City of God (2002, Fernando Meirelles Katia Lund, Brazil)

• Useful starting points

  • Opening sequence 'The Flying Chicken' 00:00:44 - 00:05:50
  • 'The Story of the Apartment' 00:35:00 - 00:38:11
• Cinematography

  • Depicts the changing nature of the slum, the favela itself features as a major character that grows and changes
  • Open environment with spaces to play football gives way to closed one with cramped and narrow streets confined by apartment blocks, tin roofed shacks, and graffiti spattered walls
  • Characters become more and more hemmed in by the encroachment of these walls and barriers, their dimensions emphasised by overhead shots
  • Characters are imprisoned, the killings are speeded up
• Cinematography in 'The Story of the Apartment'

  • Camera in a fixed position, spectator watching from a place in the stalls of a theatre, not entering the Apartment or seeing things from the characters' points of view
  • Wide-angle lens and deep focus give an exaggerated perspective to the room where figures appear large in the foreground, small in the background
  • Story told with a series of dissolves where people appear, disappear and reappear in different parts of the room
  • In the Apartment the characters watch themselves, the walls change colour, the furniture moves, and objects change, the lighting gets darker and darker, the story appears like a series of tableaux
• Cinematography in the disco scene

  • Shots of the dancing crowd from the dancers' eye line contrast with high angle shots from Rocket's point of view as he puts discs on the turn table, emphasising his position as an observer and not a participant
• Mise-en-Scène in 'The Story of the Tender Trio'

  • Retains some of the romantic, warm imagery of the earlier poetic representations of outlaws, social bandits, echoing the cangaceiros, the revolutionary outsiders of earlier Brazilian films but there is often a disjunction between the image we see on screen and what we hear Rocket say
  • Image of Bené and Dice with their arms round each other laughing will recur later in the film as a sepia coloured insert, the recollection of a lost more innocent time
• Mise-en-Scène in Dice's rebirth

  • Montage of shots that turn the boy Dice into the man Zé
  • Candlelit voodoo christening ceremony that evokes the dead
  • Priest in a wheelchair gives him a magic amulet that seals his pact with death and sanctifies his violent behaviour
  • Glimpse of slum dwellers wearing gold jewellery, with their cars and girls bears some relationship to the understood paraphernalia of the gangster film
• Mise-en-Scène of Rocket


  • Seen in an atmosphere of normality and freedom - working in the newspaper office, riding around in the newspaper delivery van with the open aspect of the mountain in the distance
• Editing


  • Attempts to use 'effects' whenever thought that this could bring something extra to the sensation or emotion that was aiming to evoke
  • If the situation is tense, and there's no time to think, it is speeded up and made even tenser
  • If the character is going to be important later, then the face is frozen to commit it to memory
  • If both things happen at the same time then the screen is split, so as not to lose anything
  • In the third part of the film, anything out of the ordinary for the editing style was especially welcomed, if a 'badly made' cut could increase levels of discomfort in the viewer then it was incorporated
• Editing style


  • Restless, characteristic of the film, announces itself from the start
  • Begins not with the customary establishing shot but with flashes that illuminate a series of close ups - knife, hand, and stone – with a cut to black between each shot
  • Another photographic flash illuminates Rocket with his camera, zooming out from behind a network of bars, which collapses down into his image
  • This is in fact a flash forward to the scene that will replay very near the end of the film, where the reverse shot has denied us here, with Zé bribing the police after his gun battle with Ned and subsequent arrest
  • Montage of conflicting shots and the collision of the fast paced editing now gives way to the spectacular circling shots which will morph Rocket from a young man to a boy, and the favela to its former days of low rise shacks and open spaces
  • Series of tight close ups zooms in and out on further fragments of street life - faces, a guitar, a tambourine, hands with tumblers of drinks, hands scraping and chopping carrots, chicken feet and chickens being lowered into the cooking pot
  • First mid shot of the film is of a live chicken on the table, tethered by its leg, a cut provides the first long establishing shot of the film, the chicken jumps down off the table making a bid for freedom
• Sound


  • Use of the first person narrator places us in a particular position in regard to what might be described as the narrative "truth" of the film
  • Cinematic devices that insert us into the text and privilege our understanding – point of view, shot-reverse-shot, eye line match – are sometimes undercut by the voice over that contradicts that position
  • Diegetic music documents the era, Bené dancing to James Brown's Sex Machine emphasises his new found persona, Kung Fu Fighting, a song about controlled power played at Bené's farewell party, is an ironic counterpoint to the real violence that erupts there
  • Music often acts in a similar way to Rocket's commentary, as a seductive counterpoint to the violent images, the music that accompanies the end credits of City of God is what Brazilians call saudade, (happy/sad) leaving the audience with a feeling of nostalgia, this can be said to work against the carnage and deprivation witnessed and neutralise the impact of the film
• Representations


  • Complex 3-story structure involves 13 major characters whose actions motivate the story, and 11 secondary characters who act as foils to the action, rival gangs and the Runts contain some nameless characters, City of God has no or very few personal details, the only families seen are those of Rocket and Ned and both play very minor roles, characters are in many ways incomplete and two-dimensional, nothing or next to nothing is known about their background
• Mané Galinha / Knockout Ned


  • Assured and handsome, has lived outside the favela as he served for the military, as well as this his job as a bus fare collector also takes him into the outside world, has no thought of antagonising others, the rape of his girlfriend and the murder of his brother and father draw him back in, contrasts with Zé in his appearance, described by Rocket as a hero who takes on the bad guy, initially welcomed as some sort of saviour or champion by the inhabitants of the City of God, transformed into a kind of terrible avenging angel
• Representations of female characters

