The production of law at the cinema. a sociological study

This work is inserted in the activities of the Law and Cinema Research Group of the Law School of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Understanding that contemporaneity is produced and reproduced through imagetic sociability, it is considered that cinema – the art of moving images – is capable of offering to law the possibility to observe itself and descry its meaning from a different point of observation and description and, maybe, of transforming itself. The aim of this work is to sociologically know the law-cinema coupling and its development as from the observation of the movie 5 x favela agora por nós mesmos. As it is art created by artists who live in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, it is considered that it can either reproduce the meanings of law already renowned or allow the settlement of certain descriptions of law still not widely generalized. Taking this path, the artistic form mentioned above may turn noticeable the complex actions of inclusion and exclusion of law meanings and how, all the time, such distinction is delineated. Assuming the production of meaning as an event, an ephemeral phenomenon that can only be “captured” in the very moment it happens and is constituted, it is taken into account the methodological indication of Luhmann that the phenomenological method – the observation of the world as it appears to observation – is the most appropriate to the description of society. The movie is such appearence.