This article aims at discussing the relations between cinematographic image and production of knowledge in shaping a social imaginary that founds and orients interpretations and evaluations about the world and the social phenomena of which it is constituted. It discusses how movies produces a certain form of apprehending social phenomena by means of a complex elaboration of an imaginary that will serve as a basis for seeing the world under a certain framing and on the basis or certain values. In order to materialize this perspective, the film Tropa de Elite, of large national and international repercussion, is taken as object of a concrete analysis in order to examine the artifices and options of the director in constructing characters and structuring the narrative. Such artifices and options allow him to present, as a movies, relational systems and hierarchies that delimit and generalize certain characters and social groups presented in a cohesive and meaningful form, simultaneously eliding the perception of the values orienting the delimitation and the construction of the world as accomplished by the film. In this sense, the article undertakes a disentanglement of such constructions, revealing the values on which they are founded, which end up in orienting the implicit value assessment and, in this case, also the evaluations made by the film, but that it try to avoid making explicit.
Tropa de Elite; Violence; Sociology of the movies; Police violence