JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Mon, 23 Mar 2015 17:34:52 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsFilm Reviews uncontrollable-violence in the cities, whether it be the more passive violence of hunger and despair or the virile violence of police torture, murder, gang warfare, and death squads, tests the very bonds of society. The reality of urban Latin America is that governments no longer monopolize violence but spawn it. Such societies are one step from anarchy. The film convincingly illustrates this social reality. Rodrigo D., like the other films of its genre, suggests that basic societal institutions do not function to the benefit of the majority. The foundations of family and kinship network wobble and erode. The church is not visible nor is its voice audible. Schools seem distant, under siege, unappreciated. So far from daily reality are they that people do not even discuss them, much less attend them. Clearly, the most pervasive governmental institution is the police, whose officers show less interest in keeping order and protecting citizens than in killing children and terrorizing the citizenry. The film subtly questions whether it is possible to eradicate mounting urban problems without first restructuring basic societal institutions.Rodrigo D. lays bare the reality of Latin American urban life that the economic platitudes of foreign aid, International Monetary Fund advice, and grandiose governmental plans ignore. Metaphorically, it captures the collapse of society. Does Latin America as we know it at the end of the twentieth century have a future? Many believe that the hoary institutional structures faithfully preserved by the few who derive benefit from them should not and cannot endure. A remarkable continuity of institutions links Latin America to the past but seems to bar it from a future. In 1980, the Brazilian poet Romano de Sant'Anna ably summed up the views of many of his generation in these few words: "I live in the twentieth century. I'm off to the twenty-first, still the prisoner of the nineteenth." A decade later, Victor Gaviria declared in his film that the prisoner has been condemned to death.
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