City of God exposes the insufficiency of contemporary filmmaking anchored in the concepts of national cinema and the dichotomy of the commercial/art film. Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles’s feature debut reinvents the socially committed Brazilian cinema through the spectacle of the digital. In other words, Hector Babenco’s Pixote meets The Matrix. Whereas Babenco’s film framed the conditioned-to-be-damned life of the favela mixing austere social realism and the melodramatic stain that haunts most of socially committed filmmaking ever since the Italian neorealist project of the Forties, Lund and Meirelles radicalize Pixote by igniting its foregrounded violence with an audio-visual feast of disproportionate dimensions. The cinematic image’s constructedness is exposed at its fullest: 360-degree axis rotations, slow, backwards and fast motions offer historical time as a narrative permeated with the looming presence of the ruthless law of violence. Childhood, adolescence, and adulthood are presented as indistinguishable parts of a continuum in which the very possession of the firepower capable of extinguishing the other puts in motion the “ballet of the bullet,” granting the self with the sheer authenticity s/he aims at. Wrapped in a endless display of celebratory visual storytelling, City of God’s violence is not only deterministically conceived but also existentially bound to the “state of the art” mechanisms that create its utter materiality.

Widely criticized in Brazil for performing a cosmetic makeover for the monstrous reality of hunger and poverty of the ghetto, City of God has been praised in the United States and Western Europe as an unprecedented achievement of cinematic excellence. Whereas the former brand of criticism privileges social realist films as the bearers of ultimate truth, the latter may indeed owe its passionate acclaim to a sheer lack of historical ignorance regarding the socioeconomic conditions of Brazil. One way or another, in the era of post-classical Hollywood cinema and of global circulation of filmic talent across nations, City of God defines its poly-auterism by explicitly and shamelessly foregrounding the multiple texts that it cites and twisting their meanings via the use of an omniscient voiceover. Narrating in the past tense, the voice appears and disappears at will, as a supreme and impossible connoisseur who manages the “historical epic” of the favela and selects, discards, embellishes, or withdraws information from the spectator. From the very first scene, in which we assume a soon-to-be-chopped rooster’s point of view, what we have here is an ostensibly verité poem in which verisimilitude is immediately thrown to the garbage.
—VICENTE RODRIGUEZ-ORTEGA