Journalistic Coverage In City Of God

1686 Words4 Pages

City of God: Temporal Compression through Journalistic Coverage Fernando Meirelles, in his Brazilian gangster film City of God, depicts the rise of adolescent crime within the city of Cidade de Deus, a slum of Rio de Janeiro. The picture, loosely based on factual events, implements a subjective perspective to document the activities of the favela’s opposing drug factions. This narrative perspective, indicated via voice over, and regularly aided by instances of montage and fast cutting techniques, intentionally recounts the fictionalized events in a non-chronological order, creating temporal gaps in the audience’s range of knowledge. The use of these fast-pace cuts, in general, throughout the entire film, would inherently contribute to the perceived, …show more content…

The distinct generations of hoodlums, from the sixties and eighties respectively, are thus referenced, by Rocket, the narrator, as a means of divulging new information and providing context to the escalating conflict. These referenced hoodlums, highlighted and often revisited via internal flashbacks, seemingly reflect the never-ending presence of gang-related warfare within the disparaged favela. Rocket intentionally compresses or eliminates certain fabula events in order to propel the narrative forward. Character positions or set pieces, for instance, are regularly utilized to bridge transitions between different time periods, eliminating the necessity for dedicated sequences in between. For instance, following Shaggy’s death at the hands of the police, Rocket and Stringy, initially observing the event, flee the crowded scene and head towards their school. The camera, tracking these characters as they travel towards the right, intentionally frames them from a slight distance, allowing objects on the road to travel in-between them. A passing vehicle, obscuring these characters for a moment, functions similar to that of a concealing curtain; The audience, unsuspecting of the transformation about to occur, witnesses the characters, now ten years older, reemerge

Open Document