Massa Care

CH A P T ER 9
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The Carandiru Massacre: Across the
Mediatic Spectrum
Robert Stam
In this chapter, I hope to demonstrate a critical, theoretical, and ped-

agogical method for analyzing a series of representations of the same
event as mediated across a broad mediatic-artistic spectrum. How
is the same event represented, or better refracted, through diverse
media, formats, and genres? What is the political valence in each case?
What medium specificities and intersections come into play? Which
voices and discourses predominate?
The event in question is the massacre in Carandiru prison in São
Paulo on October 2, 1992, when 325 Brazilian military police, firing
515 shots, slaughtered at least 111 inmates (needless to say, such situa-
tions are hardly unique to Brazil. A similar massacre also took place in
the United States, in Attica prison, in 1971). Although the Brazilian
police made the standard claim of a “cross fire” between inmates and
police, no police were killed or even seriously wounded. Most prison-
ers, meanwhile, were killed in their own cells, with many shot in the
back. Frightened at the prospect of contracting AIDS from the blood
of their victims, the police forced the surviving inmates to clean up
the blood caused by their own bloodbath.
Prisons everywhere are sites where the state meets the citizen in a
very direct and brutal way. A manifest instance of Weber’s concept of
“the state’s monopoly on violence,” a prison is also the place where
Althusser’s idea of “interpellation” becomes terribly literal. No longer
the abstract “hailing” of a widely disseminated ideology, it now takes
the very concrete form of a voice heard from the intercom ordering
10.1057/9781137304834 - New Argentine and Brazilian Cinema, Edited by Jens Andermann and Álvaro Fernández Bravo
140 ROBERT STAM
“prisoner number 347” to “strip naked and come to the yard!” While
one can ignore discursive interpellation without any immediate conse-
quence, ignoring the “hailing” of the carceral state can easily become
dangerous to one’s health.
A prison can be metaphorized in manifold ways—as the dark side
of a presumably enlightened society, or as a social microcosm reflec-
tive of the contradictions of that society, or as a dumping ground for
the marginalized of that society. In the case of Carandiru, the prison
warehoused a veritable army of the marginalized masses of Brazil:
the racially marginalized (blacks and mestizos), the sexually margin-
alized (prostitutes, transvestites, transsexuals), the regionally mar-
ginalized (migrants from the northeast), and even the religiously
marginalized (the practitioners of Afro-diasporic religions). But, of
course, prisoners are not merely marginalized victims; they are for the
most part also criminals, adding still another layer of complexity to
the issue of ethical responsibilities of media making. How does one
avoid both the demonization and the angelization of prisoners while
also probing the system-institutional dimension of the problem?
The Carandiru massacre generated written, performative and
audiovisual texts of all kinds. This discursive afterlife includes offi-
cial reports concerning the massacre, firsthand testimonies by sur-
vivors, memoirs from the participants, novels, poems, and films, as
well as diverse accounts in the print, the electronic, and cybernetic
media. Here, we will look at three representations of the prison and
the event, representing different points along the discursive, medi-
atic, and artistic continuum: first, a feature fiction film (Carandiru,
2002); second, a feature documentary (Prisioneiro da Grade de Ferro,
2003); and lastly, a concert film (Caetano Veloso’s “Haiti” from the
CD Noites do Norte). I wish to emphasize a number of interlocking
issues: (1) the commonalities across the spectrum; (2) the convergen-
ces and interplays across media and genres; (3) the diverse modalities
of representing the real, not in terms of accurate versus inaccurate
representation, but rather in those of the inescapable processes of
mediation. How does each text recover “cinema’s capacity to observe
or stage the observation of real worlds?” What is the role of perfor-
mance and theatricality? In each case I will link the segment in ques-
tion to larger methodological or theoretical issues: the fiction feature
and point of view; documentary and the politics of authorship; music
and national allegory.
Although I will not be able to analyze it in detail here, it is worth
mentioning briefly how the event was portrayed in the national news
THE CARANDIRU MASSACRE 141
show Jornal Nacional, as a way of contextualizing the screen image of

