VIOLENT TEXT(URE)S OF URBAN SPACE IN EARLY 21ST CENTURY BRAZILIAN CINEMA

TEXTOS E TEXTURAS VIOLENTAS DO ESPAÇO URBANO NO CINEMA BRASILEIRO DO INÍCIO DO SÉCULO XXI

TEXTOS Y TEXTURAS VIOLENTAS DEL ESPACIO URBANO EN EL CINE BRASILEÑO DE COMIENZOS DEL SIGLO XXI

Abstract

This article analyzes the representation of urban space in contemporary Brazilian cinema, focusing on how violence functions as both an aesthetic and ideological discourse. Through readings of Cidade de Deus, Amarelo Manga, and Estorvo, it argues that some early 21st-century films depict the city as a besieged territory where violence becomes naturalized. Elements such as mise-en-scène, cinematography, and voice-over are understood as discursive operations that shape the viewer’s experience. The article highlights a documentary impulse in these works that links visibility to truth and reinforces biopolitical forms of control. By focusing on filmic textuality, it emphasizes how urban violence is constructed not only as content but also through cinematic form. Estorvo-in particular-stands out for challenging narrative coherence and offering a critique that destabilizes readability.

Keywords:
Brazilian Cinema; Naturalism; Urban space; Violence

Resumo

Este artigo analisa a representação do espaço urbano no cinema brasileiro contemporâneo, com foco em como a violência atua como discurso estético e ideológico. Por meio de leituras de Cidade de Deus, Amarelo Manga e Estorvo, argumenta-se que alguns filmes do século XXI retratam a cidade como um território sitiado, onde a violência se naturaliza. Recursos como mise-en-scène, cinematografia e voz em off são compreendidos como operações discursivas que moldam a experiência do espectador. O artigo destaca um impulso documental nessas obras, que associa visibilidade à verdade e reforça formas biopolíticas de controle. Ao centrar-se na textualidade fílmica, observa-se como a violência urbana é construída também pela forma cinematográfica. Estorvo, em particular, se destaca por questionar a coerência narrativa, propondo uma crítica que desestabiliza a legibilidade do relato.

Palavras-chave:
Cinema brasileiro; Naturalismo; Espaço urbano; Violência

Resumen

Este artículo analiza la representación del espacio urbano en el cine brasileño contemporáneo, enfocándose en cómo la violencia actúa como discurso estético e ideológico. A través de lecturas de Cidade de Deus, Amarelo Manga y Estorvo, se argumenta que algunas películas del siglo XXI muestran la ciudad como un territorio sitiado, donde la violencia se naturaliza. Recursos como la mise-en-scène, la cinematografía y la voz en off son vistos como operaciones discursivas que modelan la experiencia del espectador. El artículo destaca un impulso documental en estas obras, que asocia visibilidad con verdad y refuerza formas biopolíticas de control. Al centrarse en la textualidad fílmica, se señala cómo la violencia urbana se construye también desde la forma cinematográfica. Estorvo, en particular, se distingue por cuestionar la coherencia narrativa, proponiendo una crítica que desestabiliza la legibilidad del relato.

Palabras clave:
Cine brasileño; Naturalismo; Espacio urbano; Violencia

INTRODUCTION

This article investigates the textual construction of urban space in contemporary Brazilian cinema, focusing on how violence emerges as a discursive mechanism shaped by filmic language. By analyzing three films-Cidade de Deus (Fernando Meirelles, 2002), Amarelo Manga (Cláudio Assis, 2002), and Estorvo (Ruy Guerra, 2000)-the study explores how the mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound, and narrative organization articulate particular configurations of violence, subjectivity, and space. The objective is to examine how these films construct urban environments as besieged territories and how such representations contribute to biopolitical imaginaries. The central hypothesis is that the cinematic textuality of these works-understood not merely as content, but as the formal and discursive operations that organize meaning-plays a critical role in naturalizing or contesting forms of social control. Methodologically, the article conducts close readings of the selected films, grounded in film theory, literary criticism, and cultural studies. It draws from the theoretical frameworks of Flora Süssekind, Ismail Xavier, and Michel de Certeau to analyze how filmic texts either reinforce or destabilize dominant regimes of visibility, legibility, and power in the urban imaginary. By emphasizing textuality as a site of conflict and intervention, the article proposes a reflection on the ethical and political stakes of representing urban violence in Brazilian cinema.

SYMBOLIC CARTOGRAPHIES AND THE CENTRALITY OF THE GAZE

In March 1976, The New Yorker magazine featured a Saul Steinberg illustration on its cover (Figure 1). The drawing, titled View of the World from 9th Avenue, presents a parochial perspective that positions New York as the center of the world. The city occupies nearly half of the image, while the rest of the United States, the Pacific Ocean, Canada, Mexico, and Eastern nations-including China, Japan, and Russia-are compressed into the remaining space. New York is rendered with relatively detailed precision, whereas the rest of the world is reduced to geometric forms. The map is oriented westward, suggesting that the viewer’s back is turned to the European continent. This configuration encapsulates the city in its most overtly provincial moment: it negates its colonial past by facing away from Europe, asserts its preeminence in relation to the rest of the country, and projects a quasi-panoptic vision of the world. This imagined urban space exemplifies the extent to which power relations are embedded in the ways cities are visualized, constructed, and experienced.

