Lee Brazil
Professor Maya Matos
Intro to Film
16 February 2015
Cinema Aesthetics in City of God: A Study of Editing and the Cosmetics of Hunger
This paper will focus on editing in the initial sequences of the film City of God. It will also show how the editing choices place this film in context with a movement, which is disaffectionately referred to as the Cosmetics of Hunger. City of God is a 2002 Brazilian film set in the favela, or slum of the same name. The film tells the story of a young photographer (Rocket) played by Alexandre Rodrigues, growing up in an environment of gangs and violence during a period from the 1960s up to the 1980s. The story begins with the protagonist literally in the middle of a gang war and reviewing the life events that brought his story to this point in a series of flashbacks.
In the first images, a knife is rhythmically sharpened in a tempo that matches several quick, fixed cuts to and from the chicken’s point-of view. The knife accentuates the cuts in editing as the knife sounds rise in tempo, intensity and volume. Several of these juxtaposed shots create heightened meaning and awareness for the viewer and seemingly the chicken. The chicken appears increasingly more anxious as the editor creates a Kuleshovian continuity. Each successive chicken shot is blended with the rhythm of a frantic samba playing while people are dancing, cutting carrots, killing and de-feathering fated chickens for a stew that symbolizes the mise-en-scene. The opening scene is a subtext of the film itself: the knife will cut the film with precision, in a clangor of violence and tense editing .
This mélange plays out until the chicken escapes and a chase ensues, but not before a close-up of a plateful of blood fills the frame and the music simultaneously stops. The blood has multiple meanings, including a reference to its importance to the meal that is being prepared and also a figurative subtext for human carnage to come. While the chicken runs for its life, the streets of the favelas are revealed in several Dutch angles, tracking shots and jittery handhelds. Film credits still appear in the sequence for over 3 minutes, and cease only moments before the standoff scene. The standoff scene brings a slow motion, gun brandishing Lil Ze to into the frame at a slight Dutch tilt as if to minimize the threat he carries..The camera stops at the protagonist, Buscapé (Rocket), and rotates around him, moving the narrative to the past in a 360- degree matrix dolly which serves to transition the first sequence into a flashback.
This movie is directed by Fernando Meirelles, who has a background in advertising and commercialls and Katia Lund, who has specialized in documentaries. The editor is Daniel Rezende, whose film credits start with this film.
In Meirelles’s City of God, the favela appears as mere background scenery for the movie’s plot. In this particular scene we are not attached to many of the initial characters. The kinetic energy that is misspent on chasing the chicken around the city streets is analogous to the political and social issues that the movie fails to address. By the end of the movie, almost all of the characters have died in the bloodshed of the drug war, on the other hand, Rocket not only survives, but gets a position as a novice photographer in a newspaper. By emphasizing Rocket as the protagonist who escapes the tragic fate of the favelados, (favela dwellers), death or misery, Meirelles’s movie ratifies only an individual solution for social ascension. In the final scene, Rocket walks with a friend and gradually distances himself from the favela. City of God’s narrative structure can be esthetically revolutionary, but the film remains ethically questionable. According to MV Bill, more than 120,000 people live in the City of God, but it is estimated that less than 0.5 percent of them work for the drug traffic. To this rapper, the image that prevails, however, is the one of the poor black as a social delinquent, a menace to mainstream society. Additionally, MV Bill maintains that the movie did not bring any positive gain to the community (Soares 35).
This 2002 film has roots in a convention of equally fictional and non-fictional discourses intended to expose the true nature of urban poverty and violence as seen through the eyes of Rio De Janeiro’s poorest citizens, who inhabit its favelas, or slums. What has been termed Cosmetics of Hunger started out as a revolutionary vehicle in the 1950s and 1960s under the name Cinema Novo, or more particularly, Aesthetics of Hunger.
