From the Aesthetics of Hunger to the Cosmetics of Hunger inBrazilian Cinema: Meirelles’ City of God

Sophia A. McClennen

symploke, Volume 19, Numbers 1-2, 2011, pp. 95-106 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska PressDOI: 10.1353/sym.2011.0086

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from thE AEsthEtiCs of hungEr to thE CosmEtiCs of hungEr in BrAziLiAn CinEmA: mEirELLEs’ CiTy of God

sophiA A. mCCLEnnEn

In 1965, Glauber Rocha presented his political film manifesto “Eztétyka da fome” (“Aesthetics of Hunger”) in Italy. Linked to the Brazilian film movement known as cinema nôvo, Rocha was part of a generation of film-makers across Latin America that understood cinema as a central weapon in revolutionary struggle. Key to Rocha’s film theory was the idea of hunger as a complex, contradictory cinematic mode of cultural practice. According to Rocha, films with an aesthetic of hunger “narrated, described, poeticized, discussed, analyzed, and stimulated the themes of hunger: characters eating dirt and roots, characters stealing to eat, characters killing to eat, characters fleeing to eat” (par. 10). But for Rocha, hunger is more than the prelude to starvation, it is a state of craving, of need, of desire. These are the bases for his aesthetics of hunger: “Economic and political conditioning has led us to philosophical weakness and impotence.… It is for this reason that the hunger of Latin America is not simply an alarming symptom: it is the essence of our society” (par. 3). Hunger here is more than a lack; it is actually a form of violent expression and a source of critical power. It is, in fact, the only form of expression, for Rocha, appropriate for political filmmaking in Brazil.

Over thirty years later, Brazilian cinema experienced a resurgence, and young directors like Fernando Meirelles produced films that were released alongside those of veterans of cinema nôvo like Carlos Diegues. One of the breakthrough films of this boom was Meirelles and Katia Lund’s Cidade de deus (City of God) (2002), which broke box office records in Brazil for a national film and had a major worldwide distribution. Using an aesthetic that borrows from television, advertising, and music videos, the film presented a graphic look at urban violence and was quickly criticized for its cosmetic, slick view of the tragedies of Brazilian daily life. One of the harshest critiques of the film was leveled by film critic Ivana Bentes who compared City of God to the work of Rocha and suggested that Meirelles and Lund’s film replaced Rocha’s “aesthetics of hunger” with a “cosmetics of hunger” (Bentes par. 1). Meirelles

© symploke Vol. 19, Nos. 1-2 (2011) ISSN 1069-0697, 95-106.

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countered, though, that the film’s success had to be measured not only by the work itself, but also by the debates that it provoked and by the way that it broke down the supposed antagonism of entertainment versus social critique that had governed Latin American approaches to filmmaking: “if you ask some journalistic film critics, they will tell you that it is just a film made to sell popcorn. It’s amazing how dialectics ruins people’s minds. They are unable to conceive of entertainment, emotion, and reflection in the same package. They always think in an exclusive or an antagonistic way: it’s either art or entertainment. It’s sad” (qtd. in Johnson 2005, 13-14). He drew attention to the fact that the film had generated hundreds of articles and debates, a detail that suggested to him that City of God had, indeed, been successful at engag-ing the Brazilian public to reflect on the social themes central to the film.

By tracing this trajectory in Brazilian cinema, this paper theorizes the idea of hunger as a troping mechanism for politically engaged filmmaking and compares Rocha’s revolutionary aesthetic of hunger with Meirelles’ cosmetics of hunger.1 Central questions to consider are whether it is ever possible to depict hunger on the big screen in ways that avoid the fetishiz-ing of poverty. And, if some measure of spectacle is always already part of the aesthetic of hunger, then how to reconcile the cosmetic with the critically reflective? Central to these questions is the fact that hunger is inseparable from violence, i.e., the violence caused by hunger is (or should be) unthink-able without attention to the violence that produces hunger. In this sense, a cinema of hunger is a cinema invested in the biopolitical realities that construct hungry communities while denying the very right of these communities to claim their hunger as a problem of national concern and civic responsibility. One additional set of questions concerns the aesthetics of hunger as utopic longing, as desire, and how that, too, calls for a certain degree of cinematic pleasure, thereby suggesting that some measure of cinematic spectacle may be necessary for political filmmaking.