the prison incident. This highly evocative rubric (roughly “National
Daily”) embeds in its very name the mediatic-intertextual memory
of the inheritance of print media (“journal” or newspaper) and its
national role in generating the shared sense of the lived simultaneity
of a community. For Benedict Anderson (1983), collective national
consciousness was made possible by a common language as purveyed
by print capitalism, which generated the horizontal camaraderie of
imagined national communities. In the wake of the newspaper and
the novel, the cinema became the teller of the national tale, mobi-
lizing desire in ways responsive to nationalized (and imperialized)
notions of time, plot, and history. The cinema’s institutional ritual
of gathering a community of spectators homologized, in a sense, the
horizontal comradeship of nationhood.
TV news inherits these various models—the fictional procedures
of the novel, the informational function of the newspaper, and the
audiovisual capacities of the cinema. Jornal Nacional offers a daily
newspaper equipped with the medium-specific attribute of televi-
sion—its capacity for direct transmission (it was only with the inven-
tion of tape-recording in 1957 that television ceased to be exclusively
direct). Although much of the news is not longer directly transmit-
ted, TV’s “contagious” sense of liveness surrounds all of television
with an aura of vivacity and experiential simultaneity. It thus shapes
mass emotion and opinion on a moment-to-moment “breaking
news” basis.
The specific segment commented here is the Globo Reporter sum-
mary of the Carandiru massacre, which replays materials from the
Jornal Nacional but is now newly synthesized with commentary by
the Anchor and the various correspondents. The segment displays the
national vocation of TV news as a channel for national emotion, in
this case the grief and shock provoked by the massacre. TV becomes
not only the conduit but also the conductor, as it were, for a broadly
shared revulsion that would hardly have existed in the same way had
the event not been portrayed on TV.1 Given Globo’s unsavory repu-
tation on the left due to its historical collaboration with the dicta-
torship, one might have expected Globo to be inclined to whitewash
the role of the military police. Althusserian theory would have led
us to expect Globo to play its obedient role as an “ideological state
apparatus.” Yet the actual report, for whatever reason—perhaps a
need to placate an angry public or perhaps to garner high ratings—is
largely sympathetic to the prisoners. Although we hear a few official
142 ROBERT STAM
voices, these are outnumbered and, more important, discredited by

the unofficial voices. A police representative’s claim that “the situa-
tion was out of control” is rebutted by the inmates themselves: “They
fired on us for no reason.” The inmate voices, furthermore, are more
graphic and persuasive, marked by the urgency of the eyewitness
account: “They beat us while we were naked, with hands above our
heads.” One inmate speaks of “summary executions,” while another
calls the massacre “a holocaust.” Instead of the usual ping-pong of
liberal and conservative voices, with the Anchor as referee, here the
anchor and reporters basically agree with the inmates. Nor do the
anchors and reporters use official euphemisms like “police action” or
“restoring order”; rather, they speak of a “massacre” and a “slaugh-
ter” that “provoked indignation around the world.”
The F eature F iction F ilm

We can now proceed to another medium and genre treating
Carandiru—the feature film Carandiru (2003) by Hector Babenco.
A reenactment of the lives of the inmates and of the massacre, the
film was by Brazilian standards a big-budget superproduction by the
consecrated auteur-director of Pixote and Kiss of the Spider Woman.
Babenco auditioned 2700 actors, and used the actual prison as well
as rented studio sets from the famous Vera Cruz studios, the 1950s
attempt to create a kind of MGM on the Tietê, a Hollywood-style
film production studio in São Paulo.
The film adapted a memoir by Drauzio Varela entitled Carandiru
Station. Varela had worked at Carandiru for 14 years as a doctor com-
bating the AIDS epidemic. The film follows the structure of the book,
which is based on the stories of individual prisoners. The structural
challenge was that the massacre forms the climax of the film, yet the
stories of the prisoners bear no intrinsic connection to the massacre,
except in the sense that we get to know the complex individuals who
are ultimately killed en masse. Perhaps the major achievement of the
film, partially made possible by the large budget, was its reconstruc-
tion of precisely that which was not intended to be represented—the
massacre itself—an absence due to the fact that the military police
went to great pains to make sure that there would be no visual or
audible trace of the massacre. Babenco thus performed a public ser-
vice by reconstructing the sounds and images of the slaughter that
took place within the prison walls. Babenco thus makes visible what
was meant to be obscene, offstage and offscreen. The massacre, in this
sense, forms a paradoxical variation on the Foucauldian theme of the
“disciplinary spectacle.” While a public hanging of the kind Foucault

