Films which make a
spectacle of violence make difficult the
discussion which they intend to stimulate. In Brazil, in addition
to the influence of the American film, we have the influence
of the "Globo standard of quality" for 30 years. Both have
made the public extremely demanding in terms of realism.
by: Maria
Rita Kehl
I must begin with a categorical statement: every image has a potential for
violence. Now I will try to explain. An image has an extraordinary power to
communicate. If every sign is a placeholder for something absent, an image
is what is closest to the thing itself.
The more mimetic the image,
the greater its power in this regard. If this is already the case for representational
painting and photography, what can be said of the power of cinematographic
images to represent the real?
We are looking at living
people, acting and speaking like we do, in environments which, depending on
the intention of the director, can be identical to those we are familiar with.
The critic can—or
rather, ought to—problematize the pretensions of naturalism in the cinema;
but one cannot minimize the impact of these films on the spectator. The cinematographic
image which is presented from a realist perspective is that which most resembles,
for those who are watching it, an exact translation of aspects of life.
What is the violence of
this impact? The violence which pertains to all the formations of the imagination.
The imagination is the psychic terrain of stable significations. The image
translates the thing as if it were the expression of its truth.
The imagination, as Freud
writes in a text about the unconscious, is the field of the "primary
and true object relations". It is formed before human contact with the
real is mediated by the word. If the real invades us in a traumatic way, imaginary
representations are our most primitive resources for dealing with this invasion.
They supply us with a
matrix of "understanding" (the quotes are necessary) which is prior
to thought; for the rest of our lives, when we see familiar images, we feel
comfortably relieved of the responsibility of thinking.
As if they presented us
with the plenitude of the real, relieved of both its mystery and its traumatic
effect; the real translated into its own image. The imagination, in this sense,
relieves of our lack. Our lack of the thing and our lack of truth. It is a
field of certainty and of totalizing illusions.
We don’t have to go far
to understand that the imagination is the field upon which we construct the
protective fortress of narcissism. It is the field of the identities which
sustain the mirage of being. The field in which all human identifications
are produced through a mirroring effect.
We cannot do without the
imagination. One cannot live in the world without believing, most of the time,
that things "are the way they are", i.e., they are as they present
themselves to us in our imagination.
One cannot live in the
absence of meaning, in the significant’s discretion, in the pure symbolic
dimensions—which by the way is the fundamental dimension of thought.
The imagination is essential to the functioning of the psyche. On the other
hand, it is also not possible to live completely dominated by its totalizing
effect.
Image and Violence
This is because the comforting
power of the image is directly proportional to its violence. Since in the
terrain in which things "are the way they are", all that humans
can do is adjust to them.
In the terrain in which
thinking can be dispensed with, Hannah Arendt would say, humans can be dispensed
with as well; and where humans are dispensable, violence easily dominates
social links.
I am referring to gratuitous
violence, violence as the predominating way in which one reacts to the presence
of the other, in facing the disagreements and conflicts which the other brings
to us. If the imagination is the field which structures the fortress of narcissism
of the ego, the relation to the other in terms of the imagination will inevitably
be one of paranoia.
In a narcissistic society,
the other always represents a threat of invasion. I want to emphasize this
fundamental aspect: in a society predominantly organized by the logic of images,
the relation to the other is marked by paranoia.
The other aspect of the
violence of the imagination is that of violence as the expression of a feeling
of impotence, of the futility of men confronting a reality which is presented
as totalitarian through the force of the image.
The facility with which
the image presents us with a version of the real is directly proportional
to the oppression that this imagined real, void of contradiction, produces
in us.
I wrote that it is not
possible to live completely dominated by the totalizing effect of the image.
If all dimensions of social life were presented to us as accomplished facts,
from the point of view of "that is the way it is", the resulting
conformism would be so crushing, so oppressive, that it would make human creativity
obsolete.
