City of god notes (out of class from an interview)

Underline = reason for camera shot

highlighted= important information

red ink = uses of mise-en-scene and editing

blue ink=  sound

Sequences and timings/links

• Opening sequence ‘The Flying Chicken’ 00:00:44 - 00:05:50

• ‘The Story of the Apartment’ 00:35:00 - 00:38:11

Camera shots

The open environment where there are spaces to play football gives way to the closed one with the cramped and narrow streets confined by apartment blocks, tin roofed shacks, and graffiti spattered walls. The characters become more and more hemmed in by the encroachment of these walls and barriers, their dimensions emphasised by overhead shots.

 Camera in a fixed position for ‘The Story of the Apartment’, spectator watching from a place in the stalls of a theatre, not entering the Apartment or seeing things from the characters’ points of view. This could be done so that you don’t feel attached to a character so that the film can be more like a documentary. The story is told with a series of dissolves where people appear, disappear and reappear in different parts of the room.

The atmosphere created by lighting, cinematography and camera movement can be illustrated by looking at the disco scene. Shots of the dancing crowd from the dancers’ eye line contrast with high angle shots from Rocket’s point of view as he puts discs on the turn table, emphasising his position as an observer and not a participant.

Mise-en-Scène/editing

Rocket is seen in an atmosphere of normality and freedom – working in the newspaper office, riding around in the newspaper delivery van with the open aspect of the mountain in the distance.

A montage of shots of six images that turn the boy Dice into the man Zé. His rebirth is through a candlelit voodoo christening ceremony that evokes the dead.

Daniel Rezende editor “What we tried to do with the editing was attempt to use ‘effects’ whenever we thought that this could bring something extra to the sensation or emotion that we were aiming to evoke. If the situation is tense, and there’s no time to think, we speed it up and make it even tenser. If the character is going to be important later, then we freeze the face to commit it to memory. If both things happen at the same time then we split the screen, so as not to lose anything. In the third part of the film, we especially welcomed anything out of the ordinary for the editing style. If a ‘badly made’ cut could increase levels of discomfort tin the viewer then we incorporated it.”

The ‘restless’ style, characteristic of the film, announces itself from the start. It begins not with the customary establishing shot but with flashes that illuminate a series of close ups -knife, hand, and stone – with a cut to black between each shot.

Brazilians describe a situation that appears to have taken off and be going but will soon crash to the ground as a “flying chicken”. This apparent freedom is illusionary – the chicken might try to fly but it can’t get very far. A close up low-level shot from the chicken’s point of view shows a plate of blood on the ground, a reminder of the chicken’s fate.