describes in Discipline and Punish (1995 [1975]) was staged in order
to be seen by the spectators, here many of the spectators of the event
were physically annihilated, while the events were not filmed. Yet,
the police did have a disciplinary goal—to show who was the wielder
of the state monopoly on violence. The paradox was that the police
wanted to teach a lesson to the inmates, but did not want to be seen
actually administering that lesson.
It is productive, in my view, to analyze virtually all films, whether
fictional or nonfictional, not in terms of single genres but rather in
terms of a broader transtextuality which embeds the traces of mul-
tiple genres which are layered and counterpointed together. Genre
in this sense is not an essence inhering in the texts themselves, but
rather a cognitive instrument that allows us to analyze texts in their
palimpsestic complexity. Each generic category provides an analytical
prism, which sheds a special light on the text. Babenco’s feature, in
this sense, can be seen through the light of many genres and inter-
texts. On the most obvious level, Carandiru is a prison film, but that
is only its topic; and the topic of prison can be treated by an infinity of
genres (comedy, satire, melodrama, etc). More precisely, it is an adap-
tation of a book, and as an adaptation, it “inherits” the various genres
embedded in a book that is simultaneously a personal memoir and a
set of medical case studies. The stories of the prisoners (those included
in the film), meanwhile, are multigeneric and classifiable as domestic
melodrama, erotic comedy, gangster caper film, and so forth.
At the same time, Babenco’s Carandiru is a historical film. Unlike
TV News, which offers a hasty “first draft” of history under the pres-
sures of inexorable deadlines, before opinion has gelled into “com-
mon sense” or into a noisy debate about contradictory versions, the
Babenco film offers a more considered and researched “second draft”
of history. Made a decade after the key event, it benefits from new
sources of information, including that encased in the Varela source
text. Babenco then visualizes and dramatizes this knowledge, giv-
ing it flesh and bones. The film also includes materials drawn from
TV reportage. In this sense, it illustrates Gaudreault’s (2011) con-
cept of “intermediality,” and, in embryonic predigital form, Jenkin’s
“convergence culture” as exemplified in a certain hybridization of
media and formats (Jenkins, 2006). This hybridization also but-
tresses the reality effect of the film. The onscreen neighboring of TV
footage, recognized as authentic by the spectator, alongside staged
scenes, implies that the two forms of representation exist as part of a
continuum, each with its quantum of veracity. The inclusion of TV
144 ROBERT STAM
reportage means that the film can also be seen as a documentary,

not only in that it is based on documents but also in that it deploys
documentary-like techniques—direct-to-camera interviews, purpose-
fully “inadequate” footage as guarantor of authenticity—even in the
staged sequences. Finally, in terms of macro-generic or transgeneric
categories, the overall structure of the film is that of a tragedy. Like
an Elizabethan tragedy, the film leads inexorably toward death, leav-
ing the filmic stage littered with corpses. Like the audience at an
ancient Greek tragedy, that knew full well that Oedipus Rex was not
likely to end happily. Brazilian telespectators were aware of the violent
outcome thanks to saturation media coverage, a fact that, for them,
imbued the film with an air of ineluctable fatality.
The segment I wish to analyze shows Varela leaving his prison
office to check on the prisoners. Its interest lies in its approach to
point of view. Film theory and analysis asks a number of questions
about point of view, basically: who tells? (Narration); who sees? (Point
of view or ocularization); who hears? (Chion’s “point of hearing”);
who knows? (Focalization); who judges? (In the sense of carrying
what Boris Uspensky calls the “norms of the text,”) and finally who
solicits our moral affiliation (Alignment à la Murray Smith). As a sur-
rogate both for the director and the spectator, the Varela character
gathers diverse powers—of seeing, hearing, and knowing—and occa-
sionally of narrating via voice-over.
It is noteworthy that the film is not terribly interested in Varela
as a character. He is less a character than a function. In the book he
changes over time, more like a character, slowly shedding his preju-
dices about the prisoners. In our sequence, Varela leaves his office
and wanders through the prison corridors, stopping to peep in on
the prisoners. In one cell, he spies on numerous inmates watching
four TV monitors amidst an ambient cacophony. In another cell,
he watches a single inmate consuming his meal. In this sequence,
Varela becomes an eye, privileged in outsized close-ups reminiscent of
the opening shots of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. With the inmate-patients,
meanwhile, Varela functions as a giant ear—he is the listener; the
inmates confess to him as if he were a secular priest/analyst who lis-
tens but who remains nonjudgmental. (We recall that Foucault links
the two figures in The History of Sexuality, 1990 [1976]).
Carandiru provides an interesting variation on the panoptical
situation described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. In the
Benthamite system, the inmates are hypervisible from the central
viewing point of the tower; the gaze is nonreciprocal. Completely
exposed to the warden’s relentless and unforgiving gaze, the
prisoners themselves see very little. In Carandiru, in contrast, the

