Slum-set (or poverty dealing) fiction films

Shoeshine (Vittorio de Sica, 1946) Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, 1994Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) Bye Bye (Karim Dridi, 1995)Umberto D (De Sica, 1952) La Haine (Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995)

Pizza, Beer & Smokes (Adrián Caetono / Bruno Stagnaro, 1997) The Rose Seller (Victor Gaviria, 1998)

Los olvidados (Luis Buñuel 1950) Amores perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000)Rio 40 Degrees (Pereira dos Santos, 1955) Our Lady of the Assassins (Barbet Schroeder, 2001)Cairo Station (Youssef Chahine, 1958) City of God (Fernando Meirelles / Kátia Lund, 2002) Slum Times Five (various, 1962) Tsotsi (Gavin Hood, 2005)

Secuestro Express (Jonathan Jacobowicz, 2005) Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)

Insiang (Lino Brocka, 1976) Heena Maysra (Khalid Yousuf, 2007)Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1981) Tirador (Slingshot, Brillante Mendoza, 2007) People of Ko-bang Neighbourhood (Bae Chang-ho, 1982)Salaam Bombay! (Mira Nair, 1988)Rodrigo D: No Future (Victor Gaviria, 1990)City of Dreams (Sudhir Mishra, 1991)

A couple of common features . . .

Children/teenagers Violent crimeShoeshine (De Sica, 1946) Los Olvidados Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) Insiang (Brocka, 1976)Los olvidados (Buñuel 1950) PixoteRio 40 Degrees (Pereira dos Santos, 1955) Salaam Bombay!Slum Times Five (various, 1962) Rodrigo D: No Future Pixote (Babenco, 1981) Once Were Warriors (Tamahori, 1994)Salaam Bombay! (Nair, 1988) La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995)Rodrigo D: No Future (Gaviria, 1990) The Rose Seller Bye Bye (Dridi, 1995) Amores perros (Iñárritu, 2000)Pizza, Beer & Smokes (Caetono / Stagnaro, 1997) City of God The Rose Seller (Gaviria, 1998) Our Lady of the Assassins City of God (Meirelles / Lund, 2002) TsotsiOur Lady of the Assassins (Schroeder, 2001) Secuestro Express (Jacobowicz, 2005)

Tsotsi (Hood, 2005) TiradorColossal Youth (Costa, 2006)Tirador (Mendoza, 2007)

What and where are the cities?

Europe Latin AmericaRome Shoeshine, Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D Mexico City Los olvidados, Amores perrosParis La Haine Rio de Janeiro Rio 40 Degrees, Slum Times Five,Marseilles Bye Bye City of God Lisbon Colossal Youth São Paulo Pixote

Medellín Rodrigo D, The Rose Seller,

Our Lady of the Assassins Buenos Aires Pizza, Beer & Smokes

Africa Caracas Secuestro ExpressCairo Cairo Station, Heena MaysraJohannesburg Tsotsi

AsiaManila Insiang, TiradorSeoul People of Ko-bang Neighbourhood Mumbai Salaam Bombay!, City of Dreams, Heena Maysra

Auckland Once Were Warriors

A continuum of representation

documentary social realism action/spectacle

1981 Pixote

1988 Salaam Bombay!

1991 Rodrigo D

1994 Once Were Warriors

1995 Bye Bye La Haine

1997 Pizza, Beer & Smokes

1998 The Rose Seller

2000 Amores perros

2001 Our Lady of the Assassins

2002 Bus 174 (Rio de Janeiro) City of God

2005 Tsotsi Favela Rising (Rio) Secuestro Express

2006 Ghosts of Cité Soleil (Port-au-Prince) Colossal Youth

2007 Tirador

pink = actual documentaries

Pixote: a lei do mais fraco (1981)

sensational material: gang rape, child abuse, armed robberies, drug dealing, underage sex, prostitution, self-abortion, murders (three by the titular, 10-year old protagonist)

brisk, deadpan direction; improvisational feel; slum kids with families cast for the film

Fernando Ramos da Silva’s life after the film: rejected brief window of opportunity playing in movies and TV shows to return to family in the slums and a life of crime like the character that made him famous

two subsequent films:– Who Killed Pixote? (José Jofilly, Brazil 1996)

– Pixote, In Memoriam (Felipe Briso / Gilberto Topczewski, Brazil 2007)

G. Kantaris, “The young and the damned”

Pixote and its antecendent, Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950), along with more recent Latin American street films (Pizza, Beer & Smokes, The Rose Seller, Amores perros), “can be said to belong to the tradition of social realism in cinema, ultimately stemming from Italian neorealism, although each problematizes clear-cut categorization” (178).

“In mass cultural globally marketed forms, the violence of social exclusion is almost always rendered monstrous or eroticized/fetishized . . . The violence registered in Latin American urban cinema is somehow more symptomatic. . . . The films I am looking at here refuse any fetishization of violence” (178-79).

Los olvidados and Pixote defetishize “their representations of poverty and social violence” by complicating our or moral responses, by questioning the voyeuristic status of the gaze, and by deploying shock images designed to desublimate our potential attachment to particular icons” (181).

