could never do, if one tried to represent them directly. In

other words, it is the eruption of reality in realism that can only take place through this

manipulation, that otherwise would not appear as such. When one places the goof at the

center, the absent blood points to the unreality of realistically contrived bleeding. The real

is not there, or, better, it makes itself felt by a lack indiscernible to the eye, which can only

emerge in the utmost effort of vision.

References: Adorno, T.W. “The Schema of Mass Culture”. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Ed. J. M. Berstein. London: Routledge, 2008. p. 61-97. Adorno, T.W. & Hanns Eisler. Composing for the films. New York: Continuum, 2007. Bordwell, D., STAIGER, J. THOMPSON, K. The Classical Hollywood Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Durão, F. A. “Towards a Model of Inclusive Exclusion: Marginal Subjectivation in Rio de Janeiro”. In: Niyi Afolabi; Esmeralda Ribeiro; Marcio Barbosa. (Eds.). The Afro-Brazilian Mind. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2007, p. 75-86.

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Eisenstein, S.M. “Método de realização de um filme operário”. In: XAVIER, I. (org.) A experiência do cinema: antologia. Rio de Janeiro: Graal – Embrafilmes, 1983. Espinosa, J. G. “For an Imperfect Cinema”. In: Coco Fusco. (Ed.). Selections from New Latin American Cinema. New York: Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 1998, p. 166-177). Gatti, André. “City of God: a landmark in Brazilian Film Language”, in Vieira (2005). Gomes, P. E. S. “Cinema: a trajectory within underdevelopment”. In: Randal Johnson and Robert Stam (eds.) Brazilian Cinema. New York: Columbia U.P., 1995. Lins, P. Cidade de Deus. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997. Lula, Luís Inácio da Silva. “Screening of City of God”, in Vieira (2005). Meirelles, Fernando. Cidade de Deus. DVD, 2002. ----. “Writing the Script, Finding and Preparing the Actors” in Vieira (2005). Nagib, Lúcia. A Utopia no Cinema Brasileiro. São Paulo: Cossac e Naify, 2006. Oppenheimer, Jean. “Shooting the Real: Boys from Brazil” in Vieira (2005). Oricchio, Luiz Zanin. Cinema de novo: um balanço crítico da Retomada. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2003. Rocha, G. “An Esthetic of Hunger”. In Randal Johnson and Robert Stam (eds.) Brazilian Cinema. New York: Columbia U.P., 1995. Schwarz, Roberto. “Cidade de Deus”. In Seqüências brasileiras. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1999. Shaw, Miranda. “The Brazilian Goodfellas: City of God as a Gangster Film?” in Vieira (2005). Vieira, Else (ed.). City of God in Several Voices: Brazilian Social Cinema as Action. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2005.