At the heart of my essay is the question of how hunger as a frame-work through which to think of politically committed cinema necessarily takes multiple forms. Is it possible to consider the work of avant-garde, experimental filmmakers like Rocha alongside, rather than in opposition to, more commercial filmmakers like Meirelles? If the hunger that drives Brazilian filmmakers is tragic and visceral as well as metaphoric, utopic, and theoretical, and if that hunger is a hunger to use cinema as a tool for social change, then wouldn’t it follow that such a cinema would require multiple aesthetic practices?

1While City of God was directed by Meirelles and Lund, Meirelles has been more outspoken in terms of his aesthetic project and has also directed films like The Constant Gardener (2005) and Blindness (2008), making it possible to see a connection between the aesthetic projects of his films.

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Revolutionary Hunger: Rocha’s Radical Aesthetics

Understanding the aesthetics of City of God requires attention to the film practices of Rocha since his aesthetic has been commonly understood as a counterpoint to Meirelles’ style. Rocha formed a part of a pan-Latin American Cinema movement known as the New Latin American Cinema. Sparked, to a certain extent, by the excitement caused by the Cuban Revolution, the move-ment included directors from Cuba, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. While there were differences between the directors, especially inasmuch as they were engaging with their own unique national contexts, they shared a number of common goals. The New Latin American Cinema, and its Brazilian iteration, cinema nôvo, was focused on promoting an autochthonous, anti-Hollywood, anti-European film form that was dedicated to reflecting the harsh realities of Latin American life in ways that would promote social change. At the core of their aesthetic theories was the idea that cinematic storytelling in and of the region had to have its own, unique aesthetic. It had to be a non-commercial, local storytelling form that aggressively confronted the legacies of colonial and neocolonial power structures.

These goals, which appeared throughout the various manifestoes penned by New Latin American Cinema directors, were more often theory than prac-tice. They faced two key challenges: the first related to the use of an aesthetic that denied Hollywood inspired forms of spectatorial pleasure. Those Latin Americans that were film literate had already had their viewing practices coded by Hollywood and Hollywood-like cinema, making the substantially different style of New Latin American Cinema films aesthetically difficult and unpleasant. Those new to cinema, such as the indigenous populations that were the intended audience of some New Latin American cineastes like the Bolivian Grupo Ukamau, had to have the films explained to them more than once before viewing began since they otherwise found them impenetrable. In the case of Brazil, political films dedicated to reflecting social realities had to contend with the history of mass-produced, spectacle-heavy film forms like the chanchada—musical comedies that surpassed Hollywood in their silly, sensual frivolousness. The Brazilian filmgoing public was accustomed to films that served as distractions from everyday life, not reminders of its challenges. And, while the tension between film as distracting spectacle or as vehicle for social critique has been present since the beginning of the cultural form, the Brazilian context was complicated by the conditions of postcoloniality. Not only did the public consume frivolous cinema, but much of that cinema originated in the US, making the ideological damage of its consumption even more pernicious from the perspective of the revolutionary left.