Figure 1
View of the World from 9th Avenue

In the twenty-first century, it became increasingly difficult to find films in Brazil that construct urban spaces without engaging with the theme of violence. Much like Steinberg’s illustration, contemporary audiovisual works depict cities as besieged spaces-war zones, labyrinths, or even concentration camps. A dense network of audiovisual discourses, including television news, music videos, films, and soap operas, continuously weaves images and sounds of Brazilian cities as sites of perpetual conflict. This, of course, is not unprecedented in Brazilian cultural history. Moreover, recent cinematic productions appear to retain the Naturalist impulse that characterized Brazilian literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

LITERARY NATURALISM AND CINEMATIC REALISM: LEGACIES AND UPDATES

In O Cortiço (1890), for instance, Aluísio de Azevedo crafts a vivid portrayal of Rio de Janeiro undergoing significant urban transformations:

That, by the way, did not prevent the small houses from emerging, one after the other, and soon being filled, spreading everywhere, from the shop to the hill, and then turning to Miranda’s corner and advancing over his yard, which seemed threatened by that snake made of stone and whitewash. [...] And in that muddy and steamy land, in that hot and slimy humidity, there started to crawl, to simmer, to grow, a world, a living thing, a generation that seemed to sprout spontaneously, right there, from that slough, and multiply like maggots in manure¹ (Azevedo, 2016, p. 25-27)

In this passage, literary language constructs an urban environment that ostensibly tries to correspond to the real conditions of a nineteenth-century cortiço (tenement). Azevedo reinforces this documentary impulse by using the legal maxim “The Truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” as an epigraph, emphasizing his commitment to factual representation. Flora Süssekind, in Tal Brasil, Qual Romance?, argues that works like O Cortiço seek meaning beyond their textual boundaries, positioning themselves as documents rather than mere fiction. She notes the novel’s invocation of legal discourse, observing that “when a novel tries to hide its own fictionality in the name of a greater referentiality, perhaps its major models are science and journalistic information, as a rule considered paradigms of objectivity and truth”² (Süssekind, 1984, p. 37). Readers encountering such artistic strategies may overlook the literary construction itself, instead drawing direct parallels with the extratextual world. Süssekind further suggests that this impulse persists in literary works from the 1880s, 1930s, and 1970s. It is possible, we argue, to extend this trajectory into contemporary Brazilian cinema.

In O Discurso Cinematográfico (2005), Ismail Xavier examines the evolution of Naturalism into what he terms “Critical Realism.” He conceptualizes cinematic Naturalism broadly, aligning it with the literary movement but expanding its scope. Xavier describes it as an effort to faithfully reproduce the physical world and human behavior, creating the illusion that the audience is in direct contact with reality. Filmic discourse, under this framework, becomes natural, a seemingly transparent medium that reveals an unmediated reality.

Leonardo Mecchi (2008) observes that this renewed interest in an immediate discourse is particularly evident in what he terms Brazilian Popular Cinema of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Analyzing box-office successes over the last decade, Mecchi identifies a trend towards film-verism (filme-verismo), in which cultural legitimacy is asserted by presenting a direct, unembellished depiction of Brazilian social realities. This tendency manifests most notably in the portrayal of poverty and violence, which are frequently consumed as typical or natural conditions-immutable aspects of urban life that preclude transformative action. Similarly, Ivana Bentes (2007) argues that films from the early 2000s rarely present explanations for any context, as they do not seem to intend to judge the “real;” rather, their narratives present a perplexed worldview as if the films could be mirrors of the state of things. This cinematic approach, akin to the Naturalist literary tradition described by Süssekind, functions as a mechanism for the pacification of contradictions and social fractures. Like their literary predecessors, films such as Cidade de Deus, Cidade Baixa, and Amarelo Manga construct violence as an intrinsic element of urban life, appealing to an immediacy that obscures their constructed nature. The characters in these films seem to denounce reality directly, reinforcing a belief in an unmediated world that cinema merely captures.

This impulse to capture reality-evidenced also by the increasing production of documentaries-often manifests through an aesthetic or narrative varnish that mitigates the trauma of direct confrontation. A striking example of this is found in Amarelo Manga, directed by Claudio Assis in 2002, in which a wide-angle lens extends the frame’s limits (Figure 2), incorporating as much visual information as possible. The desire to see everything, to expose every facet of urban degradation, is akin to the function of a peephole in a wall: a voyeuristic gaze that offers access while maintaining distance.