Continuing a little farther
down the path opened by Arendt, man is different from nature because of his
infinite capacity for creation, of "giving rise to that which does not
exist", of producing something new. Nature conserves, reproduces, perpetuates;
man, unnaturally, invents, begins anew. In a world stabilized by the force
of the image, there is no where to begin anew.
And so, in all societies,
power makes use of spectacle to consolidate its places in the hearts of its
subjects. Spectacle is much more efficient in stabilizing power than force
of arms. It is capable of endowing power with visibility, making it convincing,
consisting, necessary.
Power as Drama
From the Roman emperors
to the absolute monarchs, from Hitler to Stalin, from Bush to Lula, power
has always depended on a healthy dose of theater, a great effort of imagination
in order to become stabilized, in spite of the incompatibility between the
fascination of publicity and the aridity of political negotiation, Or perhaps
precisely for this reason.
In all periods, power
projected itself by images; but our period is the only one capable of producing
images on an industrial scale, with the possibility of distributing them around
the planet. The only one capable of producing images in all areas of social
life, images simultaneous with events, translations of the real published
and transmitted so quickly that image and reality, trauma and meaning become
confused in the perceptions of the spectator.
In all periods power is
translated into images, but our epoch is the only one in which the central
axis of power, which is no longer politics, but capital, is concentrated above
all in the places where images are produced and distributed.
The image is capable of
supplying to poor humans forsaken in the arbitrary realm of language at least
two modalities of enjoyment. The enjoyment of meaning, which takes place at
the moment that the wandering signifier stops to meet the image of the thing.
The enjoyment of meaning
explains why dream and fantasy have, in psychoanalysis, the task of realizing
desires. Desire is not realized in meeting a real object, but in meeting its
representation.
The representation of
a desire by its signifiers would already be sufficient for its realization;
but the encounter with the image potentializes this little pleasure, gives
it the consistency of a thing, an appearance of reality that is comforting
and extremely pleasing. "That’s it!" the subject of the desire says
upon meeting its imaginary representation.
The other type of enjoyment
provided by the image, which is an unfolding of the first, is the enjoyment
of identification. I wrote immediately above that the imagination is the field
where illusions of identity are constructed, which are formed by means of
identifications.
Identity is an illusion
that sustains us. No one is "identical" to himself, nor to the group
of meanings that represent him—name, profession, gender etc.—but
the creation of a stable field of identifications resolves, even if precariously,
our questions about who we are.
The imagination is the
field of these identifications. The presence of the body of the other, of
the look, of the expressions of the other has more impact for the psyche than
our own existence. The image of the other has more "existence" for
me than I do myself.
This is why it causes
jealousy, writes Lacan, an "existential" jealousy, which is not
to be confused with the jealousy which we feel when faced with the loss of
a love object. Jealousy for our own image, overshadowed by the presence of
the image of the other. What follows, and repairs this loss, is identification.
"That is what I am!", is what the poor ego feels, destabilized in
the face of the force of the image of the other.
If this takes place in
our daily interactions with our peers, what can be said about the fulgurating
images produced by the cultural industry. Images from the cinema, from television,
from billboards, present themselves to us dressed in another kind of "aura"
which is not to be confused with the aura which emanates from works of art.
At the axis of production,
the industrialized image is merchandise, clad with the shine of the fetish,
beneath which is hidden the excess value, the time expropriated from the men
who worked to produced it. At the point of consumption, the aura of the objects
from the cultural industry is produced by the thousands and millions of looks
which these objects attract.
Unlike the solitary experience
which an encounter with a work of art, in its strange singularity, can supply,
the encounter with an object of the industrialized culture brings us directly
to the space where "they all" are. The value of an image is directly
proportional to this effect of social covalidation of its power of truth.
To see the film that "they
all" are going to see, to watch the TV series with the highest rating,
are not only way of including the anonymous dweller in the mass society in
the imaginary terms which rule social life. They are also the means by which
elements are produced for the identifications which subjectively homogenize
society.