The second challenge related to film industry production, distribu-tion, and exhibition practices. While post-revolutionary Cuba was able to restructure the film industry via a state system that supported the use of film for a left project, the bulk of New Latin American Cinema directors faced significant challenges as they sought funding for projects and venues for

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screenings while working in hostile national contexts. One of the interest-ing complexities to this trajectory, though, was that conservative goals for protecting national culture and developing national economies opened up spaces for some filmmakers that would otherwise not have been possible. In 1930s Brazil, the state developed a series of protectionist policies that would also support national cinema. The state’s investment in and protection of national cinema paved the way for the socially critical films of cinema nôvo from the 1960s to reach the big screen. There, as in Cuba, the support of the state was always a double-edged sword since with support came ideological pressures to reinforce state policies. And the aggressively critical optic of films like Rocha’s inevitably sparked critiques of anti-nationalism. As he explains it,

From Amanda to Vidas Secas, Cinema Nôvo narrated, described, poeti-cized, discoursed, analyzed.… It was this gallery of the hungry that identified Cinema Nôvo with the miserabilism so condemned by the government, by criticism at the service of anti-national interests, by producers and by the audience, who can not bear images of its own wretchedness. (par. 10)

The limits of generalizations about complex movements aside, what must be gleaned from this brief overview is that the ideals of the New Latin American Cinema were often out of synch with its realities: directors spoke of a cinema for the people while making films that were only appreciated by an intellectual elite, and they sought an independent, radical cinema while necessarily relying on funding sources from outside of Latin America (usually from Europe) and/or from the state. As Randal Johnson explains, in its initial phase from 1960-1964, Brazilian cinema nôvo was intimately connected to the state’s goals of “formulating a national ideology of development” (1987, 89). Cinema nôvo was dedicated to exposing the extent to which underdevelop-ment limited the possibilities of social transformation. Conceived in vulgar Marxist terms, the goal was to use film to “raise consciousness” in ways that would lead directly to revolutionary change. By using a radical aesthetic, viewers would finally be able to see the “true” face of their nation and would be inspired to struggle for social change.

As was common with many of the politically committed filmmakers from Latin America in the sixties and seventies who had been influenced by the experimental aesthetics of the French nouvelle vague, Rocha’s cinema, despite its call to urgency, and despite its desire to communicate revolutionary ideals to the Brazilian public, was extremely stylized, highly symbolic, and slow-paced. Rocha commonly used cinema in highly metaphorical ways, blending classical myth, local folklore, and contemporary politics. His filming of violence and suffering was often operatic and grand. Scenes of violence from Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil) (1964) contrast image and sound in ways that can be highly disconcerting to the viewer. And, in that film, movements, especially those of violence, are shown in an excruciatingly

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slow pace, with cinematography that favors large, circular, off-kilter camera shots. The aesthetic project in films like Rocha’s was to defamiliarize and intensify images of violence, producing a sense of fear and disgust in the viewer. Overblown images of almost melodramatic suffering blended with uncanny attention to the details of everyday life found in nouvelle vague, making each movement, each action, each utterance strange and disturbing. Almost all features of standard narrative cinema are entirely absent, forcing the viewer to work to link scenes and follow plot.

His films, unsurprisingly, had far greater success with Latin American left intellectuals and with the international art house circuit than they did with the general public. As a result, they suffer from one of the central dilemmas that tends to plague engaged artists who believe that political art requires the destabilization of traditional representational forms and familiar storytelling modes: the alienation produced by such films may provoke reflection, but the audience generally inclined to tolerate such provocation is an intellectual elite, who likely already has some familiarity with the social themes addressed in the film. Again and again, filmmakers connected with Brazilian cinema nôvo and its larger counterpart, the New Latin American Cinema, struggled with the urge to make films that differed radically from the mass media aesthetics used in both Hollywood films and in mainstream national cinemas. This often meant, though, creating films that offered the viewer no interpretive field from which to read their films, thereby cutting off the social sector they hoped to address. Such films, then, when dedicated to screening hunger, beg the question of why such hunger should be represented, if the audience that consumes the film of hunger is already aware of and committed to changing it. Wouldn’t such films also risk fetishizing hunger for the benefit of a self-satisfied intellectual elite? How would that aestheticized, stylized hunger differ from a mass-mediated one? And why would one necessarily be more politically productive than the other?

