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Article Excerpt
These are the characteristic features attributed to repression, which serve to distinguish it from the prohibitions maintained by penal law: repression operated as a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know (1).
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Onibus 174 (Bus 174) tells the story of a hijacked bus on 12 June 2000, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The documentary is drawn from the director Jose Padhila's extensive research of television and traffic surveillance footage, as well as original interviews and investigative documentation surrounding the events of Bus 174 and its perpetrator Sandro Rosa do Nascimento. Bus 174 pronounces to tell a story in two parts, the first being the events that unfold as the police try and fail to handle the "hijacking," the second to attempt to understand the life story of the "hijacker," revealing how a typical Rio de Janeiro street kid is transformed into a violent criminal due to a society systematically denying him any kind of social existence (2).
Bus 174 can be analyzed as a series of events relating to three questions. First, what are Sandro's intentions in relation to Bus 174; does he intend, as a premeditated course of action, to hijack the bus and murder its passengers until his terms are met? Second, how do the Brazilian police, SWAT, civilians and news media interpret Sandro's actions? Third, how is Bus 174 as an event represented in the TV and traffic surveillance footage that Padhila edits; as well as Bus 174 as a documentary of response or counter-representation to this stock footage?
In an effort to answer these questions, selections from Stuart Hall's Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices will be held in relation to and constellated with the writings of Michel Foucault, in particular: "The Body of the Condemned" from Discipline and Punish, "Method" from The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, "About the Concept of the 'Dangerous Individual' in Nineteenth-Century Legal Psychiatry," and "The Birth of Social Medicine."
An interpretation of Bus 174 will also be placed within a selective discussion of the modes of documentary filmmaking: poetic, expository, participatory, observational, reflexive, and performative (3). The intention of examining a hybridization of the participatory mode of documentary in Bus 174 is to understand how the story of Sandro is told by Padhila as a restitution in cinematic terms. Further, by juxtaposing the modal and meta-theoretical interpretations of Bus 174, the questions of intention, interpretation and representation can be explored, formulated and reformulated in an effort to fine-tune the vicissitous nature of Bus 174 as a media event: what are the theoretical implications, what is at stake within as well as without the spectacle of repressive power that subjects Sandro?
The documentary mode of Bus 174 could be described as for the most part participatory. A characteristic of participatory documentary that plays an important role in Bus 174 is the inclusion of the ethical and political in the encounter between filmmaker and subject (4). In relating this encounter to Bus 174, the concept of cinematic truth regarding Sandro's intentions aboard Bus 174 becomes prevalent. Bill Nichols in Introduction to Documentary makes the following point regarding participatory filmmaking as cinematic truth:
This style of filmmaking is what Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin termed cinema verite, translating into French Dziga Vertov's title for his newsreels of Soviet society, kinopravda. As "film truth," the idea emphasizes that this is the truth of an encounter rather than the absolute or untampered truth. We see how the filmmaker and subject negotiate a relationship, how they act toward one another, what forms of power and control come into play, and what levels of revelation or rapport stem from this specific form of encounter (5).
The above quote opens a valuable space of difference between...
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