Digital Realisms

The chapter looks at contemporary depictions of slums in digital cinema. Joining recent scholarship (Nagib, Elsaesser, Rombes) that argues for a correlation between the advent of DV and a renewed return to realism in world cinema, the author rejects the notion that the advent of digital technologies marks a ‘loss of indexicality’, as claimed by some (Rodowick; Manovich, Grusin). Instead, the author argues that today’s independent (festival, art or new wave) cinemas (e.g. Dogme 95) enter into a post-postmodern phase since they attempt to re-materialise the filmic signifiers, precisely by refashioning the filmmaking practices and principles of earlier movements such as Italian neorealism or cinéma vérité. To illustrate this, the chapter looks at how Manila’s slums have been represented by the filmmakers of the ‘Philippine New Wave’ (e.g. Mendoza) and at Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas Trilogy, which depicts a slum once located on the outskirts of Lisbon. The chapter concludes that these filmmakers use digital technologies, albeit very differently, to reanimate a political kind of cinema that has been declared dead, turning their films into acts of resistance to the digital confections of today’s entertainment industries as well as to the blatant social inequalities of our ‘planet of slums’.

Slums on and off Screen

Taking vital clues from the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, the chapter discusses slums both off and on screen, as urban as well as cinematic (or represented) spaces. It provides in that way an interdisciplinary discourse on some of the book’s larger conceptual frames: the ‘planet of slums’, the ‘cinematic city’, ‘representation’ and the notion of ‘world cinema’. The author suggests that it is important to take critical voices into consideration that explain the ‘mass production of slums’ (Davis) as an effect of global capitalism (Castells et. al.). However, in accordance with recent empirical research, particularly with UN-HABITAT’s global report The Challenge of Slums (2003), the author suggests to also acknowledge the diversity of slums. This double-perspective – acknowledging diversity while also considering the historical dynamics of globalisation – is also useful when approaching world cinema. The author conceives world cinema consequently in terms of global-local exchanges (or ‘glocalisation’): employing the riverine / maritime metaphors used by film and globalisation scholars alike, the author proposes to look at representative examples via their local historical contexts as well as through considering the larger global flows (currents or waves) of documentary and realist styles in world cinema.

Introduction

The chapter first outlines the book’s scope and its aim to reconstruct two developments while trying to weave them together: accelerated urbanisation and the rise of an increasingly interconnected global film culture. Considering the enormous amount of slum-dwellers around the globe as well as the ‘global archive’ of still and moving imagery that we have of slums in cities as diverse as Victorian London or modern-day Mumbai, the author argues that in approaching ‘slums on screen’ one needs to take the historical processes of globalisation into account, since they have profoundly shaped both ‘world cinema’ and our ‘planet of slums’. While acknowledging the ethical and political concerns that have continuously been raised by critics – most recently in regard to the enormously popular Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle 2008) – Krstić argues to watch out for hasty accusations of social voyeurism, arguing instead for an approach that is anchored in historical-contextual analyses of representative examples. Taking the notion of ‘global complexity‘ (Urry) as a clue, and departing from Stam and Shohat’s Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994) as well as from recent scholarship on world cinema (Nagib, Andrew et. al.), the author outlines a ‘polycentric approach to world cinema’s planet of slums’.

Conclusion

The book’s conclusion summarises the key paradigms of contemporary slum representation on screen and relates them to their historical predecessors – a strategy that reverses the chronological approach applied throughout the book. It then looks at Susan Sontag’s assessment of social documentary photography as a form of social voyeurism, or ‘slumming’ through cameras, as well as to the changing notions of documentary and realism by interrogating what role cameras together with still or moving images play in our digital era today. The author concludes with a final argument which is that our ‘planet of slums’ has, for better or worse, become a hypermediated topos, an ‘archaeological’ media site of global dimensions, to which many filmmakers of the digital era respond in a palimpsestic way, re-writing or remediating our cities’ stored stories and images in sometimes highly imaginative, sometimes provocative ways. These filmmakers are not necessarily (re)turning to slums in order to look voyeuristically at the world’s ‘Other Half’ with fascination, pity or disgust, and neither with a reformist or socialist agenda in mind, but rather, the author agues, to challenge our ways of looking at life on our planet of slums.

Bombay Cinema

The first part of this chapter discusses phases of slum representation in the cinema of Bombay/Mumbai, including those of what is better known as Bollywood. Together with scholars of Indian Cinema (Mazumdar, Prasad, Basu), the chapter focuses on a few representative examples, such as Boot Polish (Arora 1954) or Satya (Varma 1998), to outline how popular Indian cinema has gradually abandoned what was once one of its most characteristic settings, the slum, to focus instead on escapist, studio set family melodramas. The second part departs from the harsh criticism (‘poverty porn’) that Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle 2008) has received to then argue that the film is best described as a palimpsestic imitation of Bombay Cinema. The film’s references to genres (gangster films, melodramas), plot structures (the forking life paths of two rival brothers), editing styles (of recent Bollywood gangster films), or character types (orphaned children) are indeed so manifold, that one can describe the film as an ‘archive of Bombay cinema’ (Mazumdar). The chapter concludes that, far from being a realistic depiction of the life of Mumbai’s street children, the film rather aims at immersing its viewers into a cinematic/televisual Mumbai of screens, surfaces and images.