The identification with
the industrialized image is a broadened form of the same phallic enjoyment
which takes place in other processes of identification. Broadened, because
the image which attracts the eyes of "them all", functions as the
face of power. It is our eyes, multiplied by the thousands, which create the
aura of the industrialized image. It fascinates us to the exact degree by
which it reproduces our alienation.
Cinema and Industrialized
Image
Before directly addressing
the question of Brazilian cinema, a caveat: not all industrialized images
work in the same way. Let us take the cinema of Godard, for example: he works
with his images based on a different logic.
In Godard, the esthetic
enjoyment produced by the cinematographic image is not on the same order as
the production of identifications; he seems, moreover, to work on purpose
against the game of mirrors which makes identification possible, above all
in his films produced at the end of the nineties and the beginning of the
twenty-first century.
His refusal to present
the actors in close-up, the scant illumination of most of the scenes, the
way in which the dialogue and the images are at cross purposes, which prevents
us from knowing "who says what", are resources which work against
the mechanisms by which the public identifies with the characters. And after
all, who are the "characters" in Godard’s most recent films?
I dare to say that for
Godard images are not composed according to laws of full visibility, of the
production of meaning, of realistic effect, which govern the imagination;
in Godard images have a symbolic function. They are like signifiers which
combine so as to produce, not signification, but mystery. Godard’s films are
closer to abstract than to figurative painting.
Another ethics of the
image is possible in the cinema—as Glauber Rocha also proved as well.
But this ethics is certainly not that of the major movie industry, the ethics
of the "happy meeting" between art and capital.
The Brazilian cinema of
the beginning of the twentieth century is perhaps the most powerful ever produced
in Brazil, not only in terms of the potency of the images but also in terms
of its impact on society.
They are films which deal
with wretchedness, urban violence, exclusion, the corruption of the elites,
injustice, abuses of power, the lack of the most elementary human rights,
etc.
Films which seek, whether
with humor or drama, to alert society to these problems. Or which seek, at
a minimum, to contribute to making it possible to think about them, to put
the violence of poverty on the imaginary map of Brazil of the elites—that
is, the elites which go to the cinema.
The greater part of these
films have made a strong impact nationally and internationally. I don’t mean
to minimize them by labeling them as "cinema de denúncia (cinema
of accusation)", nor do I like the expression "cosmética
da fome (cosmetic of hunger)", coined by Ivana Bentes, because the artistic
quality of this harvest of films surpasses these clichés—the best
of them do not represent misery with make up.
Perhaps they even emphasize
the horror too much. What I would like to discuss is the problematical effect
of discussing violence by means of images of violence.
Need for Realism
I fear that the films
which make a spectacle of violence make difficult the discussion which they
intend to stimulate. In Brazil, in addition to the strong influence of the
American film industry, we have been under the influence of the "Globo
standard of quality" for thirty years.
Both have made the public
extremely demanding as far as the "realism" of the production is
concerned, and the result is to dissuade film directors from seeking other
experimental possibilities in dealing with the image.
"Reality", in
contemporary cinema, must pass everything through the strainer of visibility.
Following this logic of spectacle we would say (thinking of Guy Débord),
that only that which can be fully visible exists, is part of the "real".
Human reality is always
the result of the language which we use in order to approach it. "Reality
is a convention of light" was the title of an article which I wrote on
the film "Lúcio Flávio, passageiro da agonia", by
Hector Babenco, for a master’s level course which I did with com Ismail Xavier,
in 1980.
The danger of abuse of
explicitly violent images is that it includes violence among the terms of
the language which constructs society’s sense of what is normal and everyday
reality.
Since the eighties, it
was necessary for Brazilian cinema to blot out all traces of the esthetics
of the Cinema Novo—which also had proposed a different ethics for the
relationship between image and social violence—so that it might finally
become a cinema for the masses.