Figure 2
Amarelo Manga: Wide-angle lens shot

Filmmakers often justify their portrayals of violence and poverty by emphasizing the delegation of subaltern voices within their works. Tata Amaral, for example, explicitly articulates her search for truth in Antônia (2006), a film about female MCs in São Paulo. In a revealing essay titled Em Busca do Naturalismo no Cinema (In Search of Naturalism in Cinema), Amaral (2007) describes her approach:

What I was searching for was the truth in the situations and emotions, and they would not always correspond to what we imagined. More than imposing a story, I wanted them [the actors] to tell theirs. [...] That it would be like ‘peeping’ into those characters’ lives, who are there independently of the camera.³

Her choice of words is telling. When Amaral says “we imagined,” she implicitly references (a) the film crew and director, (b) the broader filmmaking community, and (c) the audience. The implication is that prior imaginings of these lives are incomplete or inaccurate; thus, it is necessary to access the real experiences of her subjects. This reality is ostensibly revealed through the actors’ own voices rather than the director’s mediation. Amaral positions herself as an invisible medium, allowing these stories to unfold independently of directorial imposition. However, the phrasing “peeping” into the characters’ lives suggests a voyeuristic impulse-an attempt to observe from a distance without becoming too entangled in their reality.

This recourse to Naturalistic aesthetics reinforces familiar topoi. The approach is familiar not only because it echoes earlier literary traditions, but also because it provides audiences with the reassuring notion that films reflect reality rather than construct it. As Catherine Belsey argues, “the world evoked in the fiction, its patterns of cause and effect, of social relationships and moral values, largely confirms the patterns of the world we seem to know” (1980, p. 51). Beneath this aestheticized realism lies a will to truth that masks a deeper will to power-the assertion of artistic authority over representations of social reality.

In a way, the kind of faith that Amaral seems to have in ontological realism of the cinematographic image points to an attempt at demystification which can be associated with leftist intellectual goals, and a belief in giving space to anonymous voices and unknown faces. Not only does Flora Süssekind stress the fact that Naturalist writers were driven by an irresistible drive to see, but she also constructs a metaphor with cinema:

It is necessary to transform the writer into film, searching for real impressions, and literary language’s opacity into transparency, so that the audience may see what happened without barriers or fiction’s ambiguity. [...] A work is valued as long as it is analogous to the real. A writer, as long as he is like a camera ⁴ (Süssekind, 1984, p. 101).

The writer/camera becomes, in a number of recent Brazilian films, a metaphor for the camera/writer, a camera that (re)writes ‘reality’ to gratify the obsession with the real. The cinematic city thus emerges as a complex object for Naturalistic discourse. It is not merely a space of representation but a site where political and biopolitical tensions unfold. In recent cinema, urban spaces are often staged as battlegrounds for competing forms of subjectivity-spaces where life is simultaneously regulated, contained, and made visible. The biopolitical imagination of these films reconfigures possibilities of existence, interrogating the very structures that determine who is seen, who is heard, and who is allowed to speak.

THE AESTHETICS OF VIOLENCE AND THE BIOPOLITICAL IMAGINATION OF THE CITY IN AMARELO MANGA

Amarelo Manga, the film directed by Cláudio Assis in 2002, presents an audiovisual rendering of Recife that perfectly exemplifies the ambiguous politics of the portrayal of the city. Significantly, Chico Dias’ character, Wellington Canibal, proclaims, “among all the species living in the world, man is the most deserving of death”⁵. Likewise, the film’s title song-composed by Otto, Bnegão, and Apollo 9, and performed by Dunga, the gay character portrayed by Matheus Nachtergaele-declares:

Turned yellow, mocked me.
Now you’ll have to pay.
Inside this box lies an indigent body-
a body that does not speak,
a body that does not feel.⁶

These elements of the soundtrack announce the film’s inclination towards a sordid universe filled with deceit, deception, and vengeance, inhabited by marginal subjects who are driven by passions and instincts, perpetually seeking the satisfaction of their appetites. This universe indeed functions as a “box,” confining the characters’ bodies within a deteriorating environment. It is, indeed, a yellow “box”-not the radiant yellow associated with gold, but rather the sickly yellow reminiscent of decomposing corpses, artificial blonde hair, or the faded paint of an old car. The idea of confinement is further reflected in the diegetic temporality of the film, which unfolds within a 24-hour cycle structured as a ritornello.

In musical terms, the ritornello technique involves an orchestral theme repeatedly introduced by the entire orchestra, returning after solo instruments or voices have introduced variations of their own. Although the theme may be repeated integrally, it can also be altered by the solos, allowing the tutti to be modulated by individual variations. Amarelo Manga adopts a similar structural logic. However, the potential of the ritornello to dismantle sameness (as it evokes the possibility of repetition with difference), is not actualized within the narrative of Amarelo Manga. Its ritornello is confined to sameness, to mere repetition devoid of difference, incarcerating the characters within yellow “boxes” characterized by endless despair.