  • This is a film that centres on an aggressive definition of masculinity, the female characters have passive and peripheral roles, the women in the film - Shorty's wife, Dona Zelia, Blacky's unseen girlfriend and Ned's girlfriend are there to be the recipients of male violence and are attacked, murdered and raped, Berenice and Angélica may reject this violence but they are sucked into it as observers and mourners, they "disappear" from the narrative and what happens to them afterwards is of no consequence, Angélica, threatened by Zé, leaves Bené's body and is not seen again, Berenice, who was given the gun, is seen fleetingly as a gangster's moll, Marina's function is to provide the bridge to Rocket's entry into manhood and the outside world
• Aesthetics


  • Fernando Meirelles was in charge of the images, Kátia Lund helped in the character development and supervised the crew, Mereilles had no experience of the favelas and needed someone who knew their way around the area and could negotiate with the people who lived there, Kátia Lund is the daughter of middle class American parents who now feels that she's Brazilian, they started the organisation "Nós do cinema" / "We of the Cinema", a workshop project for boys from the favelas, they chose 200 who they then trained to be actors in the film
• Influences


  • From 1960 to 1964 the first phase of Cinema Novo "an idea in your head and a camera in your hand" established modern cinema in Brazil, it transformed its image outside the country by reason of its critical success, the Brazil that it symbolised of was one of exploitation, violence and deprivation
• Buscapé / Rocket


  • The documenter and voice-over in City of God, based on the photographer Wilson Rodrigues, he becomes Rodrigues at the end of the film and his association with photography enhances his "neutral" view of events, the poverty and violence are seen through the viewfinder of his camera, he documents the final shoot out, he informs what is taking place both on a local level (the City of God itself) and at a national level (the slums of Brazil), City of God mixes the notion of the reporter with his objective camera that is able to reveal the truth of a sordid and violent area with the films own highly manipulated and constructed style
• Brazil is part of the "developing world" and the largest country in Latin America, covering about half the continent, it is the fifth largest country in the world in terms of both land area and its population of about 163.7 million, an estimated 20 % of the population (32 million) live in absolute poverty, the disparity between those living below the poverty line (who receive 2% of the GDP) and the top 10% (who receive 50.6%) is greater than most other countries in the world
• Brazil was colonised by Portugal in the 16th century resulting in almost genocidal subjection of the indigenous people, struggled for independence, which was then gained in the 19th century, economy partly founded on the transport of huge numbers of slaves from the west coast of Africa, a practise abolished in the second half of the 19th century, their multi-ethnic communities are today made of the descendants of these slaves, together with immigrants from all over the world
• Economically dependent and dominated by the USA in the 20th century, in 2002, the year the film was made, ex-metalworker Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva was elected as President on his fourth attempt, head of PT, the Worker's Party, he led the first left-wing government to be in power for more than 40 years, he promised economic prosperity fairly distributed to all Brazilians
• The use of digital editing allowed Daniel Rezende to experiment and try out new ideas, he claims that many of the interpretations of the characters were created at the editing stage, different results could be obtained with the same footage "all the scenes evolved from the actor's improvisations, and of course each one was unique"
• City of God was financed by TV Globo, Brazil's biggest TV channel, and O2 Filmes, Brazil's biggest commercials company, the international distributor was Miramax, the company founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 1979, their involvement with the film was a continuation of successes they had with international and so-called independent films, beginning as promoters of rock and roll concerts their reputation as "art film brats" was founded on their involvement with some of the most interesting and challenging films of the 1980s and early 1990s
• Component 2 (Global Film) topics


  • Contexts: social, cultural, political and institutional
  • Representations of gender, ethnicity and age
  • Aesthetics
  • Film form (cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, sound and performance)
• City of God


  A film that is critically acclaimed within Brazilian cinema, but which also has universal appeal
• City of God is in Portuguese and is set in the crime- and poverty-riddled favelas of Rio de Janeiro
• City of God


  Has a coming-of-age narrative and uses Hollywood gangster tropes, which means it has gained international distribution and critical acclaim
• City of God is a compelling example of co-direction
• City of God was nominated for four Academy Awards in 2002, though not for Best Foreign Language Film (perhaps a reflection of its popularity beyond the arthouse)
• O2 Filmes


  Company that financed 85% of the film
• Fernando Meirelles


  Director who owns O2 Filmes
• Lei Rouanet


  Brazilian tax incentive law to encourage filmmaking
• Co-producers of the film

  • Globo Films
  • Video Filmes
  • Lumière
  • Wild Bunch
  • Studio Canal
• Miramax


  International distributor of the film, founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 1979
• Miramax had great success in the 1980s and 90s with distributing US independent or international films
• Non-US filmmakers (such as Hayao Miyazaki)

  Criticised Miramax for re-editing their films to better suit a US audience
• Brazil


  Largest country in Latin America, covering about half the continent, fifth largest country in the world in terms of both land area and population (about 216 million)
• An estimated 29% of the population (62 million) live in absolute poverty
• The disparity between those living below the poverty line (who receive 2% of the GDP) and the top 10% (who receive 50.6%) is greater than most other countries in the world
• Rio de Janeiro


  A good example of a 'double city' where the downtown area is populated by middle-class, wealthy people, while the underclass is pushed out into 'slums' on the city's edges
• Films that explore the 'double city' theme

  • Tsotsi(Hood, 2005)
  • Amores Perros(Inárittu, 2000)
  • La Haine(Kassovitz, 1995)
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