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Beyond the Bandit: Dispossession and Recovery in Paulo Morelli’s City of Men

Kate Lawless* perception and social organization change over time, but that these changes are histor- Let’s begin with a maxim: Changes ical, meaning they are inextricably linked in material conditions produce changes to shifts in the material circumstances of in human perception. Clearly materialist production. Benjamin describes this ten- in its infuence, such a maxim derives in dency more explicitly in his exposition of large part from the work of Walter Benja- modernity via Baudelaire (1939): further min, whose insights on the history of tech- elaborating tensions between subjectivi- nology continue to infuence the dialectic ty and mediation, Benjamin describes the of politics and aesthetics today. In 1936, historical shift in perception he names “the illustrating changes in perception that ac- shock experience” and its relationship to companied the inventions of flm and pho- changes in social organization that emerged tography, in what would become his most at the apex of modernity. I quote at length a oft-cited essay,1 Benjamin wrote: “Just as passage that elucidates the transition from the entire mode of existence of human col- one technological formation, one social lectives changes over long historical peri- formation, to another: ods, so too does their mode of perception. Baudelaire speaks of a man who The way in which human perception is or- plunges into the crowd as into ganized—the medium in which it occurs— a reservoir of electric energy. is conditioned not only by nature but by Circumscribing the experience history” (emphasis in original, 23). What of the shock, he calls this man becomes increasingly clear in this and later ‘a kaleidoscope endowed with works is not only that the modes of human consciousness.’ Whereas Poe’s

*Kate Lawless is an assistant professor in the Centre for Global Studies at Huron Univer- sity College in London, Ontario. She has recently published articles on memory, art and capitalism in American Imago and Public: Art/Culture/Ideas.

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passers-by cast glances in all di- particular—and its effects on human per- rections seemingly without cause, ception in the age of industrial production today’s pedestrians are obliged to (especially in terms of the sharp rise of Fas- look about them so that they can be cism he witnessed in the frst half of the 20th aware of traffc signals. Thus, tech- century), aligned with insights by Foucault, nology has subjected the human Agamben, and Hardt and Negri, contempo- sensorium to a complex kind of rary media theorists have replaced Benja- training. There came a day when a min’s politics with biopolitics in order to new and urgent need for stimuli was imagine the ways in which visual econo- met with flm. In a flm, perception mies participate in the biopolitical impera- conditioned by shock was estab- tive to preserve life—in Foucault’s words, lished as a formal principle. What to “to make live and let die” (Society 241). determines the rhythm of produc- In this regard, Allan Meek argues that “[b] tion on a conveyor belt is the same iopolitical theories require us to think about thing that underlies the rhythm of media beyond its uses, its social impact, its reception in flm. (175) representations, its ownership and control, or its technological development and to con- Here, Benjamin not only demonstrates the sider how media record, monitor, analyze, ways in which human perception and sub- classify and harness life as biopower” (2). jectivity shifted with the new forms of so- More specifcally, drawing on Benjamin’s cial organization that accompanied rapid adaptation of Freud’s “protective shield,” urbanization; he also reveals the ways in Meek maintains that “[m]edia form part which such an experience is formalized in of an apparatus of immunity that promises the aesthetic production of a given histori- to insulate us from actual destruction” (2). cal moment. The crowd, the traffc signal, Pasi Valiaho takes a slightly different tack. and flm are all part of the same formali- Extending Benjamin’s materialist rather zation of shock that characterizes the over- than Freudian leanings, Valiaho emphasiz- whelming experience of modernity under es the ways in which the function of screen the industrial mode of production. More media has shifted with historical changes importantly, all three are technologies that in the mode of production. “If the visual subject the human sensorium to a complex economy of cinema in the early twenti- kind of training that produces a particular eth century corresponded with modes of historical subject. Fordist production and sensibility,” he While Benjamin sought to eluci- argues, “one could say that postcinemat- date the politics of mass media—flm in ic images correspond with post-Fordist

