Fernando Meirelles' City of God

City of God ( f i l m still), 2 0 0 2 Zita Nunes T he recent Brazilian film, Cidade de Deus (City of God) opens with a stunning sequence that introduces the viewer to aesthetics and themes of the film. The camera focuses on black hands tying the legs of a chicken that is destined for the pot. The camera maintains a tight close-up on hands engaged in sharpening a knife and, then, chopping potatoes, carrots and tomatoes to the beat of a samba whose lyrics praise food. The chicken struggles against its bonds and manages to escape. The camera angle opens wide to show the small, rundown houses attesting to the poverty of the inhabitants. The camera follows the chicken through the unpaved, winding streets as it is chased by a group of brown and black boys dressed in shorts and flip-flops. The joyful and noisy chase is interspersed with shots of a conversation that a young man, a camera in his hands, is having with his friend about the photo he needs to take in order to get the job that will take him out of the favela (shantytown ). As the chicken rounds the corner, the two friends come face to face with the crowd of boys, who stand with guns drawn. Buscap£, holding his camera, looks behind him and sees the police prepared for a standoff with the gang facing them. The frame freezes before jumping back in time to give the background to that fateful meeting. With this scene, the film firmly places itself in conversation with Brazilian Cinema Novo. This movement consolidated itself at the beginning of the 1960s as a reaction to a national film industry dominated by aesthetic and ideological concerns influenced by Hollywood. Filmmakers such as Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Carlos Diegues, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, and Leon Hirszman sought to create works that conveyed a Brazilian reality in a Brazilian voice. They developed a "tropicalist " aesthetic that drew on the Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian traditions and cultural practices of the desperately poor and chronically drought-stricken Northeast of Brazil to provide biting analyses of class relations and political injustice. Visually compelling and densely metaphorical to avoid censors of the Dictatorship established in 1964, the films challenged a very repressive period in Brazilian politics. An important aspect of the critique of Brazilian society is conveyed through the elaboration of an "aesthetics of hunger," which functioned on the level of content as well as technique. Hunger, for these filmmakers, is at the root of the socio-economic problems of Brazil. The poor are hungry and the rich get richer by feeding off the poor. They argued that the ethics of the exploration of this reality required a practice of filmmaking that 8 8 - N k a J o u r n a l o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A f r i c a n A r t eschews technology in favor of hand-held cameras, rough cuts, natural light, location shooting, intense colors or black a n d white, and amateur actors. The vertiginous camerawork of the opening moments of the film focuses on food a n d on the poverty and hunger of residents of the City of God. The camera follows the fugitive chicken and highlights the colors red and black, which will figure in an AfroBrazilian candomble ceremony at an important transitional m o m e n t later in the film. The soundtrack blends voices a n d music evocative of the Northeast and the urban South. All these elements indicate a debt to Cinema Novo a n d to the politics of that era. City of God is based o n an eponymous novel by the professor of anthropology a n d poet, Paulo Lins. A former resident of the community that gives its name to the novel and to the film, Lins fictionalizes the history of the favela culled from hundreds of interviews. The government of Carlos Lacerda had built the City of God, between 1962 a n d 1965 in the western quarter of the city of Rio de Janeiro, to...