War in rio: The city goes to the movies

Urban violence exacerbates existing trends of inefficient urban planning and social fracture. On the one hand, some actors instrumentalize violence to legitimate aggressive security plans and, on the other hand, discourses that depict specific urban territories as territories of violence and others as ordered spaces polarize the citizens in two groups as if each were irreconcilable and circulate an atmosphere of generalized anxiety (Da Silva, 2010).

Since the end of November 2010, in reaction to the initiative of reinforcing police presence in some of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas that where, at least implicitly, under the control of criminalized gangs, violent surges have been more recurrent and have occurred outside the boundaries or the favelas. Those violent episodes, and the authorities’ reaction, where widely circulated through the medias highlighting how the “paranoiac city” can coexist with the “spectacular city” (Canclini, 2005).

If those events activated debates about public security in Rio de Janeiro and in Brazil in general, another event, this one cultural, has also created a debate on the same issue. The two movies Tropa de Elite I (2007) and Tropa de Elite II (2010) by director José Padilha, not only were the most popular movies of Brazilian cinema but also occupied a great deal of the news. Rapidly, the line between the discourse circulated about the violence in Rio and the discourse about the movies was blured. Our paper seaks to explore how Tropa de Elite I and II produced and circulated a specific conception of place, violence and the city. Our intention is, thus, not to consider movies as an object giving a more or less accurate representation of reality, but as set of relations that together create specific subjectivities and, ultimately, territorial representations.