Issue 5, 2016 Lawless 23 production, neoliberal ideologies, and theory of homo sacer to that cinematic text contemporary biopolitical ways of taking and which reads the fgure of the favelado charge of the life of individuals and popula- as a manifestation of banditry that exem- tions” (8). Focusing more narrowly on the plifes bare life.2 This kind of analysis con- biopolitics of flm in particular, Nitzan Leb- ceives of the text as a direct refection of ovic is concerned not with the apparatus of reality (though if this is the case we really immunity but rather with the emancipatory have no need for the flm in our analysis of potential of biopolitical flm. In particular, the favelado); more importantly, however, he identifes the ways in which biopolitical it overlooks the ways in which the text is flm not only “seems to focus on the urgent rather a carefully constructed and complex need to expose and undermine the fallacy of system of signifcation that emerges dialec- centrism and consensus” but also demon- tically within a given social, political, and strates “how thinking through catastrophe economic order. In contrast to Cruikshank’s can be an emancipatory power for the re- claim that City of Men provides an “effec- consideration of norms, whether political, tive medium to advertise the biopolitical political-theological, or aesthetic” (n.p.). event of the favelados” and “urban resist- Despite their varying approaches, all three ance” (Cruikshank 8), we should ask how suggest that flm and media are not only vi- the flm engages in the production able sites for theorising the biopolitical but and reproduction of a biopolitical subject also central vehicles for the production and in the age of information and digital me- reproduction of biopolitical life. dia. Melanie Gilligan opens this line of in- Offering an account of the varied quiry when she asks: “Is representation the ways in which the visual economy inter- answer to ‘social exclusion’ or one of the sects with the order of biopolitics in a world mechanisms of its reproduction?” (n.p.). In shaped by information networks and fnan- biopolitical terms, the question becomes: cial speculation, these recent interventions Does the favela flm work to counter the ef- suggest that instead of simply applying bi- fects of social and economic exploitation, opolitical theory to the object of analysis, or does it reinforce an existing order in we should consider the ways in which the which images not only reproduce but also object—for example, the 2007 flm City of capture and direct the “potentials of life” Men—engages in the maintenance of the (Valiaho 7)? current biopolitical order. Such an approach In keeping with our original max- complicates Stephen Cruikshank’s essay im, and building on the insights of Meek, “Bandits and Biopolitics,” which proposes Valiaho, and other biopolitical media the- a straightforward application of Agamben’s orists, we should begin by examining how

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the formal and narrative structures of the of globalization. Accordingly, the com- favela flm in general, and City of Men in plex form of training that emerges in the particular, refect, register, and facilitate age of biopolitics is reception in recov- the transition from industrial to fnancial, ery, wherein a fantasy of redemption or perhaps cognitive, capital.3 If we agree merges with history from below to con- with Benjamin’s claim that “[f]ilm serves ceal the ongoing material conditions to train human beings in those new apper- of exploitation. ceptions and reactions demanded by inter- In the favela flm, the history of action with an apparatus whose role in their dispossession and alienation that accompa- lives is expanding almost daily” (26), then nies global crises of housing and labour are it serves to reason that the favela flm must re-written as narratives of personal struggle contribute to the training of human beings that participate in what I have elsewhere in those new apperceptions and reactions called the preservationist aesthetic—that demanded by the biopolitical apparatus. is, the principle of preservation at the heart Benjamin names the complex form of train- of new practices of cultural resistance and ing invoked by flm in the age of industrial new forms of enclosure and assimilation production “reception in distraction,” a pro- worldwide.4 Marx famously defned the cess by which, instead of being absorbed process of enclosure or primitive accumu- by the work, the “distracted masses absorb lation as the separation of the worker from the work of art into themselves” (40). Writ- the means of production, using the land en- ing around the same time, often in dialogue closures of 16th century England as a prime with Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer saw this example. However, contemporary thinkers “cult of distraction” as a potential source of have argued that this process is not so much emancipation in which the speed and dis- historical (in that it marked the inception of jointedness of distraction would serve as capitalism) as continuous: that is, the orig- a critique of bourgeois individualism and inal violence of accumulation must be re- alienation by “aim[ing] radically toward a peated forever anew.5 Furthermore, as the kind of distraction that exposes [social] dis- mode of production changes, so too must integration rather than masking it” (328). the means of separation. In the age of in- While the modernist flms of Kracauer’s dustrial production, the separation of the and Benjamin’s era mediated the shock worker from the means of subsistence was and alienation of industrial production, primarily material or land-based; in the age the biopolitical flms of our contemporary of information, however, image-based or moment provide a seemingly transparent cognitive dispossession becomes the dom- window onto the catastrophes and traumas inant mode of expropriation through which

