In that hot, disturbing summer afternoon in 2000, about thirty-five million Brazilian people watched live, as Keough refers, the “reality TV at its most intense” Bus 174 hijacking incident. From then on, there are thirty-five million individual stories about what happened: the reasons, the motivations, the consequences, the hijacker, the hostages, and the police officers are all differently interpreted even though thousands of cameras were aimed at the same man at the same time. Reality is relative to the observer. Director José Padilha would certainly agree with such an argument as he claims to carry a “neutral tone” about the event in his documentary film Bus 174(Rother). Larry Rother also points out in his review of the film that “without either editorializing or flinching, Mr. Padilha shows a police force that is both incompetent and violent.” This illustration of police system, however, hints a question whether the director attempts to deliberately draw audience's attention on the rescuer rather than hijacker. Although his critical depiction of the law enforcement in Rio seems to challenge his intention of fairness, Padilha’s perspective on Brazilian justice system that the police force lacks discipline and integrity during the crisis reflects his outright and detached viewpoint on this particular event as a filmmaker.
This is an unfair story from the very beginning; Padilha’s goal of staying neutral can only be achieved by him balancing existing prejudice from the public and taking a more critical approach of directing. Without knowing any background, the audience have already been influenced by the definitions of “hijack” and “hostage” when these words are used by police, media, or any stranger on the street. As a matte...
... middle of paper ...
...ld and Mark Cousins. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996. 97. Print.
Keough, Peter. “Onibus 174/Bus 174.” BostonPhoenix.com. The Boston Phoenix, 5-11 Dec. 2003. Web. 14 Jan. 2013.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2010. Print.
Padilha, José, Felipe Lacerda, João Nabuco, and Sacha Amback. Bus 174: Ônibus 174. New York: Hart Sharp,2004. DVD.
Peixoto, Marta. “Rio’s Favelas in Recent Fiction and Film: Commonplaces of Urban Segregation.” PMLA 122.1 (Jan. 2007): 170-8. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Jan. 2013.
Pryluck, Calvin. “Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filming.” Journal of the University Film Association 28.1 (Winter 1976): 21-9. JSTOR. Web. 22 May 2013.
Rohter, Larry. “A Horrific Crime that Was Seen by Millions.” NYTimes.com. The New York Times, 7 Sept. 2003. Web. 23 Aug. 2012.
Schechter, Harold. The serial killer files: the who, what, where, how, and why of the world's most terrifying murderers. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004. Print.
As a result of all these things, everyone took interest in the case and wanted to exploit the attention it was getting. A documentary, P...
Tompkins, C., 2009. The paradoxical effect of the documentary in Walter Salles’s “Central do Brasil”. Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 33 no1 p9-27
“The documentary tradition as a continually developing “record” that is made in so many ways, with different voices and vision, intents and concerns, and with each contributor, finally, needing to meet a personal text” (Coles 218). Coles writes “The Tradition: Fact and Fiction” and describes the process of documenting, and what it is to be a documentarian. He clearly explains through many examples and across disciplines that there is no “fact or fiction” but it is intertwined, all in the eye of the maker. The documentarian shows human actuality; they each design their own work to their own standards based on personal opinion, values, interest and whom they want the art to appeal to. Coles uses famous, well-known photographers such as Dorthea Lange and Walker Evans, who show the political angle in their documentations and the method of cropping in the process of making the photo capture exactly what the photographer wants the audience to view. In this paper I will use outside sources that support and expand on Coles ideas with focus on human actuality, the interiority of a photograph, and the emotional impact of cropping.
Film Society of Lincoln Center , ND/NF Q&A: "Stories We Tell", Sarah Polley, online video, May 10 2013, viewed May 5 2014,
When you hear about Brazil, what comes to your mind first? The Amazon rainforest? The Christ Redeemer statue? Soccer? Carnival? What about the 16 million Brazilians living in poverty? In Gordon Parks’ “Flavio’s Home”, the Life magazine article centers around the poverty-stricken da Silva family who reside in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He tells the story of a twelve-year-old boy, Flavio, and his misadventures as he and his family face poverty. Parks describes poverty as “savage”, it “claims victims”, and it “spreads like a cancer”. Notice what “savage”, “victims”, and “cancer” all have in common? Among these words, they arouse a feeling of pity or sadness within the reader. These words drive the reader to think about possible ways to help alleviate poverty -- this being Parks’ purpose for telling Flavio’s story. Another way Parks brought pathos into his essay is by describing the living conditions of the slums by using personification
When interviewing subjects for the film, Moore is often mocking or heavily interrogation people, he is very forceful with his approach to reaching the truth. It’s this influence on interviews that poses ethical questions about the role the filmmaker plays with in documentary film. When Moore is interviewing
In the favela of São Paulo, Brazil, 1958, Carolina Maria de Jesus rewrote the words of a famous poet, “In this era it is necessary to say: ‘Cry, child. Life is bitter,’” (de Jesus 27). Her sentiments reflected the cruel truth of the favelas, the location where the city’s impoverished inhabited small shacks. Because of housing developments, poor families were pushed to the outskirts of the city into shanty towns. Within the favelas, the infant mortality rate was high, there was no indoor plumbing or electricity, drug lords were governing forces, drug addiction was rampant, and people were starving to death. Child of the Dark, a diary written by Carolina Maria de Jesus from 1955 to 1960, provides a unique view from inside Brazil’s favelas, discussing the perceptions of good
5 Light, Ken. Tremain, Kerry. Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.
Gabriel Mascaro’s unadorned sophomore feature, “Neon Bull”, brings to the big screen the lives of a few individuals connected to the Vaquejada, the typical rodeo of the Northeast Brazil.
...tem. These traits are typical of what has happened throughout history when normal people become subordinate to new and oppressive bureaucracies. It seems that all a treacherous government needs in order to normalize the most disgusting violations of basic human rights is a convincing façade of efficiency. It could be said that the American Dream plays that role in current American society, that it is purely a façade to blind our eyes to the larger system. If the system succeeds in preventing people from gaining awareness of the larger picture, and indeed further compartmentalizes every aspect of life, the line between just and false laws become blurred. Gilliam uses “Brazil” to bring these often overlooked problems with government to the forefront of his viewer’s mind, making apparent that no element of human life is safe from this type of unconscious degeneration.
Williams, Linda. “Mirrors without Memories. Truth, History, and the New Documentary.” Film Quarterly 46.3 (1993): 9-21.
...all want to believe that the crime was truly “foretold”, and that nothing could have been done to change that, each one of the characters share in a part of Santiago Nasar’s death. Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes about the true selfishness and ignorance that people have today. Everyone waits for someone else to step in and take the lead so something dreadful can be prevented or stopped. What people still do not notice is that if everyone was to stand back and wait for others, who is going to be the one who decides to do something? People don’t care who gets hurt, as long as it’s not themselves, like Angela Vicario, while other try to reassure themselves by thinking that they did all that they could, like Colonel Lazaro Aponte and Clotilde Armenta. And finally, some people try to fight for something necessary, but lose track of what they set out for in the first place.
Globo Network is the “number one in audience practically everyday, everytime, with every audience”, and as astonishing as it may seem, its soap opera, “Selva da Pedra” from 1970, reached an index of 100%, which meant all televisions were tuned in to Globo (“Brazilian Television”, “Beyond Citizen Kane”). However, soa...
1. Nichols, Bill. ‘Why are Ethical Issues Central to Documentary Filmmaking?’ Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001, p1-20