Another problem of violence
as spectacle, which is increased by the realistic treatment of the image,
is that it undoes a large part of the ethical effect of these films, thus
producing some important "side effects".
The most obvious is the
raising of our level of emotional tolerance as far as violence is concerned.
The continual exposure of our sensibility to scenes of horror, to the sight
of the suffering of our fellow human beings, to the contemplation of bodies
which are mistreated, wounded, shattered, ends by leaving us relatively indifferent.
A vicious circle is created:
to the degree that we become accustomed to darker scenes, the film industry
calls on even more violent and frightening special effects.
It is clear that any sort
of "consciousness-raising against violence", if such a thing ever
existed, has already been replaced by the enjoyment of the violence which
the film intends to decry.
And moreover, these images
invite the spectator to enjoy the violence; in a society governed by the pleasure
imperative, as contemporary market-driven societies are, the enjoyment of
violence is the most immediate response to the violence of the imperative
of enjoyment.
The Charm of Violence
Secondly, the public comes
to identify with the violent characters themselves, as well as having an unconscious
fascination with the acts of violence, which are associated in these narratives
with characteristics of power, boldness, force, courage, in contexts in which
it is only when they are translated into violent acts that these human qualities
are able of producing any kind of transformation.
It would be unfair to
say that cinema or television produce the social violence which torments Brazilian
life. I think it is more appropriate to say they participate in the same logic
that produces this violence. The economic coercion which is at the base of
production for cinema and television impedes, or at least makes it difficult
for another logic to replace it.
I would need to turn the
screw a few more times to show that the logic of violence, in the end, is
the same as the logic of the concentration of capital. For the moment I do
not have all the means necessary to execute this theoretical pirouette.
In conclusion, I want
to mention quickly some films produced in the last two years which, in spite
of the fact that they cannot avoid the problems mentioned above, show some
attempts to develop en ethics of approaching the problem of social violence.
O Invasor, by Beto
Brant (2001), relativizes the impact of violence through the use of irony.
In addition to this, it dislocates the focus of the narrative, finding the
origin of violence not in the underworld from where it is commonly believed
to originate, but in the ferocious competition and corruption of the elites.
Brant’s film throws out
some bait to catch the uncautious viewer. As soon as we see the trailer we
think we know where the violence will be coming from: Anísio, the hired
killer played by Paulo Miklos, appears in quick and menacing cuts, with an
evil glare, the hard lines of his face lit so as to make them look even harder,
a cruel smile, the imaginary "parabelo" pointed at the camera (read:
the public): cláclá!
Back to Normal Life
But our expectations about
the cruelty of the hired killer are not confirmed. Once he has done the "job"
for which he was hired, Anísio invades the life of his bourgeois partners,
who are hoping to return to normalcy after the crime.
As if having an irksome
partner killed was a sort of temporary fix, an exceptional thing for difficult
moments, after which one can return, unstained, to the democratic institutions
of life: family, clubs, school, business.
It is just that there
is no longer normality to return to: the invader does not invade the life
of his accomplices to make them hellish, but because he wants to be bourgeois
like them. Like Hegel’s slave, Anísio returns in order to teach the
entrepreneurs (his masters) who they truly are.
An inglorious task, like
all teaching. The entrepreneurs/killers do not want to see themselves in the
killer they hired. The killer, for his part, discovers that the entrepreneurs’
life fits him like a glove. He conquers the heart of the adolescent daughter
of the victim.
He appears at the company,
and pretends that he works there. He enters, he stays. We, in the audience,
expect that the violence will continue to escalate. When will Anisio get tougher?
When will heads begin to roll?
But this is not an American
film. It is not Cape Fear. Not Fatal Attraction. This film will
not satiate our desire to see Ivan (Marco Ricca), the businessman who regrets
what he has done, blow Anísio’s brains out, nor will it try to morally
justify our murderous impulses.
Very reluctantly, we begin
to understand that the invader is not the most violent character in the film.