Issue 5, 2016 Lawless 25 material dispossessions are rewritten as wise to consider the ways in which these moral faws. tensions are refected in and reproduced by Despite this shift in emphasis, the new technological advances, as well as new process of enclosure has, since the begin- cinematic genres and forms. Accordingly, ning, contained both material and episte- we might ask: How does the dialectic of en- mological dimensions. Silvia Federici em- closure and emancipation that underwrites phasizes this dual aspect in her rewriting the preservationist aesthetic, and mirrors of the history of primitive accumulation the fundamental paradox of biopolitics from the perspective of the European witch (killing in the name of preservation), oper- craze when she states: “Saving this histori- ate within the economy of images? What cal memory [of the expropriation of wom- mode of perception does the favela flm, a en’s bodies] is crucial if we are to fnd an subset of biopolitical flm conditioned by alternative to capitalism” (10). By placing the logic of enclosure, produce? Using City Early-Modern witch hunts at the center of of Men as an example, I argue that the fave- the transition from feudalism to capitalism, la flm participates in the production and re- Federici reveals not only the androcentric production of the current biopolitical order nature of traditional theories of primitive in two primary ways: 1) it naturalizes the accumulation but also the enclosures of violence of enclosure through the alchemi- memory and knowledge through which tel- cal reversal of nature and history, and 2) it eological narratives of history, including facilitates reception in recovery through the Marx’s claim that capitalism is a necessary revitalization of a neorealist aesthetic and step toward full communism, foreclose or the narrative of loss and redemption. exclude the narratives of marginal and sub- City of Men opens with a grainy, ordinate populations.6 Attempts to make washed out close-up of two young boys these stories visible emerge alongside viewed through a water-dappled pane of equally strident attempts to preserve tradi- glass. We then fade into a nostalgic scene of tional histories. At the same time, images the boys walking arms over shoulders—a of struggle operate as secondary modes leitmotif that continues throughout and of enclosure through the mediation of the signifes a kind of brotherly love or loyal material remains by which the original vio- comradeship. The boys age as the credits lence is covered over by a new narrative of roll and eventually the camera pans from redemption and recovery. a faded blue sky to a bird’s eye view that Given the prominent tensions be- lands on Dead End Hill, the eventual site tween preservation and exclusion within of a bloody gang shoot-out and the coveted the existing biopolitical order, we would be property of Midnight, the current leader of

Scum & Villainy 26 Te Word Hoard Beyond the Bandit

the ruling gang. The gang sits idle on the dit,” the “collateral damage” of primitive hilltop, oppressed by the unrelenting heat, accumulation—to its so-called historical discussing the question of what to do, while origins. In the natural history of enclosure, an apparently unrelated domestic scene un- in which the exploited are transformed (if folds below—Acerola (“Ace”), the reluc- not by the flm itself then by its biopolitical tant teen father, is awoken by his partner, interpretation) into bare life, “nature, devel- Christiane, who reminds him that he must oped to the point of its most extreme signif- care for their son Clayton while she works. icance, appears as the saturation of time— The two scenes converge when Laranjinha that is, as fully timely, hence historical be- (“Wallace”) arrives on his motorcycle and ing—where humanity as a historical phe- Ace, against his better judgment, accompa- nomenon in turn appears under the sign of nies him to the beach with Clayton in tow. the historical repetition of catastrophe, and While Paulo Morelli’s use of heat therefore as mythically recursive and static, in this opening scene necessarily appears that is, as nature” (66). The oppressive heat, feeting and incidental, it not only plays a as historical subject, motivates the leader’s signifcant role in framing and mobilizing decision to go to the beach despite the fact the narrative but also performs an ideologi- that, as Wallace exclaims, “Midnight hasn’t cal sleight of hand that both naturalizes the left the hill in three years!” In this way the violence of enclosure from the outset and metaphor naturalizes the eventual struggle incorporates an aesthetic of nostalgia that for the hilltop, effacing the role of the state places the spectator in the position of wit- in the history of enclosure through its re- ness and moral ally. The metaphorization ifcation in the fgure of “heat.” And just of heat draws implicitly on the naturalist as heat passes over from nature into “fully aesthetics of early twentieth-century Amer- timely, historical being,” the fgure of the ican literature, in which it overdetermines favelado-bandit as a historical phenome- the role of environment in characters’ ac- non appears as “mythically recursive and tions and dispositions.7 In City of Men, the static, that is, as nature,” (Pensky 66) or oppressive temperature both foreshadows “bare life.” and provides motivation for the ensuing The alchemical reversal initiat- violence. However, it also enacts what ed by the metaphorization of heat and the Max Pensky in his analysis of the natural personifcation of bare life in the fgure of history of capitalism calls a “reverse po- the favelado-bandit is further reinforced by larity,” by returning the product of capital- the coupling of neorealist aesthetics with a ism—in this case the “excluded,” the “ban- personal narrative of loss and redemption.