Neoliberal Hunger: Meirelles’ Market Aesthetics

In contrast to the less widely accessible aesthetics of Rocha’s cinema, Meirelles and Lund’s film drew a tremendous audience in Brazil and interna-tionally. In the period from 1994-2003, City of God attracted the second largest Brazilian audience for a national film with 3.3 million spectators watching the film in theaters. Its fast-paced editing, use of popular music, and slick look combined to appeal to a broad range of spectators. The combination of its hip aesthetic, with its large box office success, and its topic of violence and suffering in Rio caused a flurry of commentary on whether the film had used images of Brazilian suffering to create a spectacle for public consumption or whether it had opened up the space for much-needed public attention to Brazilian social crises.

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Based on a homonymous 1997 novel by Paulo Lins, who had lived in the favela himself, the film City of God spans over two decades and delves into the lives of a group of young boys who grow up in the planned project-cum-slum named, ironically, City of God. Meirelles has said that the real protagonist of the film is the slum itself, as it houses a community that suffers and inflicts greater and greater degrees of violence. A repository for the bare life of the city of Rio, the film’s City of God stands in for all of the favelas, shanty towns, camps, ghettos, and projects that populate the globe separating disposable, precarious life from those with privilege. When signs of the state appear in the film in the form of the police, they are disinterested in protecting the lives of the inhabitants, choosing instead to indiscriminately murder, accept bribes, and encourage drug violence. By focusing on the partitioning of Brazilian society, the film displays the biopolitical realities of lower-class afro-Brazilians who not only are denied the rights and protections of a state, but who are also denied even the recognition of their precarious status.

Despite its provocative topic and its multilayered aesthetic, the film’s plot is fairly simple and reductive. It weaves together the lives of two boys from City of God, the non-violent, thoughtful, attractive, and kind narrator who becomes a photographer for a major newspaper Buscape, and the psycho-pathically violent, amoral, and ugly drug lord Li’l Zé. The binary structure to these two characters and the lack of larger context to explain the realities that shape their lives create substantial limits on the film’s ability to foster critical reflection on the themes of poverty and violence. The fact that both charac-ters are shown to be predisposed to either aggression or nonviolence from an early age suggests that the cause of violence in slum communities may be more genetic than socially produced. In effect, both characters are hungry, both want their lives to change, both want security and respect, but they choose radically different paths to satisfy their cravings. The film’s presen-tation of these two alternative paths runs the risk of suggesting that those members of City of God who do not achieve Buscape’s success simply didn’t try hard enough or were basically inclined to living a life of violence, squalor, and drug consumption. And while one of the main characters, Knockout Ned, experiences a transformation from an upstanding, moral, good guy to a gangster, and while the violence of the “Tender Trio”—the preceding gang made up of an older generation—is vastly different from that of Li’l Zé, the film seems largely disinterested in providing a broader social explanation for the ubiquitous presence of violence in the community.

When we combine the film’s slick aesthetic, morally reductive plot, and lack of context for City of God’s poverty, violence, and drug culture, it is easy to see why the film came under such critical scrutiny. It is also easy to see why few, if any, critics would see any parallels between Meirelles and Lund’s film and the work of cinema nôvo directors like Rocha. My argument, however, is that the superficial features of the film are only part of its larger aesthetic project—that, in fact, the commercially oriented features of the film are used strategically to expose a large audience to a film experience that combines

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pleasure with social critique through a very specific mode of montage and shot construction.

Upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that each reductive element of the film has a reflective counterpart. For instance, the slick aesthetic pleases at the same time that it is so readily apparent as to call attention to itself and to its own artifice, thereby constantly reminding the viewer that they are experiencing produced images. The contrast between the good Buscape and the bad Li’l Zé is complicated by other secondary characters that trouble that binary, such as the benevolent drug lord Benny and the aforementioned Knockout Ned. But perhaps the most interesting counterpoint is between the way that the film presents the problem of the lack of context.