He is only the ugliest character. He is only the poorest.
The roots of the violence:
they are where they have always been, with the elites. In the lack of scruples
justified by the logic of capital. In impunity. In greed.
And moreover: violence
is, principally, to be found in the yearnings of everyone, adolescents, adults,
poor, rich for unlimited, unending enjoyment, pleasure. We see no shots in
the film, no blood, no beatings, no clubbings.
The most violent and disturbing
scenes are the parties to which the rich adolescent brings her new boyfriend.
There, high on Ecstasy, the young people from the Jardins excitedly act out
the sound and the fury of the city, which the security guards hired by their
parents are working hard to keep outside.
State Violence
Already in City of
God (2002) by Fernando Meirelles, the matrix of the violence was the action
of the state which removed by force the favelados from Zona Sul of
Rio de Janeiro, in the sixties, in order to drop them into shacks constructed
in a hurry on an arid piece of land, unsupplied with the minimal conditions
of city life, far from the workplaces of the residents, without paved roads,
electricity, sanitation, transport.
The state invented Cidade
de Deus and radicalized the marginality of its inhabitants, moved there, like
undesirable trash. Social violence has its origin in segregation, which is
already denounced at the opening of the film.
It is just that the speed
of the images, a speed more violent than its content (and it is for this reason
that the film captivated Brazilian adolescents raised on television) makes
us forget this essential link.
In City of God,
as in the film by Beto Brant, the majority of murders take place off screen.
But one does not need to see mutilated bodies to experience the horror.
The fear on the character’s
faces, the limitless cruelty of Zé Pequeno—whom we come to hate
within minutes—the desperate crying of the child condemned to be shot,
the nervous, terrorized pulse of the film—a film in accelerated flight,
masterfully tense—all this includes the spectator in the violence which
it intends to demonstrate.
The fight between the
two groups of traffickers becomes so tense, so threatening, that by the end
we are waiting for the climax of the death of the terrible Zé Pequeno.
The spectator is swallowed by the logic of the violence. We want to explode
with it. Only the execution of the criminal will redeem us.
Unlike O Invasor,
which by force of irony prevents us from enjoying the violence, City of
God calls us to participate in it in our imaginations. We are all the
potential exterminators of Zé Pequeno. And so, I am forced to paraphrase
Eugênio Bucci in his crônica for Jornal do Brasil:
"what a magnificent film; what a revolting life".
Carandiru (2002),
by Hector Babenco, continues the more conventional style of the director,
following Lúcio Flávio and Pixote, from 1977 and
1980 respectively.
Faithful to the book by
Dráuzio Varela, Carandiru offers us a critique of oppression
tempered by comforting doses of cordiality. In flashbacks by the prisoners
the institutional violence seems bearable, laden with affection, almost sweet,
until the scenes of the massacre spoil our mood.
We could argue that the
cordiality "humanizes" the characters, brings the prisoners closer
to the public—which is true. It is more likely for the middle class viewer
to identify with Babenco’s bandits than with those of Meirelles. "Here
everyone is innocent, doctor", says the veteran Seu Chico (Milton Gonçalves)
to the recently arrived doctor.
In fact, it seems that
the only agent of violence in Carandiru is the prison itself. At the
end, after the scenes of the massacre, the horror is newly counterbalanced
by the Olympian posture of the doctor (Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos), before the
public has had time to weep for the dead.
Strangely, this film,
which has the rare grandeur of a Brazilian epic, ends by placing a balm on
the wound that it helped to open. "Patience, life is like this",
the complacent smile of Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos seems to say as he leaves
the prison, days after the massacre.
Frustrating Expectations
Finally, I want to mention
a production from Pernambuco: this is Amarelo Manga (2003), by the
novice Cláudio Assis. It is a film which, like O Invasor, does
not fulfill its promise. It frustrates our expectations, forged by watching
hundreds of similar films, that there will be violent outcomes for the various
tense scenes which it presents us with.