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According to Lebovic, biopolitical flm the nostalgic revitalization of neorealism has largely returned to a 1920s German lends authenticity.8 aesthetic that derives from a “growing sus- Eclipsing the role of state violence picion of democratic politics,” “a fascina- in the production of the favelado-bandit, tion with biological catastrophes and cul- City of Men reframes the story of histori- tural crisis,” and “a renewed interest in… cal violence in the favela as a story of lost radical experiments in aesthetics, philos- fatherhood, resulting in a moral chaos and ophy, and politics” (n.p.). Similarly, New gang warfare that moves towards a Hobbe- Brazilian Cinema, a movement that laid sian state of nature. Despite the fact that the the foundation for the favela flm, draws history of “banditry” in Rio’s only more predominantly on the techniques and emerged with the rocky transition away innovations of 1940s Italian neo-realism, from military rule towards full democracy, including “nonprofessional actors, location the fgure of the fallen father looms large shooting, handheld camerawork, and a lim- from the outset and is, in fact, a metonym ited script” (Villarejo 125). These stylistic for the state and the implicit cause of inter- techniques produce a sense of authenticity nal social breakdown.9 Its frst instantiation and transparency that are also elements of appears in the initial beach scene where, in documentary. Aline Frey points out that in a sudden feverish quest to help locate Wal- addition to these particular stylistic choic- lace’s father before his impending eight- es, New Brazilian Cinema perpetuates a eenth birthday, Ace accidentally abandons narrative that not only reduces class con- his three-year-old son, who runs wailing fict to personal strife but also proposes along the shoreline with a pacifer dangling migration or escape as “a romantic solu- precariously from his mouth. The fgure of tion to poverty” (59). Gilligan draws a sim- the fallen father is doubled as Ace inad- ilar link among the favela flm’s “style of vertently mirrors the gestures of Wallace’s fast cutting, abbreviated exposition, tinted absent father. Ace’s mistake materializes colour palettes and perpetually moving explicitly in Wallace’s grandmother’s vitri- handheld photography,” its “restag[ing of] ol toward the absent father. The two boys class conficts as a series of personal nar- rush back to the beach only to fnd that ratives” and the “passing over [of] primor- Clayton has disappeared, and is, unbe- dial act[s] of state violence” (n.p.). State knownst to them, safely (or not) in the hands of violence is overshadowed, sealed off into Midnight’s gang. the past, concealed by the romantic nar- The problem of fallen fatherhood rative of redemption and escape to which in the favela intensifes over the course of