The color yellow, powerfully photographed by Walter Carvalho, serves as a metaphor for the social and psychological maladies afflicting the diegetic universe of Assis’s film. A character references a chronicle by Renato Carneiro Campos, which reads:

Yellow is the color of the tables, the benches, the fishmonger’s knife handle, garden hoes and junk. Of oxcart, yoke, aging hats, sun-dried beef. Yellow of the diseases, boy’s eye secretion, purulent wounds, gob, worms, hepatitis, diarrhea, rotten teeth [...]. Yellow inner time. Old, faded, sick.⁷

Set in the periphery and old neighborhoods of Recife, the film constructs its human subjects as animals driven purely by instincts, confirming the pathological dimensions highlighted by Campos’s chronicle. Like Naturalistic novels of the late 19th century, the film’s poster (Figure 3) explicitly proclaims that humans are “stomach and sex,” and if examined closely, the poster’s background features a mango-yellow vagina. Similar to Naturalist literature, the film employs a clinical approach, foregrounding behaviors marked by sickness and decay.

Figure 3
Amarelo Manga. Film Poster. The reference to sex and instincts are present in the quote on top of the poster, taken from a line spoken by the priest in the film.

Yet, Amarelo Manga also manifests a cynical attitude, exemplified through the director’s cameo appearance. Cláudio Assis approaches Kika (Dira Paes) while she is walking on the street and whispers, “Modesty is the most intelligent form of perversion.”⁸ In this act of lecturing a character, the director positions himself as a moral arbiter, embodying the ultimate stance of condemnation. Additionally, the direct address to the camera, simultaneously engaging and alienating spectators, owing to the accusatory tone of both the script and the actors’ performances-one need only recall the opening soliloquy by Leona Cavalli, who explicitly tells everyone to “Fuck off.”⁹ Such moments produce a blunt pedagogical effect, reiterating a viewpoint of humanity that is indignant yet fundamentally naïve.

Amarelo Manga’s open spaces underscore its Naturalistic impulse and intention to denounce social degradation. The priest’s journey (Figure 4) through the slum-a labyrinthine environment of subhuman dwellings-culminates at a sealed church whose doors and windows, cemented shut, form the semblance of a corpse’s face with closed eyes. During this wandering, the voiceover narration pronounces, “We’re doomed to be free.”¹⁰ Thus, freedom in this maze equates paradoxically to being perpetually lost. The dreary, dilapidated labyrinth of endless streets leading only back to themselves is also characteristic of Cidade de Deus, as we will discuss further in this article.

Figure 4
Amarelo Manga: The labyrinth of the slums

Moreover, this paradoxical statement echoes another expressed by the voiceover: “the human being is stomach and sex.”¹¹ This fatalism accords instincts a preeminent role in subjectivity, although these instincts are not explored as a nuanced response to a body/mind dichotomy or as an astute Freudian critique. Rather, they are presented superficially, reducing human potential to sordid acts seemingly intended merely for shock value.

Consequently, it is unsurprising that spaces in Amarelo Manga emphasize the degradation of Recife’s urban environment and inhabitants, depicted metaphorically as living “like maggots in manure,” in reference to Azevedo’s novel. Façades, shops, parks, and streets are portrayed in states of decay.

CIDADE DE DEUS: THE LABYRINTH, THE SPECTACLE, AND THE CAMERA AS WEAPON

Similarly to the “maggots” in Claudio Assis’s film, Fernando Meirelles’ Cidade de Deus (2002) also seems to produce its notion of life through an animal metaphor. The title sequence (Figure 5) presents a frenetic chase after a hen, which frantically tries to escape its fate by running through the streets of the slum. In the maze formed by the slum’s arteries, the hen stands no chance. There is no way out for it, caught between the violence of drug dealers and the police. Framing and camera movement favor the hen’s perspective, which also resemble a video game.

Figure 5
Cidade de Deus: Initial sequence

These first shots announce the dynamic camera movements and editing which, throughout the film, will destabilize the spectator’s sense of direction and space. This disorientation, however, operates within the confines of the slum. Cidade de Deus, the diegetic space in which the film is set, is a maze of dirty alleys. As most of the action takes place there, we are given few other spatial references (a beach, the newspaper building); it is the maze that concerns us here. It is a self-contained world, its narrow lanes ending in dead ends.

But it has not always been like this, this Cidade de Deus. Once, it was a romanticized place inhabited by the Robin Hood-esque Trio Ternura of the 1960s. The nostalgic tone is established through the musical soundtrack, when we hear “Alvorada no Morro” (Dawn in the Hill/Slum). The song, composed by Carlos Cachaça, Cartola, and Hermínio Bello de Carvalho in 1968, says:

Dawn on the hill- so pretty,
no one cries, no sorrow here,
no one’s disappointed.
The sky, now painted,
so beautiful,
and nature smiles,
tinting the world.¹²

Nostalgia is accompanied by irony, as the images deny the most obvious meaning of the lyrics. Still, this early version of Cidade de Deus, with its dusty roads and inept criminals, is far from the war zone it will become later in the narrative. The Trio Ternura remain much closer to the cultural matrix of the malandro, living by their wits, avoiding confrontation whenever possible-at least in comparison with the ‘professional’ criminality embodied by Dadinho/Zé Pequeno. In fact, the transformation of young Dadinho into Zé Pequeno is also a transformation of the image, from the ochre/yellow tones of the ‘old’ Cidade de Deus to the somber shades of blue and gray of the 1970s and 1980s. However, cinematography is only one of the elements changed by this temporal dislocation. The ‘professionalization’ of the criminal, the aggravation of violence, is also manifested in the deaths of the malandro Cabeleira and the marginal Zé Pequeno. The former dies a romantic hero, leaving his girlfriend behind, surrounded by the people of the favela. The soundtrack plays Candeia’s song “Preciso me Encontrar” (I Need to Find Myself), whose lyrics say:

Let me go
I have to go
I’ll walk around searching
Laughing so as not to cry
I want to see the sun rise
See the river waters running
Listen to the birds singing
I want to be born
I want to live
Let me go
I have to go
I’ll walk around searching
Laughing so as not to cry
If someone asks for me
Tell them I will only come back
When I find myself.¹³

The lyrics are accompanied by a melancholic bassoon solo that carries the melodic line, emphasizing the sorrow and sadness surrounding Cabeleira’s death. Zé Pequeno’s death, on the other hand, occurs brutally and almost without ceremony. There is, of course, a genre convention at work: Zé Pequeno is the villain and deserves his death. The reassuring punishment of the villain contrasts with the poignant death of the not-so-bad malandro. Yet Zé Pequeno’s death points to something else. It personifies the expendable life that inhabits the favela.

The film’s shifts between past and present are not always smoothly paced. The ebb and flow of time may be erratic, as in the sequence that explains the rise and fall of the “gang do apê” (the apartment gang). Mise-en-scène plays an important role in revealing the transformations taking place, but these are orchestrated more forcefully by the voice-over narration, which controls the narrative by deciding when events should unfold. For Ismail Xavier (2006), the voice’s decisive control over the narrative functions as a mediating device that comes between the audience and the film, organizing, restraining, and pacifying the diegetic world. Buscapé’s role as photographer underscores this mediation: the camera distances him from the sordid world around him. But this camera is not free of ambiguity.

We need only recall that Zé Pequeno’s death occurs under the scrutiny of the camera. We might say the camera (re)frames the killing, transforming it into a spectacle for the newspaper’s readers. But it is also through the camera that Zé Pequeno’s gang becomes visible, becomes a subject. If we isolate a frame from the sequence in which Buscapé produces the gang’s ‘official’ images, it is quite revealing: Buscapé’s image merges with that of the gang (Figure 6). For a brief moment, they are one and the same. But this identification is immediately undone, fulfilling the redemptive promise reserved for the boy with the camera, who helps us maintain our distance from the gang.

Yet there is little point in acknowledging this ambiguity without also recognizing the camera as a ‘shooting machine’. Caught between drug dealers and the police, Buscapé’s camera aims to record everything, to collect images of the favela for the consumption of those who cannot see “what it is really like.” He clicks, and he shoots-a fatal photograph/bullet hits a gang member (Figure 7).

Figure 6
Cidade de Deus. Buscapé produces the images of the bandits. In the top right frame, the fusion of the images.

Figure 7
Cidade de Deus. A character is ‘shot’ by Buscapé’s camera.

Nor is it only Buscapé’s camera that shoots. The film camera itself becomes a bullet. It zigzags through the streets, ricocheting until it reaches its final destination. This time, however, it does not hit anyone. What, then, does the camera do when it becomes a bullet? It selects its victims; it decides who is to die and who is to live. These images enact exclusion-not only through literal depictions of annihilation but also via dynamic camera movements that blur the bodies of those excluded from the juridical order. One of the most disturbing scenes in the film shows a child shooting other children from Zé Pequeno’s gang. By contrasting deep and shallow focus, the images of the children are effaced, leaving only traces of their existence (Figure 8).

Figure 8
Cidade de Deus: The effacement of characters in the manipulation of focus

In the instances described above, Cidade de Deus suggests ways of recognizing not only representation but the actual production of power over life. Camera movement, cinematography, mise-en-scène, and voice-over narration are filmic elements that naturalize control over life and the filmic experience.

There remains one final element that reinforces the argument we are trying to make. The film’s ending hints at a nihilistic resolution, where the younger generation of criminals takes over the drug trade. Violence becomes trapped in a loop within the diegetic world of the slum’s maze. With no external referent beyond the elimination of life, violence in the film does not generate intensities that could unsettle representational clichés. Here, clichés dictate the terms: violence is co-opted by power and moralized as exemplary punishment for the ‘bad guys.’

ESTORVO AND ERRANCY AS A FORM OF RESISTANCE

There are, nevertheless, other possibilities within Brazilian cinema for articulating violence, as exemplified by Ruy Guerra’s Estorvo. Estorvo is adapted from a novel by Chico Buarque, first published in 1991. Both works present non-linear narratives featuring a man who believes he is pursued by unknown assailants; in attempting to flee his persecutors, he continually encounters individuals to whom he becomes an unwelcome burden. The book begins with a circular chain of words-“burden, to burden, extubare, disturb, perturbation, bewilderment, turbid, whirling, turbulence, turmoil, trouble, trap, hustle, crowd, slumber, stupor, cripple, uprising, insubordination, burden”¹⁴- which signals the dissolution of a conventional narrative line by immersing readers in a singular space and time. Much like the protagonist, drifting aimlessly through the city, readers and viewers alike are thrust into discontinuous space and time. The main character’s perambulations undermine linearity, intertwining past, present, and future, thus creating a “burdened” film that denies facile gratification.

