This was my third time watching the City of God, and with each viewing, I find that the film reveals a little more about itself; the dense, active, and chaotic space is somehow always punctuated with moments of clarity that interweave themselves in the urban fabric. De-centralized and continuously expanding, favelas are somewhat of an urban phenomenon. There is a self-organized spontaneity to them that inherently includes a logic of diversity. I was especially interested this time in following how the camera works with and/or against this urban fabric.

Within the film, architecture serves the purpose of facilitating fluid camera movement from one space into another, from one doorway through another, acting as stand-in facades that function not so much as set design as they do as tools to frame characters, as vignettes that introduce individual portraits of people in constant states of dislocation and relocation. The running camera immerses us into the layered dynamics of the neighborhood—the density as well as expanse of it. It follows one character and lands on another as the voiceover helps us transition between characters. We move quickly in and out of a lot of places, we witness many events, and as we remain confined on the microcosmic level of activity, we become even more aware of the macro systematic problems of gang violence and power vacuums.