Scum & Villainy 28 Te Word Hoard Beyond the Bandit

the flm as Wallace not only fnds his fa- (bourgeois) fatherhood is foreclosed. The ther, who reluctantly embraces him (less as redemption of the favelado-bandit through a son than as a potential comrade), but also the restoration of the father as the guardian discovers his father’s responsibility for the of the moral order of knowledge transmis- questionable and untimely death of Ace’s sion not only effaces the socio-political and father in a botched robbery. Wallace even- economic realities of favela life but also re- tually watches as his father is apprehend- inforces an ideology of bourgeois individ- ed by police and tossed in the trunk of a ualism that constitutes the favelado-bandit car on the way back from the innocent act as a threat to liberal democracy rather than of buying a package of cigarettes. As Ace, a product of exploitation and dispossession. through a series of inauspicious events not Given Agamben’s indebtedness to of his own making, becomes increasingly Benjamin and his multiple forays into me- enveloped by Midnight’s gang, Wallace dia theory,10 I would like to close by re-read- and Ace are forced to decide whether or not ing one of Cruikshank’s claims—that City they will repeat the fateful demise of their of Men reveals the bare life of the favela- fathers’ friendship or forge a new path that do-bandit—against Agamben’s theory of resists the inheritance of fallen fatherhood “gestural cinema” in order to demonstrate (and, with it, fallen brotherhood). The flm the ways in which these humanist theories ends with the three boys—Wallace and Ace, themselves participate in the same cult of each hand-in-hand with Clayton—walking recovery and production of the biopolitical along the beach, toward a new life beyond order as the favela flm. Benjamin Noys the borders of the favela. As they head to summarizes Agamben’s theory as cinema’s Wallace’s father’s now-empty apartment, desperate attempt to recover the massive Ace assures Clayton that he is going to loss of gesture experienced by the Western teach him everything he knows, beginning bourgeoisie at the end of the 19th century. with the lesson of looking both ways be- Refecting elements of Benjamin’s dialec- fore he crosses the street. Escape from the tical image as much as Deleuze’s move- favela and the transmission of knowledge ment-image, gestural cinema reveals “the in this fnal scene is represented as an in- image as a force feld that holds together dividual choice devoid of socio-economic two opposing forces. The frst is that the realities. And, despite Wallace’s parting let- image reifes and obliterates the gesture, ter to Camilla, in which he recognizes the fxing it into the static image. The second favela as a kind of home, the favela is rep- is that the image also preserves the dy- resented as a space of corruption and vio- namic force of the gesture, linking the ges- lence in which the possibility for legitimate ture to a whole” (Noys n.p.). Furthermore,

Issue 5, 2016 Lawless 29 affrming Agamben’s claim that “[c]ine- its form of life” (30). Bare life is absolutely ma leads images back to the homeland of subject to the state, “human life that is com- gesture” (“Notes” 55), Noys argues that pletely exhausted in its status as the corre- the power of cinema lies in its capacity to late of sovereign action” (Ross 2). Bare life “reveal the potential of the image, and re- is the negation of all human gesture, and lease what has been frozen in [it]” (Noys gesture is what recovers the form of life to n.p.). However, a careful reading of “Notes life itself: “Without gesture, life is bare life on Gesture” reveals that Agamben’s theo- ‘ready for the massacre’—no strings at- ry comes not so much from an attempt to tached” (Birmingham 132). For Agamben, “release what has been hidden” but from bare life is the universal condition facili- a desire to recover true humanity through tated by the commodifying effects of mass the redemption of the gesture, pure unme- media, which stripped humanity of the diated human experience, a form of ex- only thing that distinguishes life from bare perience that was lost with the advent of life: gestures. modern media. A biopolitical reading of City of Despite belonging to different phil- Men that focuses on the fgure of the fave- osophical schema, Agamben’s theories of lado-bandit as the embodiment of bare gesture and bare life derive from a unifed life, a personifcation of social exclusion, aspiration: to recover humanity. Meek high- ultimately fails to account for the ways in lights the commodifying function of media which this fgure emerges as material re- in this context: “What Agamben sees as the mains, the collateral damage of capitalist commodifcation of human experience in accumulation. Agamben’s theory of gesture the media image resonates with his account posits cinema as a mode of resistance to the of biopolitics as reducing individuals to a production of bare life through the recov- state of bare life” (10). Adapting the con- ery of gesture. But his theory participates in cept of bare life from Benjamin’s “Critique the very cult of recovery in which preserva- of Violence,” Agamben not only defnes tion of life at the level of representation not bare life as “that which may be killed but only covers over the material conditions of not sacrifced,” but also uses it as a syno- exploitation but necessarily appears as the nym for zoe,11 (Homo Sacer 4) or “natu- humanist morality of the bourgeois order— ral life” (Homo Sacer 6). It is, in Arne De an order that re-writes, for instance, the his- Boever’s words, “a life that is neither hu- tory of dispossession as the story of fallen man nor animal, but rather an inhuman fatherhood. Only by recognizing the bandit kind of life that exists at the limits of ethical for what it is, a reifcation of the material and political categories,” “a life stripped of conditions of dispossession, can we truly