I beg your pardon for
having forgotten the names of the characters; I will refer to the actors instead.
The first part of the film makes us thing that the jealous, grumpy butcher
(Chico Diaz) is going to run someone through with his butcher knife: his unfaithful
wife (Dira Paes), his lover, or the homosexual (Mathew Nachtergale) who is
in love with him.
The conflict between the
owner of the bar (Leona Cavali) and the necrophilic guest at the hotel (Jonas
Bloch) also seems likely to end in bloodshed. The characters do not "follow
through" on their threats. The anticlimax to which the film leads truly
frustrates, in the psychoanalytic sense, our expectation of consummating the
violence.
Amarelo Manga tries,
perhaps a little timidly, to approach social violence with a different logic
in mind, which eliminates the climax of the viewer watching traditional "action"
scenes, the function of which is to relieve the tension produced by the narrative.
In this film, social barbarity
is not presented by means of shootings and beatings, but in the form of a
stagnation without the possibility of hope for the future, in which all of
us, both characters and public, are immersed. This
is not something condescending.
The fundamental violence
in this film cannot be reduced to any temporizing; it is found in the poverty
of the settings, the filth stuck to all the old walls, in the apathy, in the
empty expressions of the Indians who eat crackers while watching television
in the filthy lounge of the Texas Hotel.
It is in the lack of air
for the characters. "First comes the day", says Leona Cavalli at
the opening of the film, before, in a foul temper, opening the same filthy
bar as always. "Then everything happens…it doesn’t stop…and then
night comes. That is the best part. Then another day, and it all begins again"….."…
Perhaps the difference
between Amarelo Manga and the other three films which I have addressed
is that the characters live in the historical center of Recife which, though
it is falling to pieces, is still part of the neural circuit of the city.
City as Character
Unlike the favelados
of City of God, the inhabitants of the periphery of São Paulo in O
Invasor and the prison inmates in Carandiru, the characters in
Amarelo Manga belong to the city; they have a territory. The center
of Recife, moreover, is the great character in the film.
We see its colors, its
food, the talk on the sidewalks, we hear the sonic mix of dozens of radios
tuned to different stations—we can almost sense the half-rotten smell
of the city, coming from the garbage on the street mixed with the exhalations
of the swamp.
In the midst of the debris
of the decaying city, the characters preserve a shred of dignity: they belong
to the city and the city belongs to them. The contrast between Amarelo
Manga and the preceding films make us ask whether the most unbearable
and cruelest violence is not that of segregation.
But this is not an effect
of the film itself: it is the effect of the comparison between it and the
others. In closing, a suggestion for the next article: it would be worth doing
a comparative analysis of Ônibus 174 and O Bandido da Luz
Vermelha, emphasizing the role of journalistic narrative—television
in the 2002 film, police programs on the radio in the 1968 film—in the
structuring of the "reception" of the crimes which actually happened
and were fictionally reconstructed by José Padilha in 2002 and Rogério
Sganzerla in 1968.
It is true that in Ônibus
174 the television reportage contributes to the realistic treatment of
the narrative, while the radio commentary in Sganzerla’s Bandido is
more than ironic: it is the central element in the construction of the debauched
language of the film.
But the comparison is
justified because both films bring into question the participation of the
cultural industry in the dissemination of violence by making it not a newsworthy
"happening", but a style of approaching reality.
Maria Rita Kehl is a psychoanalyst, writer and poet, the author of three
books of poetry and the books of essays A mínima diferença—o
masculino e o feminino na cultura. She was born in Campinas, São
Paulo state, in 1951 and is a doctor of clinical psychology. You can reach
her emailing mritak@uol.com.br.
Translated from
the Portuguese by Tom Moore. Moore has been fascinated by the language and
culture of Brazil since 1994. He translates from Portuguese, Spanish, French,
Italian and German, and is also active as a musician. Comments welcome at
querflote@hotmail.com.