City of God may be the protagonist of the film, as Meirelles says, but its ongoing critical trope, if not central theme, is in fact the problem of context, of how to tell a story of a marginal community in a way that recognizes that cinema can never provide adequate context. To address this dilemma, the film offers an aesthetic technique of layering, parataxis, and juxtaposition, where images only make sense when compared and connected to others. Taken alone, the images lack significance; they only acquire meaning as the viewer connects them to others. This problematic is made evident in the opening scene, which only becomes intelligible at the end of the film, when it is screened again. Not only do we have to watch the whole film to under-stand the dynamics that structure the last scene, but the actual montage and shot construction emphasize the fact that films can only capture part of the picture.

The first image after the opening credits is of a knife sliding over a sharpening stone. The image is violence absent context. After five images of the knife intercalated with black screen, we are given extreme close-ups of a series of images: dancing feet, chickens being slaughtered, and prepa-rations for a stew. The only onlooker to the scene is another chicken that awaits its own slaughter and slowly manages to escape. As it flees, a group follows in hot pursuit. Again, the images favor the extreme close-up, often with the main screen object off center, providing the viewer little background for what is being seen. We only get medium shots when we see Buscape walking with a friend and discussing his new job as a photographer. In these shots, the Samba music and quick cutting techniques we have been watching disappear, and the sound is limited to the dialogue of the boys. Eventually, these two worlds collide as Buscape comes face to face with his nemesis Li’l Zé, who brandishes a pistol as he asks him to grab the escaped chicken. As an anxious Buscape faces the gang, a van of police pulls up behind him. The camera does a 360 degree circle around Buscape: he is caught between the guns of the gang and those of the cops. The swooping camera works like a device of entrapment, underscoring the border that has been drawn around City of God itself. But just as the movie camera encircles Buscape, his vulner-ability is offset by the still camera that he has around his neck. He may be the object of image production, but he himself is able to produce images.

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The extreme close-ups that deny the viewer context, the 360 degree swoop around Buscape, the offset between the movie camera’s visual effects and the camera held by Buscape, and the cross-cutting between Buscape and the gang’s pursuit of the escaped chicken all combine to create a highly intense and visually stimulating opening sequence. And, while the effects might be consumed as nothing more than Matrix-like visual antics, there is a marked difference between the way these effects work in a film with no larger critical point and one that gestures towards social commentary. In fact, one might argue, that the non-realist filming strategies used in the opening sequence draw even greater attention to the difficulties of using commercial cinema as a vehicle for representing harsh realities. It is worth remembering that the film opens with a scene of hunger, where a community that suffers hunger engages in violence to satisfy it.

Hermann Herlinghaus in Violence without Guilt (2009) writes about the difficulties for filmmakers who attempt to create images of violence that elude common tropes. He describes an aesthetic shift in recent Latin American films. And, while he doesn’t consider City of God necessarily as a good example of these changes, I think that the film can be read according to his theory of how Latin American films have developed an aesthetic of bare life (169). The epistemic changes described by Herlinghaus can be read interestingly alongside Henry A. Giroux’s theories of the ways that the mass media teaches society to accept the disposability of massive sectors of a given state’s population. As Giroux argues, the mass media has created a barrage of images of bare life that function as a form of pedagogy—“Media and image-based media have become a new and powerful pedagogical force, reconfiguring the very nature of politics, cultural production, engagement, and resistance” (2006a, 26).

