Narratives of fear: constructions of otherness in contemporary brazilian cinema O homem do ano

Abstract

In the final decades of the twentieth century and the initial decade of the twenty-first century, narratives of violence have proliferated within Latin American cinematic production. Films such as the Mexican Amores perros(Iñárritu 2000) and the Brazilian Cidade de Deus(Meirelles 2002) have become both national and international box office blockbusters by projecting the spectacle of violence upon the silver screen. These cinematic works appear to dialogue with newspaper and television headlines that broadcast daily what, at times, seems an ad nauseam repetition of accounts of metropolitan violence. This mediatic episteme in turn creates a discourse of exclusion that then serves to validate the negation of human rights to disenfranchised social groups.Within the visual spectacle of contemporary media and film, what are the narratives that crime films construct and how do they dialogue with social perceptions of violence and its origins? This paper considers how O homem do ano(Fonseca 2003) offers a critique of dominant society’s willingness to forfeit human rights when they pertain to individuals who do not belong to the upper and middle classes. Rather, hegemonic society and the media posit these transgressions as necessary responses to the escalation of violence within the urban sphere. In this manner, Fonseca’s work questions the bourgeoisie plays in the proliferation of said violence as well as the media’s scapegoating of marginal groups within this context.