This style of cinematic expression which had its emphasis on “sad, “ugly films” that would create an “imperfect cinema” was championed by Glauber Rocha in his incendiary manifesto which stressed a necessity for artisans of LatAm film to remain hungry in both their approach to films and the content within them(Nagib 101). In the 1960s, filmmakers insisted on the particularity of their national experiences. They aspired to refute the “universal” concepts of history, knowledge, beauty, etc. put forth in U.S. and European films by demonstrating how they produced cultural and economic “underdevelopment” in their countries. Though they first adapted the theories and processes of European filmmakers, by the end of the 1960s, they rejected these foreign approaches and opted instead to create a trial-and-error practice that produced advances in film form and content tied to their particular contexts. They also developed unique approaches to production, distribution, and exhibition that allowed them to make and show films outside of the commercial cinema infrastructures in their countries, which were often tied to Hollywood styles and industrial models. While filmmakers in the 1960s insisted on national differences to oppose the exclusionary universal notions of the “first world,” filmmakers in the 2000s have largely aimed at combating perceptions of difference that marginalize their national cultures and filmmaking practices by linking them to a specifically Latin American or Third World context. Their films seem to insist on the universality of their national experiences by emphasizing how these experiences express universal truths. In addition, their films represent an international model of filmmaking that aggregates a variety of styles, themes, funding sources, and distribution outlets. This latter-day approach has returned the gaze of the Latin American filmmakers to European and U.S. styles and methods, which they incorporate into their own works. But the cost has been done little for prevalent stereotyping. In conclusion, City of God may succeed where it fails; as a form of cinematic expression it has become a symbol of its times –more commercially viable, very stylish in its presentation, and creating an new audience for Latin American film, yet, at the expense of reinforcing a tran cultural invisibility that underscores a continuing problem for the poorest inhabitants of Brazil.

Works Cited
Getting Kids to Dream. Prod. Saul Guy. Perf. MV Bill. Getting Kids to Dream. 4Rreal.com, 1 Dec. 2007. Web. 19 Apr. 2011. <http://www.4real.com/tv/details.asp?pageid=10.>. Online video interview of rapper/activist MV Bill.
Laurier, Joanne. "Sincere, but Avoiding Difficult Questions." World Socialist Web Site. 3 Mar. 2004. Web. 20 Apr. 2011. <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/city-m03.shtml>. An article from a Marxist online journal that critiques City of God on the basis of the filmmakers' avoidance of political and historical context in the film.Author Joanne Laurier, sees the film as "reinforcing a social mood that views the conditions of the poor as wrenching but unalterable".
Nagib, Lúcia. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Print. This book focuses on the reemergence of ideas of utopia in cinema of the so-called retomada—the renaissance of Brazilian filmmaking that began in the mid-1990s. The author,Lucia Nagib contextualizes this recent trend within utopian traditions in Brazil’s cinematic past, considering how these were in turn inspired by the nation’s foundational myths. She thus gives due attention to the pioneering, avant-garde Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, and to how film production of the retomada era transcends that movement’s national project, engaging instead with modern, postmodern, and commercial cinemas worldwide, “thus benefiting from and contributing to a new transnational cinematic aesthetics.” In focus are classics of Cinema Novo, such as 'Black God, White Devil', 'Land in Anguish' and 'How Tasty was my Little Frenchman', alongside representatives of a more recent transnational aesthetics, including this paper's subject,'City of God' and the urban dystopia of 'The Trespasser'.
Soares, Luiz Eduardo., Bill MV, and Celso Athayde. Cabeça De Porco. Rio De Janeiro: Objetiva, 2005. Print. Authors MV Bill (Brazilian Rapper/Social Activist),Celso Athayde(A hip hop entrepreneur) and Luiz Soares (an anthropologist),combined talents to create a book that gives very important information on violence and youth in Brazil. MV Bill and Celso Athayde, born in the favelas Cidade de Deus (City of God)and Favela do Sapo, respectively, were impressed by Luis Eduardo’s work and his ideas regarding Rio’s favelas.
Stam, Robert. Film Theory an Introduction. Malden, Mass. [u.a.: Blackwell, 2005. Print. Author Robert Stam explores the essence of the Latin American Cinematic movement known as "Third Cinema","Cinema Novo", and "Aesthetics of Hunger".This information lays the groundwork for successive waves of politically and socially inspired third world films that would give light to the condition of the urban poor in Latin American countries.