Research Questions
How do the films City of God and Do the Right Thing portray urban violence? In particular how are the police depicted in urban film?
Audience
The audience for this topic are those interested in an analysis in the portrayal of racial violence in movies and how the representation of those involved is very important. This module is intended for students who have a general understanding of film and historical terms. This is more of a general view and overlook of the films and how the representation of cultures and especially cultural and racial violence is important to keep in mind when watching and producing films.
Overview
Violence has always been a part of films. It is used as nonverbal communication that everyone in the world understands. It is similar to music of you can understand the emotions and feelings of the characters by being able to see what they are doing rather than having to translate it into words. It is difficult to decide when violence is necessary and needed but in a movie the audience desires it. A movie goer seeing an action movie will be drawn into a narrative knowing full well going into it there will be violence. Violence drives the plot and adds emotional and metaphysical connections and stakes. However, it is very different when talking about violence in movies attempting to depict real world events. Then it becomes personal to everyone watching due to our own moral feelings of violence when it is used. This can be seen in City of God and in Do the Right Thing.
In city of god the depictions of violence are always used as a position of power. This was done in order to achieve a goal. Lil Z in the movie desires to be the top crime boss and to be respected. This is well defined in the movie so that the viewer can understand the morals behind the horrible acts he commits throughout the film giving the viewer the knowledge to make the conclusion that he did evil things because he his evil. Once Little Z gains power in the favelas and is in a position to starts making calls and running business it can be seen how his methods for dealing with problems only creates more that ultimately lead to his downfall It is because of some of these acts he commits that the world around him changes and he creates his own rival to combat his view of ruling the favelas. But humans are more complex than that with the depth of gray area around morals of revenge especially for knockout Ned who was nonviolent prior to his girlfriend getting killed and raped by little Z then breaks his moral code and starts to kill in order to achieve his goal of revenge. This is all done to point out the grey areas of our emotions when viewing the movies. The fact that the audience is unsure how to feel about seeing real life acts of revenge help to drive the audience to ask the question of the morality of the scenes and therefore the movie.
It is scenes like this throughout the movie that we see the main protagonist deal with his own morality as he is a watcher of all the violence and anger around him. This is very similar to how the audience feels, just a watcher into the tragic story of people’s lives. Seeing these tragedies unfold which might be considered beautiful as a story is very tragic when the viewer remembers these were real people who committed these acts and murdered innocent lives. This realization makes it difficult to understand whether these actions were justified. Because the reality of the situation for the people in the story is that they live in poverty which means necessary resources such as food and water are not easily accessible. The means to gain more money and better the situation are unrewarding. In essence, life is not fair so why play by the rules. The audience sees this mindset in characters throughout the film with the corruption of morals to improve life all around. This is the message that is attempting to be sent from the movies.
The question here is violence necessary in film can be seen here violence is a part of the real world separate from the filtered view of cinema. It is because of this often-censored view that the nature of when and how violence is portrayed that makes it important. the director is intentionally showing or obscuring the violence on the screen to evoke emotions from the audience in order to persuade the audience to think about the matter in a certain way. in order to use the characters from the movies as a comparison in order to relate them to real life. That is the importance of representation in films. However, this can have negative side effects when the characters that audiences relate to is depicted incorrectly or poorly. This create stereotypes in society due to our expectations from watching the negative, poor portrayal. This was done in the past due to censorship and attempting to cater to a predominantly white audience but the diversity in the country has increased as time has progressed to where catering to the white audience leaves out other cultures. This has come to a point where once a movie is made specifically made to cater to tell a story of non-white audiences that it is considered bold and a statement rather than the norm
This can be seen when Spike Lee directed and filmed his movie Do the Right Thing. In this film the audience is told a story of a hot summer day and the tensions of New York City during the late 20th century. This shows of the tensions between different races in America and how each one is tense around the different race. This is caused by multiple factors including economic standing, living conditions, and the biggest factor of all time. Time is a factor that is very important to consider when it comes to racial tensions and representation. The notion of equal rights has become common enough in American culture to where the 1990s African Americans were sick of dealing with being treated as inferior simply due to their skin color. The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 and almost thirty years later the same issues of judgement of character based on skin color was still occurring. The more time progresses, the higher tensions will be on the matter due to it seeming simple in nature yet polarizing in practice. Take all this into account making a movie attempting to show all these polarizing tensions and the audience is left to look into society and address the problem. That is the necessity of violence and why movies use it. The emotions and questions left after watching films such as these are the start of where change occurs in society and how new ideas occur watching different cultural groups
Annotated Bibliography
Bezerra, Kátia da Costa. “Favelas for Sale: Resisting the Easy Links between Democracy and Urban Restructuring Plans.” In Postcards from Rio: Favelas and the Contested Geographies of Citizenship, 68–93. Fordham University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1xhr5cp.6.
This source provides the context for the plan for the buildings of the favelas and how it was attempting to modernize to keep up appearances. It also explains why many people viewed favelas as the problem with their society. Mainly trying to justify and provide answers as to why the buildings were constructed and why hostilities are high between economic classes. This source is used due to the author providing examples and narratives of people taken from their home and provides the moral reality needed to understand the severity of the situation.
French, Jan Hoffman. “Rethinking Police Violence in Brazil: Unmasking the Public Secret of Race.” Latin American Politics and Society 55, no. 4 (2013): 161–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43286490.
This source discusses the nature and commonality of police brutality in brazil and how the cause of which might be racially motivated. The argument of the proportion of violence committed by police This ties into the move to a new city of god and how the police were depicted as just as crooked as the gangsters.
Igor Krstić, Chapter Eight, “Favelas on Screen,” from Slums on Screen: World Cinema
and the Planet of Slums, Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
This source discusses the change in how the favelas have been portrayed in films. discussing how early Hollywood romanticized the misery and poverty of the favelas and made narratives to play on the emotions of their audiences. This will be used to show how Hollywood and movie producers see the potential to exploit the unfortunate situation of poverty to craft a narrative that does not help those it tells about.
Stephen M. Hart ,“Analytical Overview: City of God,” from A Companion to
Latin American Film, Tamesis Books, 20074 pp. 203-210.
This source discusses the nature of Latin American film since it’s inception. Discussing the various genres and going into detail about the portrayal and effects of the movie while also providing data for scale of magnitude of how popular these films were during the time. This source is used due to it providing the documentation for the interest in seeing Latin America on film and how Hollywood would evolve from there.
Lund, Kã¡tia, and Fernando Meirelles. 2002. City of God. United States: Miramax.
This is a film based on the rise of violence and crime in the favelas during the 1960s and the 1970s. The story follows of a photographer as he tell his story of what life was like in the small poor favelas where he grew up and how the violence surrounding his home unfolded and left it broken and almost destroyed.
Scene analysis
This is the scene where the audience gets to know how Li’l Z came into power in the favelas after the incident at the hotel. this scene is where we see how Li’l Z fulfills his lust for violence and continues to rob and kill to satisfy his need. This is done to paint the character as purely evil one that the audience should not relate to and should even come to despise. He is the main antagonist so this makes sense for the film however in the real world where situations very similar to this occur it is difficult to determine the reason behind why someone would take the life of another human but the clear decision to show the reason as simply evil is a way to provide a simple and cut and dry answer for a question that is very layered with depth and consequences.
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