Representations

• Representations of women...
• The favelas are a place of gendered violence  
• The City of God is represented as almost exclusively male, and women’s bodies provide another site for men to carry out violence against one another  
• The film portrays women primarily as victims


  Ned’s girlfriend’s rape instigates a full-scale gang war at the film’ conclusion, Angelica and Bernice use their sexual hold over men to get them to leave the gangs but both result in death – leaving them indirect victims of violence and indirectly responsible for it  
• The women are presented as a civilising influence, encouraging the men to leave the barbarism behind and choose peace – the barbarism wins out and the women become removed from the narrative  
• Representations of men...
• Masculinity is a key theme that runs through the film, men/boys are the key agents of the narrative  
• Positive role models for males growing up in the favela is restricted  
• Criminal activity – drug cartels and gang warfare are presented as almost inevitable consequences of environment  
• Key factor in representation of male agency and power is the text’s insistence on weaponry and increasingly casual slaughter seen as a coming-of-age ritual (Lil Ze’s murder of the hotel inhabitants) 
• Gun --> powerful symbol of masculinity, agency and destruction 
• Technology presented as a weapon...
• The camera becomes a weapon against the violence of non-recognition – it’s a demand for social visibility in the structure of the film
• The camera can be seen as a technological metaphor representing alternatives in life beyond dire poverty or drugs  
• City of God opens with Rocket’s photographic camera pointing directly at us – the audience, existing outside the filmic world and inside the real world it replicates  
• The camera makes the film and thereby the favelas ‘deserted through isolation and insignificant through distance’ just as they are neglected by the upper-middle class of Rio 
• Film’s climactic sequence – Rocket points his camera directly into Merielle's film apparatus --> visual parallel to when Shaggy points gun at camera, Rocket is a powerful alternative to the violent hoodlum, he furthers himself through the peaceful mastering of new technologies  
• Merielle's visual style communicates the chaotic world bequeathed to a new generation of children by an indifferent society – a world of which they’re desperately but unsuccessfully trying to make sense