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begin to imagine the transformative possi- enclosure, see Midnight Notes. The New bilities of biopolitical flm. Enclosures 10 (1990): n.p. 5 See Mezzadra, Sandro. “The Topicality of Prehistory: A New Reading of Marx’s 1 “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Techno- Analysis of ‘So-Called Primitive Accumu- logical Reproducibility” is the second ver- lation.’” Rethinking Marxism. Trans. Ari- sion of his most widely cited essay, which anna Bove 23.3 (2011): 302-21; Massimi- was originally published as “The Work of liano Tomba’s “Historical Temporalities of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc- Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective.” tion.” Historical Materialism 17 (2009): 44-65; 2 Please see pages 8 – 9 of Stephen Crui- Tony C. Brown’s “The Time of Globaliza- kshank’s “Bandits and Biopolitics” for a tion: Rethinking Primitive Accumulation.” discussion of favelas/the favelado. Rethinking Marxism 21.4 (2009): 571-84; 3 I use these designations reluctantly given and Werner Bonefeld’s “The Permanence the ongoing controversy among Marxist of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity theorists as to the usefulness and/or correct- Fetishism and Social Constitution.” The ness of such phrases. Briefy, “Cognitive Commoner (2001): 1-15. capitalism” is generally understood as the 6 In her counter-history of the inception of current stage of capitalism following the capitalism, Federici offers feminist rejoin- earlier stages of mercantile and industrial ders to both Marx and Foucault. If Marx capitalism in which accumulation takes an had placed women at the center of his anal- immaterial rather than material form. How- ysis, she argues, capitalism could never ever, some historical materialists are criti- lead to liberation. And if Foucault had done cal of this term, and its claim that labour the same, the promotion of life forces that has become increasingly immaterial, due to accompanies the transition from sovereign its alleged misinterpretation of value theory power to biopower would have appeared (i.e., Hessang Jeon’s “Cognitive Capitalism not as mysterious but as the harnessing of or Cognition in Capitalism?” Spectrum: women’s reproductive capacities for the Journal of Global Studies 2.3 [2014]: n.p.). controlled reproduction of the labour force. Others argue that cognitive capitalism is 7 See, as prime examples, F. Scott Fitzger- in fact an advanced stage of capitalism be- ald’s The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: yond the third stage of fnancial capitalism Scribner, 1995; Nella Larson’s Passing. (i.e., Yann Moulier-Boutang’s Cognitive 1929. New York: Penguin Books, 2003; and Capitalism. Oxford: Polity, 2012. Print.). Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat.” 4 For an in-depth analysis of new forms of 1926. Literature and Its Writers: An Intro-

Issue 5, 2016 Lawless 31 duction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. state then transported inner city slums to Ann Charters and Samuel Charters. 2nd ed. the periphery through programs of forced Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 351- relocation. However, this process of re- 360. Print. moval and relocation ultimately failed to 8 In his analysis of the time of globalization, address the material conditions of Rio’s Tony C. Brown describes two models of housing shortage, as well as favelados con- presentation in Marx’s theory of primitive sistent resistance to “integration.” As a re- accumulation: entombment and prefgural. sult, favela populations continued to grow The frst corresponds to the time of repre- over the next three decades or so. sentation, which seals the violence of prim- 10 Not only is Homo Sacer: Sovereign Pow- itive accumulation or enclosure off into the er and Bare Life an attempt to complete past. He notes that for Marx this tendency Benjamin’s response to Schmitt, which ar- to “stress a temporality of historical vio- gues that the state of emergency is the rule lence that…seal[s] primitive accumulation rather than the exception, but in many ways off into the past” (578) is precisely why an “Notes on Gesture” appears to provide a act of historical recovery in the sense of de- phenomenological account of Benjamin’s scribing the “marks of capitalist accumula- theory of reception in distraction. tion historically” is not enough. The “tomb” 11 In his theory of bare life, Agamben draws in this model is a metaphor for the remains on Aristotle’s distinction (via Hannah Ar- of historical violence; it is that which in endt) between zoe, pure biological exis- representing them simultaneously conceals tence (life), and bios, a qualifed or political them. Interestingly, Millicent Marcus uses existence that Arendt links with speech and the metaphor of the tomb in her discussion action (the good life). For more on Arendt’s of the “memorial impulse” of neorealist defnitions, see The Human Condition, 2nd flm, stating: “Rossellini’s frst neo-realist Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago flms may be considered epitaphs, ‘writing Press, 1998. on tombs’” (82). 9 Favelas in were originally squatter settlements that housed itinerant workers for which the state refused to ex- tend public services. During the 1940s the state began to develop temporary public housing projects as an alternative to the growing problem of urban slums. In re- sponse to the failure of such projects, the