Kantaris on vision and ‘making visible’

“The insistence on vision, eyes, and the gaze in Pixote is only matched in intensity by the imagery concerning vision which suffuses the entirety of Los olvidados, but with a crucial difference which brings Pixote closer to the films of the 1990s: vision in the later film is mediatized, self-consciously played out over the screens of television and cinema” (181-82).

• but: “vision,” “eyes,” and “the gaze” are not the same thing . . .

“The film maker can use the representational power of cinema to ‘make visible’ the invisible lives of the socially excluded, although always at the risk of implicating the medium itself with the very structures of power . . . That produce social exclusion in the first place ” (178).

The Rose Seller was “largely shot in the twilight of Medellín’s night-time streets, lit up by here and there with garish Christmas illuminations, the flare of celebratory fireworks, and the lights of passing traffic. . . . [the filmmaker has talked] of the displaced light that bathed the production of this film: a nocturnal light that made visible, for a few fleeting weeks, ‘los días de la noche’—the night-time days of or the day-time nights—of Medellín’s street children and homeless youths” (184-85).

Jacob A. Riis (1849-1914) emigrated from Denmark to the U.S. at 21 for work

police reporter for various New York City newspapers from 1870-1880s, working the most crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city

one of the first Americans to use flash powder to penetrate the dark of night and capture the hardships faced by the poor and criminal along his police beats

“Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process” published in Feb. 1888 in the New York Sun

in Dec. 1889, Scribner’s Magazine published Riis’s photographic essay on city life

How the Other Half Lives published 1891

Bandit’s Roost (1888)

Street children, How the Other Half Lives

Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899-1968) emigrated from Central Europe with family at 10

a candid news photographer in the 1930s and 1940s: the only New York newspaper reporter allowed a police-band shortwave radio, which he used to arrive quickly to photograph crime scenes at night (‘Ouija’)

used a flash to often startle his subjects and infrafred film to conceal his presence

initially sold his images via Acme Newspictures to major New York papers; frequent contributor 1940-45 to the slick P.M. Daily

MoMA includes his photos in 1943 exhibition

first book collection of photographs, Naked City (1945), inspiration for major 1948 movie The Naked City--”noir documentary”

Cop Killer (1941)

Children in Weegee’s world

Slumming it? What happened next . . . none of these films was directed by a (former) resident of the slums--they were

all middle class, with some of the less or unestablished ones going on to big-budget, English-language filmmaking:

– Babenco: Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Ironweed (1987), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991)

– Kassovitz: Gothika (2003), Babylon A.D. (2008)– Iñárritu: 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006)– Meirelles: The Constant Gardener (2005), Blindness (2008)– Hood: Rendition (2007), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (pre-production)

several of these films featured non-professional actors, esp. street children: Shoeshine, Rio 40 Degrees, Pixote, Salaam Bombay!, Rodrigo D, The Rose Seller, City of God, Colossal Youth, Tirador

in at least two cases, the lead performers/street children met with sad fates:– Fernando Ramos Da Silva (Pixote) took up the criminal life after the film, was shot

and killed by police in 1987 (aged 19)– Leidy Tabares (The Rose Seller) was convicted along with her boyfriend of the

robbery and murder of a taxi driver in 2003 (aged 21)

1990s emendations / 1st world influences

speed/velocity: short shots and fast editing, fast moving camera (steadicam as well as hand-held), extreme camera angles

– action cinema, advertising, “MTV-povera”

first-person narrated crime saga with visceral violence, pulsating music track: narrative punishments do not necessarily overturn the spectacle of excitement

fragmented/serial/repeated narrative structures, self-consciousness and self-reflexivity (“mediatization”)

Lucía Nagib v. Ignacio M. Sánchez-PradoNagib on City of God: [N]one of of the self-reflexive techniques used in the film creates a distancing effect, the most

obvious one being the alter ego of the filmmaker personified by the character Rocket, the omniscient narrator of the film. Devised as a middleman, with access to the middle classes, he is also the film’s conscience. . . . Behaving, as the truth-keeper, he organizes, with his voice-over, the facts that make up the narrative . . . (249)

In truth, the film could easily have gone down the route of the postmodern language of a cinema of citation, such as that of Tarantino, who only ‘surfs’ the surface of reality. . . . But the film, just like the novel, avoids such schemes via the importance it gives to the narrative. (245-46)

Sánchez-Prado on Amores perros: [The film] does not attempt to place the characters into a set of circumstances from which they

measure their decisions, but rather creates an absolute moral compass that evaluates everyone using the same criteria. . . . This narrative structure has profound consequences in terms of the manner in which violence is understood by Mexico’s conservative middle-class, whose frames of reference are represented by this movie. (41, 42)

Amores perros operates within a new cinematographic world where violence is the new trademark of Latin America. . . . Its appropriation of this discourse of violence is based on a problematic interpretation of Pulp Fiction: the use of an essentially metacinematographic discourse for the expression of a social problematic. (49)