Urban Violence and the Politics of Representation in Recent Brazilian Film

Abstract

The spectacle of force, an age-old presence in the arts, has become far more complicated—and spectacular—these days as new technologies expand venues and media for the exposure of both real and simulated violence. This essay examines questions that arise from the representation of violence in Brazilian films of the last couple of decades. As Simone Weil observes, force “exercised to its limit” is only one of its possibilities; its subtler, more uncertain manifestations have equally devastating effects:

How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps, it merely hangs, poised and ready over the head of the creature it can kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into stone. (Weil 164–65)

To define force—it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him: somebody was here and the next minute there’s nobody here at all; this is a spectacle that the Iliad never wearies of showing us.

Simone Weil