Erratic conceptions of time and space are further accentuated by Ruy Guerra’s decision to fragment the imagined city of Estorvo across three countries: Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), Cuba (Havana), and Portugal (Lisbon). The protagonist’s wanderings in nameless locales preclude the reconstitution of either geography or history; indeed, the term “to err” functions here with dual significance: to walk through unfamiliar streets also implies existing in a state of confusion relative to one’s surroundings, a form of spatial misalignment. This is evident in the scene where the protagonist meets his sister for breakfast, and she displays photographs of unidentifiable places-seemingly interchangeable. His gaze drifts across these images, bereft of any inclination to determine whether they are genuine locales or mere representations.

Moreover, the protagonist’s deambulatory motion connects an array of dissimilar places: dilapidated buildings, modern shopping complexes, opulent mansions, and deserted farmsteads. These spatial shifts reverberate through other forms of displacement, notably in the film’s linguistic politics. The lead Cuban actor, Jorge Perugorría, converses in Portuguese with a discernible Spanish accent, occasionally interjecting Spanish. In addition, Ruy Guerra’s voice-over narration bears a distinct Mozambican inflection. Hence, the supposedly “natural” bond linking territory and language is disrupted, since speech in varying languages occurs irrespective of local context.

A further instance of displacement lies in challenging the commonplace assumption that men inhabit the public sphere whereas women belong to the domestic realm. Here, the main character does not perform socially prescribed male duties; rather, his wife fills these roles. Mise-en-scène underscores this reversal, depicting him in an apron, idly reclining on a sofa. The character’s prevailing sense of alienation emerges from his transitions-between affluent pool parties and run-down suburbs, or between public and private arenas-never fully belonging in any milieu.

As a schizophrenic stroller, the protagonist of Estorvo contrasts with the rationalist, utilitarian demands of contemporary society, which insists that actions be justified in terms of social propriety. He is not, however, a flâneur. According to Tom Gunning:

The flâneur flaunted a characteristic detachment which depended on the leisurely pace of the stroll and the stroller’s possession of a fund of knowledge about the city and its inhabitants. As an observer par excellence, the flâneur attempted to assert both independence from and insight into the urban scenes he witnessed. [Walter] Benjamin’s famous example of flâneurs walking turtles on leashes stands as an emblem of the figure’s unhurried pace. […] Further, the flâneur classified the sights before him into more or less stable (even if ironic) categories. [...] However, as Benjamin stresses, this was a petit bourgeois genre offering limited insight, a literature of reassurance which sifted the shifting and potentially chaotic urban population into superficial stereotypes. [Edgar Allan] Poe’s convalescent at his plate glass window exemplifies both the leisurely observation and the epistemological confidence of the classic flâneur. He displays, as Brand puts it, the flaneur as domesticator of reality, aspiring to reduce it to a comfortable transparency (1997, p. 28).

Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, as elaborated by Gunning, is the self-styled observer of modernity who endeavors to moderate the hectic tempo of his era through unhurried strolls that reveal the city and its social types. In contrast, Estorvo features a jittery wanderer propelled by paranoid delusions. He is wholly immersed in disjointed spaces, devoid of the flâneur’s detachment or confidence in attaining epistemological certainty. Furthermore, the reliance on closer framings, agitated camera movements mirroring the protagonist’s gaze, and limited use of wide shots prevents the viewer from obtaining a clearer spatial orientation. The image thus compels us to share the protagonist’s viewpoint: we look but cannot entirely comprehend what we see.

What remains possible is simply to track the main character’s trajectory within constraints. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau explores how such constraints might be subverted via everyday “tactics,” which clash with the “strategies” of dominant powers. For Certeau, a “strategy” “postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats [...] can be managed” (2002, p. 36). In an effort to convert time into space, it establishes predictable patterns of surveillance, rendering “the uncertainties of history into readable spaces” (p. 36). Strategies arise from a power/knowledge matrix whose existence precedes them, one that can designate an appropriate location.

In contrast, “tactics” involve “calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus” (p. 37). They occur in the “space of the other” (p. 37), manifesting randomly, unpredictably, and without explicit expertise. Tactics, then, represent “the art of the weak” (p. 37). By employing such tactics, individuals can evade the “machine of the law, a social typewriter that inscribes bodies metaphorically-via requirements to carry identification-or physically-through oppressive force. Even when the city is demarcated by prohibitive constructions such as fences and walls, certain residual sites remain accessible, including sidewalks, rooftops, and staircases.