Herlinghaus and Giroux analyze how cultural representations of contemporary forms of bare life must be read within the context of neoliber-alism, the free market focused economic practice that first appeared in Latin America in Chile under the regime of Augusto Pinochet in the early seven-ties. Under the free market, pro-privatization practices of neoliberalism the geographic boundaries that had marked the postcolonial criticisms of sixties and seventies revolutionary culture are no longer functional. Recall that Rocha’s cinema was involved in a complex relationship to the pro-nationalist protectionist policies of the right in the sixties in Brazil, that created, for instance, state mechanisms to protect national cinema. At that time, there was a convergence between the ways that the right and left both attempted to provide alternatives to postcolonial power structures. Each was concerned with developing national alternatives to the dependency model. The left project, though, sought not only to develop autochthonous cultural forms and sovereign economic practices, but it also framed these goals within a larger power struggle that emphasized the need to reject the legacies of colo-nial practices and epistemes.

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Within this logic, it makes sense, then, for filmmakers to be extremely invested in the creation of a local aesthetic, one that emerges from the space of the nation in order to offer a critical view of it. And, even though that aesthetic was itself inspired by extra-national practices like Italian neo-realism, the French nouvelle vague, and Soviet dialectical montage, these influences were cannibalized, adapted, and altered in the Latin American context. By the time of City of God’s debut in 2002, however, the investment in the production of a local aesthetic had radically shifted. First, the postcolo-nial center-periphery model that governed most Cold War theories of culture and economy had been replaced by attention to the ways that free market economics called for new understandings of geographic spaces. And second, the new global economy for filmmaking brought with it an entirely different context within which to make non-Hollywood cinema. By the nineties, when neoliberalism enjoyed a global surge, most state quota systems that protected national cinemas had been repealed, feature films were made with an eye to recuperating costs in the global market, and the prevalence of Internet video, television, and other media forms made it possible for citizens of any nation to access culture across national borders. The idea of a contained national culture no longer made sense. This means that the MTV culture-inspired aesthetic elements of City of God cannot be assessed according to cinema nôvo criteria. It means that when Brazilian film critic Bentes constructs a dichotomy between an aesthetics of hunger and a cosmetics of hunger, she is assessing a twenty-first-century film that emerges under neoliberalism according to cultural models that no longer apply.

By the late 1990s, the idea of a Latin American autochthonous film style had been the subject of significant debates; and critics like Néstor García Canclini and Jesús Martín-Barbero argued for understanding Latin American media as hybrid mediations, where local practices of reading intertwined with extra-national cultural products. Martín-Barbero explains that it is a mistake to see the consumption of US mainstream culture in Latin America as a straightforward case of ideological indoctrination, since media consumers always consume according to local practices. García Canclini (2001) suggests that consumption itself becomes one of the ways that it is possible to measure citizenship. If we think of the opening scene of City of God with its images of hunger and violence, we can recognize that the film opens up the question of hunger, or consumption, and of violence within an aesthetic that is both pleasurable and critical while also participating in the neoliberal marketplace. Just placing the story of City of God on the big screen and opening up the injustices screened there to public debate has to be understood as a political act, even when, or especially when, that act includes reinvigorating Brazilian cinema for Brazilian audiences. While it is clear that such an aesthetic risks objectifying the very population it seems committed to serve, it is also clear that when a Brazilian film about hunger and violence is commercially consumed in the global marketplace, it serves to destabilize the neoliberal practice of distracting the public from social inequities.

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David Harvey explains in Spaces of Hope (2000) that neoliberalism influ-ences the geographies and the temporalities through which individuals imagine their relationship to struggle, and Giroux claims that the biopoliti-cal practices of neoliberalism yoke state sanctioned violence to state policies that “relegate entire populations to spaces of invisibility and disposability” (2006b, 21). At the very least, City of God’s focus on the way that the construc-tion of housing projects for lower-class Brazilians instituted a politics of bare life where segments of the population were violently separated from civic society draws attention to social practices that border on apartheid. What is more, the film traces the trajectory of this community over time, where any semblance of civic protections increasingly erodes as City of God’s inhabit-ants become more and more the subjects of drug gangs and police brutality rather than citizens of the state. But, as mentioned above, it is the films’ inability to fully offer viewers the larger social context for these inequities and injustices that begs the question of what it means to offer viewers a film about hunger that is exciting and pleasurable to watch.

