Cidade de Deus em 360°

Abstract

In this paper, the film City of God, by Fernando Meirelles, is the trigger for a reflection on barbarism in Brazilian outskirts. Captured in its narrative plot, the middle-class spectator is encouraged to move from a passive position, insofar as he is entangled in the violence that the film denounces. From a methodological point of view, this film analysis consists of a psychoanalytic research supported on the way Freud listens to a visual work in The Moses of Michelangelo. In this sense, a formal element of the City of God’s composition – a 360º panoramic view – seems to allude to the genocide of the country’s black youth. From a psychoanalytical reading, we suggest that this circuit of repetition indicates the filicide in culture: the extermination of new generations orchestrated by power structures in order to sustain positions of jouissance. In the deadly circuit in which young black Brazilian people from the periphery are swallowed, it is a matter of describing what is regularly repeated, but also the possibilities of inscribing a difference.