City of God: Representation Notes & Why it was a Success.

Representation in City of God

Representation is

• Time-Period
• People
• Places
• Lifestyles
• Religion

FOS: FOCUSING, ORGANISATION, SELECTION

Representation is always someone's version of something - not reality

Selection: Whatever is shot on screen is a snapshot of the full picture, much more will be left out

Organisation: The elements of the shots are organised carefully to tell a certain story: incorporating the mise-en-scene and narrative of the piece

Focusing: Audiences are pushed towards concentrating on one aspect of the text. You make your own decisions about what is worth our attention. The media tries to do this for us through mediation: what the director wants to make you feel.

Representation refers to the construction in any medium (especially the mass media) of aspects of 'reality' such as people/places/objects/events/cultural identities

Mediation - Encountering media texts, not seeing reality but someone's version of it. Media takes something real and changes it to produce the text we end up seeing.

Representation of Aggressive Masculinity:

- City of God deals with hyper-realism

- Hyper-realism is when everything is taken to an extreme: breaks ceiling of masculinity. For example in City of God the characters aren't satisfied with just being in charge so they want to kill as well to assert their power (e.g. Lil Ze turning 18 and wanting to kill all his opposition)

- Extreme examples in the film include: the girl being killed for sleeping with another man, the rape scene, nightclub scene, the final battle where the characters have a machine gun

- Other examples are: kids playing football in their spare time (typical), Lil Ze as a school 'bully', the character of Lil Ze as a child and adult in general and Lil Ze confronting a man in the street.

Representation of Violence:

- Theme of violence represented in particular throughout the film

Key thoughts for representations of violence:

- Why was the material filmed/edited in the way it was?

- What effects are the filmmakers attempting to have on the audience & how have specific techniques been used in order to try and achieve these effects?

Hotel Scene:

- Unpremeditated attack

- Cinematography: canted angles to present the unpremeditated nature of the attack, bright lighting is used

- Editing: Fast, gives the impression of disorganisation/spur of the moment

- Performance: Over the top, frantic, also seem sympathetic

- Sound: playful music used

The Killing:

- Slow crossfade

- Red car leaving represents the robbing scene we just watched, surrounded by darkness/pale colours, shot behind bars (gives connotations of crime/danger), fixed camera at garage -> less frantic nature and the mood has changed, the blurring of the two scenes gets rid of the excitement that the editing created.

- Sound almost silent, presents deadly nature of scene. Ambient sound is used (diegetic), strips away sound so the eyes take over and the lack of sound re-emphasises the powerful and haunting visual.

- Slow reveal (2 tracking shots of corpses) presents the true extent of the horror and the brutality/lack of fun in crime. Director stamps on in this scene that he disagrees with violence as it isn't glorified, the tracking shot presents killing is bad.

City of God: Why was it a success?

- Something new - Western speaking audiences unaware of the story as it was a hidden story

- Exotic culture

- Non-genre specific? - borrows elements of recognisable genre conventions and blends them with Brazilian film-making styles.

- American influences throughout the film (films of a similar ilk such as 'Goodfellas' and 'Pulp Fiction' were also successful) mixed with Brazilian flair

- Hyper realistic, high saturation of colour, music blended together made people more intrigued about what the film was about and increased interest in watching City of God.

- Accessible to Western Audiences: we recognised it, can see the Western influence in the construct of the film.