Jorge Perugorría’s character in Estorvo deploys tactics to remain unregistered by official systems. Both he and the film itself attempt to elude the figurative typewriter. The conventional naming of places for the purpose of situating them in our collective imagination has long constituted a strategic method of spatial representation, often employed to delineate “national” spaces from “foreign” ones. In Guerra’s work, however, the result is a violent, downtrodden universe that amalgamates “Third World” contexts (Cuba and Brazil) and “First World” settings (Portugal), unsettling the notion of national identity. Ultimately, Estorvo implies the absence of any coherent “being together,” or a shared community.

In essence, Estorvo confronts the viewer with sensational violence and violent sensations. Distributed across urban terrains, it reinserts the sensationalist rationale of representation, wherein imitation safeguards us from the discomfort provoked by stark visual brutality. Through tactics of displacement, Estorvo offers a provisional alternative. However, the predominant imagery nonetheless perpetuates and replicates biopower.

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION

Doxa, or common-sense thinking, typically holds that depictions of violence in urban settings incite moral outrage, prompting viewers to categorize these images as inherently good or bad and urging a moralistic corrective stance on reality itself. Taken together, Cidade de Deus, Amarelo Manga, and Estorvo articulate three distinct yet interrelated approaches to representing violence and urban space in contemporary Brazilian cinema. While Cidade de Deus constructs the favela as a self-contained labyrinth governed by an economy of expendable lives, and Amarelo Manga renders Recife’s old neighborhoods as a grotesque stage of instinctual degradation, both films engage in a Naturalist aesthetic that seeks to reveal a sordid “truth” about Brazilian urban life. Their stylistic choices-dynamic camerawork, saturated colors, fragmented narratives-intensify the spectacle of marginality, often at the cost of reinforcing biopolitical logics that normalize poverty and criminality as immutable features of the social landscape. These films offer viewers a carefully framed image of social decay, one that paradoxically claims immediacy while concealing its own aesthetic mediation. They do not simply reflect violence; they produce it, codify it, and circulate it as both moral allegory and consumable image.

In contrast, Estorvo unsettles the spatial and narrative coherence found in the other two films. By dislocating the protagonist across multiple national and linguistic contexts and denying the viewer a stable point of identification or orientation, Ruy Guerra’s film disarticulates the familiar frameworks through which violence and subjectivity are usually made legible. Rather than offering a panoramic view of urban chaos, Estorvo embodies disorientation, adopting what Michel de Certeau would call tactical operations-improvised acts that resist spatial domination. When read in relation to Cidade de Deus and Amarelo Manga, Estorvo suggests an alternative cinematic grammar, one less invested in rendering the city visible as a totality and more attuned to the gaps, failures, and errancies of representation itself. These three films, when viewed in dialogue, reveal the tension within Brazilian cinema between aestheticizing violence and resisting its narrative containment, raising critical questions about the ethics of seeing and the politics of spatial imagination.

Taken together, Cidade de Deus, Amarelo Manga, and Estorvo offer contrasting but complementary perspectives on how contemporary Brazilian cinema constructs the urban experience. While the first two films draw from a Naturalist tradition that foregrounds instinct, pathology, and social determinism, often aestheticizing violence through highly stylized cinematic forms, Estorvo disrupts these conventions by embracing narrative and spatial fragmentation, errancy, and dislocation. Each film enacts a form of textuality that is not merely illustrative of violence, but productive of particular regimes of visibility, meaning, and affect. Through the filmic manipulation of mise-en-scène, camera movement, voice-over, and diegetic structure, urban space is not simply represented-it is actively fabricated as a site where biopolitical tensions, ethical dilemmas, and political contradictions unfold.

By foregrounding the textual operations of the cinematic medium, this article contributes to the field of film studies by challenging the assumption that urban violence in Brazilian cinema is self-evident or merely documentary in nature. It proposes a methodological shift that privileges close formal analysis and theoretical engagement with film language, arguing that what is seen on screen cannot be disentangled from how it is constructed and mediated. This approach situates violence not only as a theme, but as a discursive formation shaped by filmic form-one that may either reproduce hegemonic visual regimes or offer points of resistance. Moreover, the comparative reading of these three films allows us to trace a tension within Brazilian cinema between realist impulses and self-reflexive critique, between representation as moral spectacle and as political inquiry.

Future research may build on this analysis by expanding the corpus to include films made in the 2010s and 2020s, particularly those shaped by digital aesthetics, streaming platforms, and new modes of spectatorship. How, for instance, do recent productions negotiate the visibility of marginalized spaces in the context of online distribution and global reception? How are questions of authorship, voice, and territoriality reconfigured by emerging forms of cinematic production such as collective filmmaking, community-based narratives, or hybrid documentary-fiction formats? These are urgent questions, especially as Brazilian cinema continues to grapple with socio-political instability and the reconfiguration of public discourse.