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Works Cited Cidade dos homens.” The Word Hoard 5 (2016): pp. 7-19. Agamben, Giorgio. “Notes on Gesture.” De Boever, Arne. “Bare Life.” The Means Without End: Notes on Agamben Dictionary. Ed. Alex Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Murray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: U of 2011. Print. Minnesota P, 2000. Print. 48-59. Federici, Sylvia. Caliban and the Witch: ---. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Women, The Body and Primitive Bare Life. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, Accumulation. New York: 1998. Print. Autonomedia, 2004. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: in the Age of its Technological Volume 1. New York: Pantheon Reproducibility.” The Work of Art Books, 1978. Print. in the Age of Its Technological ---. Society Must be Defended: Lectures at Reproducibility and Other Writings the College de France 1975-1976. on Media. Ed. Michael W. Jennings New York: Picador, 2003. Print. et al. Trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., Frey, Aline. “Confnement and Violence Harvard UP, 2008. Print. 19-55. in the Streets of New Brazilian ---. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Cinema.” in Twenty-First Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Century Popular Media: Culture, Trans. Harry Zohn. Berlin: Schocken Politics, and Nationalism on the Books Inc., 1968. Print. 155-200. World Stage. Ed. Naomi Pueo Wood. Birmingham, Peg. “Agamben on Violence, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, Language, and Human Rights.” 2014. 55-71. Print. Philosophy and the Return of Gilligan, Melanie. “Slumploitation – The Violence: Studies from this Widening Favela on and TV.” Mute 2.3 Gyre. New York: Continuum, 2011. (2006): 5. Print. 124-135. Green, James N. “Favelas in Rio de Brown, Tony C. “The Time of Globalization: Janeiro, Past and Present.” Brazil: Rethinking Primitive Accumulation.” Five Centuries of Change. Center Rethinking Marxism 21.4 (2009): for Digital Scholarship, 2012. 571-84. http://library.brown.edu/create/ Cruikshank, Stephen. “Bandits and fvecenturiesofchange Biopolitics: Power, Control, and Kracauer, Sigfried. “Cult of Distraction: On Exploitation in the Brazilian Film Berlin’s Picture Palaces.” The Mass

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Ornament: Weimar Essays. Trans. & München: Hanser, 1973. Print. Ed. Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Villarejo, Amy. “Killing Me Softly: Harvard UP, 1995. Print. 323-328. Brazilian Cinema and Bare Life.” Lebovic, Nitzan. “The Biopolitical Film (A Beyond Globalization: Making New Nietzschean Paradigm).” Postmodern Worlds in Media, Art, and Social Culture 23.1 (2012): n.p. Practices. Ed. A. Aneesh, et al. New Levitt, Deborah. “Gesture.” The Agamben Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 2011. Dictionary. Ed. Alex Murray. Print. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011. Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume One. 1867. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1990. Print. Meek, Allan. Biopolitical Media: catastrophe, immunity and bare life. New York: Routledge, 2016. Print. Morelli, Paulo, dir. City of Men. Miramax , 2007. DVD. Noys, Benjamin. “Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film.” Film- Philosophy 8.22 (2004): n.p. Pensky, Max. “Three Kinds of Ruin: Heidegger, Benjamin, Sebald.” Poligraf (2011): 65-89. Ross, Alison. “Introduction.” South Atlantic Quarterly: The Agamben Effect 107.1 (2008): 1-13. Tomba, Massimiliano. “Historical Temporalities of Capitalism: An Anti- Historicist Perspective.” Historical Materialism 17 (2009): 44-65. Valiaho, Pasi. Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. Print. Vertov, Dziga. “Kunstdrama und ‘Kinoglaz.’” Schriften zum Film.

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