Postmodern Bricolages

This chapter focuses on the 1970s and 1980s and illustrates how some of the most celebrated world cinema directors became profoundly affected by postmodern thought and cultural practice, among them auteurs like Kurosawa, Brocka or Scola, all of whom have approached the slums of their native countries and cities in their films. The author argues that the cultural and architectural practice of bricolage may serve as a key paradigm that subsumes the otherwise quite disparate styles of these directors. Postmodern concepts and aesthetic strategies such as bricolage – and, by extension, intertextuality, intermediality or hybridisation – put the traditional claims of realist and documentary practices in doubt. Instead, postmodern films, like the chapter’s main example Time of the Gypsies (Kusturica 1989), mix what are apparently contradictory notions, such as magic and realism. However, the chapter also discusses other examples of (predominantly ‘Third-Worldist’) filmmakers who have been trying to preserve and recover the historically inherited, but now vehemently questioned (ethical, social and political) concerns of realist and documentary modes to approach their countries’ social problems, but without turning a blind eye towards the new postmodern realities of increasingly consumer-oriented ‘Third World’ cultures.

Third Docufictions

This chapter discusses the international film culture of the 1960s and 1970s against the backdrop of the massive urbanisation of what used to be called the ‘Third World’. During these decades not only did world cinema modernise itself in the form of numerous, highly politicised and predominantly leftist, ‘new waves’, but so, too, did many (mega)cities of the global South. The chapter’s first case example, Moi, un noir (Rouch 1958), depicts how rural migrants, full of hopes for and dreams of a better future, flocked to these cities in search of jobs. The intersections between social and film history on a global scale, hence, between the emergence of a politically engaged international film culture and the massive urbanisation of the ‘Third World’, are, as the author argues, not coincidental, and neither is the rise of docufictional forms. Whether theorised as ethnofiction, docudrama, cinéma vérité or Impefect Cinema, these hybrid forms share their historical links with earlier movements (neorealism and the Grierosonian documentary, in particular), as this chapter’s second main example illustrates: De Cierta Manera (Gómez 1974), an essayistic docudrama that investigates the Cuban government’s slum removal policies in a Havana neighbourhood.

Neorealist Narratives

This chapter outlines how documentary and realist styles coalesced as a form of documentario narrativo in the Italian neorealist movement – the major new paradigm of slum representation which, according to the author, distinguishes the postwar period. As a hybrid between fiction and non-fiction, neorealism has especially appealed to filmmakers who aimed at telling stories about ordinary, often poverty-stricken people, despite insufficient budgets. The chapter argues that the neorealist mode of production travelled across national and even continental borders in the postwar era, reaching developing film countries and their urban centres in India, Brazil or Mexico, thus becoming one of the very first truly global film or ‘world cinema’ styles. The chapter provides a close reading of Los Olvidados (Buñuel 1950), a fictional story of a boy’s struggle for motherly love in a Mexico City slum. It asks in what way it effectively represents a variety of postwar films that have been, to a larger or lesser extent, influenced by Italian neorealism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of films that have, just like Los Olvidados, employed the narrative perspective of abandoned or homeless street children – a narrative device that is still often employed today (e.g. in Slumdog Millionaire).

Favelas on Screen

The first part of this chapter discusses phases of favela representations in Brazilian cinema through handpicked examples like Rio Zona Norte (dos Santos 1957) or Babilônia 2000 (Coutinho 2001). Together with scholars of Brazilian cinema (Nagib, Bentes, Xavier), the author argues that the favela is one of the most recurring landscapes in Brazilian cinema and favela films some of world cinema’s most memorable ‘local expressions’ of ‘global currents’ like neorealism or Third Cinema. Movements like Cinema Novo and key directors like Nelson Pereira dos Santos have not only produced these memorable films, but they have also stimulated vital ideas on the way filmmakers ought to address the lives of the underprivileged. Building on this, the second part provides an extended close reading of City of God (Meirelles 2002), which narrates three decades of drug trade in a favela on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The author shows how the film builds on previous favela films and so creates an immersive experience of a ‘cinematic city of god’, which, however, disintegrates into a ‘cinematic city of violence’ – and so becomes a modified version of Cinema Novo’s plea for an ‘aesthetic of violence’ in the digital age.

Sensational Remediations

This chapter takes the decade of the birth of cinema, the 1890s, as a vantage point and tackles the question of how, by that time, the slum has become a topic of high visibility in various media. The author identifies the notion of ‘remediation’ (Bolter and Grusin) as this era’s key paradigm, because clichéd slum imagery and sensationalist stories (of violent crime, immorality, abject poverty etc.) travel around 1890 across (old and new) media, from the stage to the cinema, from photo books to magic lantern shows. The chapter focuses thereby on the ‘documentary impulse’ (Gunning) to disclose urban pauperisation, which emerges together with the photographic apparatus and the reform movement. Accordingly, the chapter’s case example, a famous reformist photo book / magic lantern lecture which promotes the urgent need to improve the housing conditions in New York’s notorious neighbourhood Five Points, How The Other Half Lives (Riis 1890), illustrates how reform movement, technological innovation and remediation go hand in hand. The chapter finally draws comparisons to a contemporary transmedia project, The Places We Live (Bendiksen 2008), in order to demonstrate the (dis-)continuities between nineteenth and twenty-first century documentary photography of slums.