visual field is not organized around the centralized gaze of author-
ity, but rather around the mobilized gaze of the middle-class flan-
eur, even if only within the walls of the prison, and the sympathetic
observer/listener. Like the warden, he has privileged access to the
prison, but he exercises his panoptical power in order to help (and
in fact Varela did indeed win the trust of the prisoners). Varela in
this sense has a very special status—neither prisoner nor a repre-
sentative of the state, he is a doctor, an intermediary, an insider/
outsider, familiar with the prison and liked by the prisoners, yet
ultimately invited by the authorities. The result is a kind of oxymo-
ron: a humanized and humanist panoptical observer. Instead of a
panopticon—a simpaticon!
The sequence also brings up the question of authorship and inter-
textuality and the relation between the two. A self-described cineph-
ile, Babenco was a fan of the New Wave who, as an adolescent, literally
carried Truffaut’s bags during Argentinian film festivals. Babenco
crowds the film with cinematic clins d’oeil, many of them having to
do with Hitchcock and with seeing. Varela’s look through the peep-
hole of the first cell is framed and lit exactly like the spotlighted look
of Norman Bates as he peeks in at Marion Crane in Psycho. When
Varela watches the inmates watching television, the array of monitors
recalls the array of windows—reminiscent of a series of YV moni-
tors—across from Jeffries’s apartment in Rear Window. In a 1980s
essay on the Hitchcock film, I suggested that Foucault’s account of
the panopticon also offered an apt description of Jeffries’s view of
the neighbors in Rear Window as “captive shadows in the cells of the
periphery . . . like so many cages, like so many small theatres, in which
each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
Like Jeffries, Varela gazes into the private lives of his neighbors; he
observes from a protected vantage point, the voyeuristic position par
excellence. A final allusion to Rear Window in the sequence takes the
form of a 360° panoramic shot around the courtyard of the prison,
reminiscent of the recurrent 360° pans around the courtyard in Rear
Window. Indeed, the architectural structure of buildings around an
inner courtyard, filmed with the same panoramic camera movement,
recalls the arrangement of the Greenwich Village apartment complex
in the Hitchcock film.
Another voyeuristic element in Carandiru lies in its rather obses-
sive concern with nonheteronormative sexuality, especially involv-
ing gays, transvestites, and so forth. Of course, this emphasis could
logically be explained by Varela’s position as a doctor dealing with
146 ROBERT STAM
sexually transmitted diseases, but it is noteworthy that such figures

also proliferate in other Babenco prison films, notably in Pixote and
in Kiss of the Spider Woman. In Carandiru, we also find a kind of
Flaubertian-Pasolinian free indirect discourse in the sense that gay
and transvestite characters become an alibi for stylistic virtuosity, in
a contagion between character and style, in the manner of Pasolini’s
“Cinema of Poetry.” At the same time, the prison—not normally the
site of the free expression of intimate emotion—becomes the scene of
constant dramatic confessions, especially by the more flamboyantly
gay characters, shaping a privileged space of tender vulnerability and
of heightened personal expression, a veritable utopia of communicative
transparency. There, characters reveal their inner truth, a trait more
characteristic of melodrama and the “women’s pictures” (pejoratively
labeled “weepies”) than the kind of social realism usually associated
with prison pictures. Through an intermedial contamination of genres,
we also recognize the traces of lachrymose Globo telenovelas.
Recalling the “melo” in melodrama, and the primordial role of
music in melodramas as well as in Carandiru, it is important to reflect
on what the music tells us about the relation between the director,
the narrating character, and the prisoners. The music is nondiegetic,
commentative, atmospheric. In stylistic terms, it is modernist and dis-
sonant and reflects not only the socially normative ethos but also the
social distance between the filmmakers and the prisoners. Music in
film also conveys a perspective. In the case of Carandiru it reflects
the social vantage point from which the prisoners are being pitied but
also judged from a kind of ethically panoptical position. In short, it
reflects the cultural norms of both author and auteur, the middle-class
director and the middle-class doctor. At the same time, in generic
terms, the music is of a kind typically associated with horror-based art
films. By engendering a vague disquiet and malaise, the music creates
a certain political ambiguity: does the ominous music suggest that
the prisoners themselves are horrifying, which would suggest a right
wing law-and-order discourse, or does it imply that the prison experi-
ence, and the imminent massacre, are the source of the horror, which
would imply a more leftist critique of the prison system?
The F eature D ocumentary