REFERENCES

• AMARAL, T. Em busca do naturalismo no cinema. 2007. Unpublished text.
• AZEVEDO, A. O cortiço. São Paulo: Penguin Classics; Companhia das Letras, 2016.
• BELSEY, C. Critical Practice. Londres; Nova York: Methuen, 1980.
• BENTES, I. Sertões e favelas no cinema brasileiro contemporâneo: estética e cosmética da fome. Revista Alceu, v. 8, n. 15, 2007, p. 242-255.
• BUARQUE, C. Estorvo. São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 1991.
• DE CERTEAU, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
• GUNNING, T. From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913). Wide Angle, [S.l.], v. 19, n. 4, p. 25-61, out. 1997.
• MECCHI, L. O cinema popular brasileiro do século 21. 2008. Available at: http://www.revistacinetica.com.br/cinemapopular1.htm Access in: 27 mar. 2025.
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• STEINBERG, S. View of the World from 9th Avenue, The New Yorker cover, March 29, 1976. Ink, pencil, colored pencil and watercolor on paper. The Saul Steinberg Foundation. Available at: https://saulsteinbergfoundation.org/essay/view-of-the-world-from-9th-avenue/. Access in: March, 27 2025.
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• SÜSSEKIND, F. Tal Brasil, qual romance? Rio de Janeiro: Achiamé, 1984.
• XAVIER, I. Discurso cinematográfico: opacidade e transparência. 2nd. ed. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2005.
• XAVIER, I. Corrosão social, pragmatismo e ressentimento: vozes dissonantes no cinema brasileiro de resultados. Novos Estudos - Cebrap, [S.l.], n. 75, p. 139-155, jul. 2006.

• 1
  In the original: O que aliás não impediu que as casinhas continuassem a surgir, uma após outra, e fossem logo se enchendo, a estenderem-se unidas por ali a fora, desde a venda até quase ao morro, e depois dobrassem para o lado do Miranda e avançassem sobre o quintal deste, que parecia ameaçado por aquela serpente de pedra e cal. [...] E naquela terra encharcada e fumegante, naquela umidade quente e lodosa, começou a minhocar, a esfervilhar, a crescer, um mundo, uma coisa viva, uma geração, que parecia brotar espontânea, ali mesmo, daquele lameiro, e multiplicar-se como larvas no esterco. All translations are ours, unless otherwise indicated.
• 2
  In the original: Quando um romance tenta ocultar sua própria ficcionalidade em prol de uma maior referencialidade, talvez os seus grandes modelos estejam efetivamente na ciência e na informação jornalística, via de regra consideradas paradigmas da objetividade e da veracidade.
• 3
  In the original: O que eu buscava era a verdade das situações e das emoções e estas nem sempre correspondiam ao que imaginávamos. Mais do que impor uma história, eu queria que eles contassem as deles [...] Que funcionasse como uma “espiada” na vida daquelas personagens que estão lá independentes da câmera.
• 4
  In the original: É preciso que do escritor se faça película virgem em busca de impressões reais, assim como da opacidade da literatura simples transparência para que o público possa ver o acontecido sem nenhuma barreira e sem as ambigüidades próprias ao ficcional. [...] Uma obra fica valorizada desde que análoga ao real. Um escritor, desde que semelhante a uma câmera.
• 5
  In the original: Entre todas as espécies que existem no mundo o homem é a que mais merece morrer.
• 6
  In the original: Amarelou mangou de mim/Não vai ficar de graça/E dentro desta caixa/Um corpo indigente/Um corpo que não fala/Um corpo que não sente.
• 7
  In the original: Amarelo é a cor das mesas, dos bancos, dos cabos das peixeiras, da enxada e da estrovenga. Do carro-de-boi, das cangas, dos chapéus envelhecidos, da charque. Amarelo das doenças, das remelas dos olhos dos meninos, das feridas purulentas, dos escarros, das verminoses, das hepatites, das diarréias, dos dentes apodrecidos [...] Tempo interior amarelo. Velho, desbotado, doente.
• 8
  In the original: O pudor é a forma mais inteligente de perversão.
• 9
  In the original: O que eu quero é que todo mundo vá tomar no cu.
• 10
  In the original: Estamos condenados a ser livres.
• 11
  In the original: O ser humano é estômago e sexo.
• 12
  In the original: Alvorada/Lá no morro, que beleza/Ninguém chora, não há tristeza/Ninguém sente dissabor/O sol colorindo/É tão lindo, é tão lindo/E a natureza sorrindo/Tingindo, tingindo.
• 13
  Deixe-me ir/Preciso andar/Vou por aí a procurar/Rir prá não chorar/Quero assistir ao sol nascer/Ver as águas dos rios correr/Ouvir os pássaros cantar/Eu quero nascer, quero viver/Deixe-me ir/Preciso andar/Vou por aí a procurar/Rir prá não chorar/Se alguém por mim perguntar/Diga que eu só vou voltar/Quando eu me encontrar.
• 14
  In the original: Estorvo, estorvar, exturbare, distúrbio, perturbação, torvação, turva, torvelinho, turbulência, turbilhão, trouble, trápola, atropelo, tropel, torpor, estupor, estropiar, estrupício, estrovenga, estorvo.

Edited by

• Section Editor:
  Fábio José Rauen

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  22 Sept 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  01 Apr 2025
• Accepted
  02 June 2025