Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

City of God (2003), the critically acclaimed film about Rio de Janeiro’s favela City of God, has been criticised for its approach to violence, which, some say, maintains a closer dialogue with the stylised aesthetic of American action cinema than with Brazil’s Cinema Novo’s tradition of social critique and political positioning (Rocha, 1965). However, despite its fatalistic portrayal of urban violence, the film should still be regarded as a demand for social visibility of the “reality” it has attempted convey, not least because of its cast of non-professional actors and use of documentary techniques. 16 years on, residents from City of God have begun to produce a different type of documentary about their community. Whereas in the film the camera of the main protagonist functions as an “inventory of death” (Diken, 2004), in the hands of the residents it becomes a tool against the violence of non-representation and a struggle for symbolic power and capital. As Bourdieu (1990: 134) has remarked, the stakes of struggle regarding symbolic power are images. A visual ethnography of the documentary filming process conducted by the author shows how the documentary makers resist some of the representations of the film through visual and linguistic discourses that build a sensitive perspective of the structural and symbolic violence favela residents encounter, while also producing new (and more hopeful) images regarding City of God. In this sense, the documentary becomes a more explicit form of civic engagement and political action than the film.