Thus, one of the key shifts that takes place between the revolutionary aesthetic of Rocha and the neoliberal one of Meirelles is connected to the questions of whether politically provocative cinema can also be successful at the box office and whether it can co-opt the language of Hollywood in order to make a film about important social issues. It seems that the choice between an art film for an elite or a mainstream film for the masses is a false choice, since neither can be imagined as a perfect vehicle for politically relevant art. Both types of films are consumed—and when the films are of hunger, that consumption is even more disturbing. One of the most significant features of City of God that differentiates it from the work of directors like Rocha was its ability to project its subject matter into the public sphere as the film became the subject of debate and the film spun into a television series that led to even more public dialogue on the topic. Meirelles and Lund created a mini-series, entitled City of Men (2002-2005), that attracted over 35 million viewers of Brazilian TV and was later released on DVD in 2004. Because of new tech-nologies and the increasing ease with which stories crossover between media forms, the cultural resonance of films like City of Men goes beyond the theater experience in ways that were unthinkable in the sixties. In today’s context, a commercial film can open spaces for critical reflection though DVD extras, websites, book tie-ins, and other media forms that allow for greater viewer engagement with the film’s subject.

Yet another key shift that takes place between the work of these directors, though, is in regard to the filmmaking industry. One of the key transformations signaled by global neoliberal practice is a changed idea of the state’s respon-sibility to the citizen. Developmentalist economics expected, for instance, that the state would be the primary force of structural development, not only building roads and bridges, but also supporting education and culture. It was during this time, uncoincidentally, that a number of Latin American nations developed state agencies to support national filmmaking, and passed laws to

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protect national cinemas in the form of state quotas. Neoliberalism, however, “proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating indi-vidual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade” (Harvey 2005, 2). The state’s principal role under neoliberalism is to protect the “rights” of the market. Translating these notions into the realm of film culture, one finds that neoliberalism demands the end of quota protections for national cinema, the end of tariffs on imported films, the deregulation of film distribution, and the end of state investment in cinema.

Filmmakers like Meirelles no longer romanticize a protectionist nation as the solution to global capitalism. Forced to engage with the logic of the global market where financing and exhibition for films takes place less and less often within state protectionist structures, filmmakers like Meirelles operate in a global marketplace that has redefined the idea of making a national film. Aesthetically, such a cinema also enters a new phase—one that combines cinematic pleasure with politics, that avoids didactic moralizing and that understands that the mere act of making and distributing a film about these issues in the contemporary context is itself a political act.

Rather than reject the visual context of the mainstream media in a manner similar to cinema nôvo, City of God takes the slick spectacle of mass media and uses it. The risk to such a strategy is that creating a spectacle of spectacle may seduce the viewer so much so that critical reflection becomes, if not impos-sible, then unlikely. There is evidence, however, that the risks were worth it, since not only did the film draw a sizeable Brazilian population to the theater, not only did it spark a significant amount of public debate, but even President Lula who attempted to implement a “Zero Hunger” policy after his election in 2002 called the film a cry for change. “We are going to create the conditions so that everyone in our country can eat a decent meal three times a day, every day, without needing donations from anyone,” Lula stated at the launching ceremony for his “Zero Hunger” plan in Brasilia (“Brazil Launches Anti-Poverty Drive” par. 4). At the time of City of God’s release, Brazil, with a population of 170 million, had 46 million inhabitants that lived on less than a dollar a day (2003). With about one-third of the population living in poverty, it is safe to say that hunger is an urgent national crisis. Clearly, a nation that suffers from such extreme problems of poverty requires public acknowledge-ment of the crisis as a first step to addressing it, and City of God, despite its potentially problematic aesthetics, undeniably assisted in that process.

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Sophia A. McClennen Hunger in Brazilian Cinema