SP13 Lecture
The Cinematic City
La vendedora de rosas, Amores perros and Cidade de deus
Boom in urban cinema
- Dual social phenomena: tensions between classes
- Massive, rapid on-going urbanisation
- Rise of the megalopolis
o Urbanisation produces powerful deterritorialising/disembedding effects
 Renato Ortiz: Mudialização e cultura — identity being linked to a
certain place/space
Ways of seeing
- Self-reflexivity/playing with dominant visual paradigms
- Questions with vision/ways of seeing — in visual vulture
- Informational capitalism/image capitalism
o Manuel Castells — information in visual form: TV, digital image, internet etc.
- Visibility/invisibility
o Buying and selling images and lifestyle
o Social power and capital — determined by whether one is visible or not in
society
o Image-conscious and imaged-mediated societies
- Paradoxes of vision
o Film as a visual medium
La vendedora de rosas (Colombia, 1998)
- Part of his Medellin trilogy: three films he made over 16 years
- Disenfranchised urban youths — street girls who gradually turn from rose sellers to
prostitutes
- Use of natural/non-professional actors: LVDR is fictional, but the street kids
essentially play themselves
- Evening of 23rd December-midnight on Xmas day
- All the street girls are separated from their families, stealing money to buy new
clothes, selling roses in nightclubs to survive, and sniffing glue in order to fulfil the
desperate emptiness of their lives
- Mónica — her grandmother looked after her till she died
- Gaviria: the film is a fairy-tale for adults, a cinematic translation of HCA’s The Little
Match Girl
- Imagery of water and fire — temporal traces
- Opening scene: spatial lines of power; commodification of romantic love in the
nightclub sequence
o We are introduced to Mónica, as she tries to find glue; it then cuts to a
visionary sequence of her grandmother, before cutting back to her and her
friend, telling her to get ready for work
o Female singer —lyrics are to do with love and the search for the perfect man
- Engages with warped forms of temporality and spatiality — other time (imaginary
dimensions); doesn’t limit itself to normative dimensions
-
The film engages with imaginary aspects of the children’s lives — their lives are
fleeting
Lighting
- Largely shot in the twilight/night of Medellin — lit up by fireworks/garish Xmas
lights/car lights
- “Los días de la noche”
- Nocturnal light — makes visible the street kids, who are often so invisible
- This is the only light they have; their days are numbers — “un puñado de días
comprimidos”
Temporal paradox — compression of time and space
- Frederick Jameson: conflation of time and speed
o Time has become “a function of speed”
o Compressed nightlight into which the kids experience their lives
o Scene: Judy enjoys the speed of the car, however the commodification of her
body hangs over the scene
HCA LMG
- Realistic adaptation of this story
- Compresses the story into the film, extending to small details such as outside shoes,
abusive stepfathers and sparklers substituting for matches
- Mónica dies as a result of mishap and misfortune, rather than of cold and
abandonment — more reflective?
- Embellishes the story with sexual rivalries and infidelities, violence among the
homeless, ephemeral visions induced by glue sniffing
- Even the title — COMMODIFICATION; REFERS TO HER JOB, RATHER THAN HER
NAME/HER PERSONHOOD
o Alonso Salazar: “the city at night is a screen, a lot of images that flash in front
of your eyes”
Time as a theme
- Life flashes before our eyes
- Watches: one is drowned in water, the other is exchanged for fireworks,
metaphorically blown up into flames
Imagery of water and fire
- Seem to suggest two different modes of temporality
- Water: the river, with geological time, permanence, death (bodies that are dumped
in it at the end of the film)
- Fire: the temporality of the commodity; fireworks, glue sniffing (a police officer sets
a bottle on fire), the burnt-out lives of the street kids, only here for a small number
of highly-compressed night-time days before they succumb to the violence of the
streets
Amores perros (2000, Mexico)
- Juxtaposition of the illegal dogfight in the urban underworld — DISPLACED — and
finishes in a TV show
- A terrible car crash that unites three desperate stories
- Keeping up appearances: Valeria’s relationship with Salgado
- Metropolis becomes megalopolis
- Disposable goods — disposable people, desechables
- Velocity — transport and displacement
- Space of flows vs space of places: Castells — the global urbanisation that
links/delinks the whole globe into the circulation of finances and information tends
to convert a space of places into a space of flows
o I.e. that’s why we don’t see any recognisable landmarks in Amores perros —
everything is reduced to high-speed car chases, mobile phones — which
make their first substantial appearance in LA film, advertising boards, media
manipulation of images
Interlocking stories
- United by a car crash:
o 1: contemporary working class
o 2: the bourgeoisie, who manipulate the mass media image economy and high
finance
o 3: bridges both these gaps, in a former guerrilla, now a tramp, who
undertakes hit jobs for the higher classes
Allegories
- The two main allegories in the film are:
o Dog fighting/relationships between dogs and humans:
 A displaced metaphor for human violence
 Fetishization of dogs — substitute for human relationships:

-
if human relationships are mapped onto human ones, then the
business of dog fighting becomes a powerful allegory for the
systemic violence inherent within globalised capitalism
 This is underlined by the owner of the dog fighting business:
he runs his firm according to extreme neo-liberal marketoriented practices — “esta es mi empresa” quote
o Mediatisation/the virtual city:
 Explains the juxtaposition in the opening clip between street violence
and the TV screens, with the screen representing the dissimulation of
the systemic violence underlying global image capitalism
 Chivo — makes strategic use of his social invisibility to transgress the
power lines — e.g. is able to kill someone w/o anyone taking much
notice of him — violently shattering the glass; playing with his image
as he sticks a photo of himself into his daughter’s graduation image,
or defacing the image of the politician (?), reflection of Octavio and
Susana when they are having sex
 He is therefore the perfect corollary for the image-conscious
Valeria, whose simulated relationship for global televisual
consumption, is forced to confront what happens when the
image falls — her beautiful, commodifiable body is left
disfigured by the accident — mutilated
The sense of rhythm and flow — velocity of the camera
Confluence of technology and violence
Conclusion
- Conflation of camera as a gun as symbolic of the processes that are at work in all of
these films: filming ethically and responsibly, with a self-reflexive awareness of the
imbrication of visual technology with the violence of the urbanising economic forces
that reduce lives to mere commodities — disposable objects
- LVDR: the camera must delve behind the visible surface of the city in order to
understand the invisible and hallucinatory world of the street kids in their druginduced states
- AP: the beauty of the screen shattered by the violence of the urban underworld