Let me move on to a new genre—the feature documentary—and a
new set of theoretical-methodological issues revolving around author-
ship and representation. The connotations of “representation” are at
once religious, aesthetic, political, and semiotic. On a religious level,
the Judeo-Islamic censure of “graven images” and the preference for

abstract nonrepresentational forms such as the arabesque cast theo-
logical suspicion on directly figurative representation and thus on the
very ontology of the mimetic arts.
Representation also has an aesthetic dimension, in that art too is a
form of representation, in Platonic or Aristotelian terms, a mimesis.
Representation is theatrical too, and in many languages “to repre-
sent” means “to enact” or play a role. But on another level, repre-
sentation is also political, in that political rule is not usually direct
but representative. Marx, in the Eighteenth Brumaire, said of the
peasantry that “they do not represent themselves; they must be rep-
resented.” The contemporary definition of democracy rests on the
notion of “representative government.” Many of the debates around
class, race, and gender, meanwhile, have revolved around the ques-
tion of self-representation, seen in the pressure for more “minority”
representation in political and academic institutions. What all these
instances share is the semiotic principle that something is “standing
for” something else, or that some person or group is speaking on
behalf of some other persons or groups.
A full understanding of media representation therefore requires a
comprehensive analysis of the institutions that generate and distribute
audiovisual texts as well as of the audience that receives them. Whose
stories are being told? By whom? How are the stories manufactured,
disseminated, received? Who controls the image? Who is represent-
ing whom and within what power arrangements? Indeed, questions of
address are as crucial as questions of representation. Who is speaking
through a film? Who is imagined as listening? Who is actually listening?
Who is looking? And what social desires and discourses are mobilized
by a film or video or TV program? While in a novel it is clear who is con-
trolling the representation, in film, as a collaborative art, and especially
in documentary film, which usually involves a dialogue between the
filmmakers and the human subjects of the film, it is much less clear.
Attempts to democratize filmic authorship go back to the many left-
ist collectives of the late 1960s, whether Cine-Liberación in Argentina
or Third World Newsreel in the United States. In France, the debate
about “putting cameras in the hands of the workers” goes at least as
far back as Chris Marker’s 1970s efforts with SLON (Society for the
Creation of New Works) in collaboration with French factory work-
ers. Whereas filmmaking historically has usually been in the hands
of middle-class directors equipped with “cultural capital” (Bourdieu)
and with connections to funding sources, there have also been many
countervailing attempts to democratize filmmaking by putting the
148 ROBERT STAM
camera in the hands of the disempowered. Although this usually very

partial transfer of power was extremely difficult when filmmaking
equipment was cumbersome and expensive, it has become much eas-
ier with the various technological changes—from lightweight cam-
eras and sound recording equipment in the 1960s to later video and
then digital revolutions in the present—that have rendered cameras
and recording equipment lighter, cheaper, and more user-friendly.
When we shift attention from texts to their authorship and pro-
duction, the question of the mimetic real gets displaced onto a differ-
ent register, touching on the issue of who is empowered to represent
the real. Rather than being an issue of a realist style or of realistic
representation, the issue becomes—who is producing the film and
actually holding the camera. At the same time, the question of “giv-
ing voice to the other” is very complicated: it is not simply a question
of handing over the camera to representatives of the disempowered
group. In the 1970s, different directors took different positions. For
Chris Marker, putting cameras in the hands of workers would lead to
a more accurate representation that would reveal a kind of truth, if
only the provisional truth as seen by the workers themselves. Jean-Luc
Godard was more skeptical; for him putting cameras in the hands of
workers would mean that workers, in a circular process, would simply
imitate those actors, such as Jean Gabin, who had incarnated them in
the cinema, and thus produce only imitation of an imitation.
In Brazil, we note the shift from representation to self-representation
in the transition from the Cinema Novo of the 1960s to more
recent films. While the Cinema Novo directors were almost invari-
ably white, middle-class, male, urban intellectuals—there were no
women—speaking for the mestizo peasants of Vidas Secas and the
black favelados of Rio, the new directors are of more diverse origins.
We see evidence of this paradigm shift not only in the trajectories of
individual directors such as Eduardo Coutinho, but also when we
compare two versions of the same film project, one from 1962 and
the other from 2010. The project in question is the 1962 film Five
Times Favela a five-episode film about the Rio favelas directed by
five middle class Cinema Novo directors like Leon Hirszman and
Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. The 2010 remake of the film was orga-
nized by Carlos Diegues (director of one of the original episodes)
filmed by people from the favelas themselves. The revelatory new title
points to the shift toward self-representation: Five Times Favela: This
Time by Ourselves.
The discussion echoes Foucault’s comments, in the context of pris-
ons, about the “indignity of speaking for others” and what Gayatri
Spivak (1988), riffing on Foucault, called “subaltern speech.” One

product of this democratizing tendency is what one might call “hybrid
authorship” or in Foucauldian terms “speaking together” instead of
“speaking for.” A signal example of this democratizing tendency is
Paulo Sacramento’s documentary about Carandiru, Prisoner of the
Iron Bars (2003). Sacramento initially planned to make a conventional
documentary about the prison, but, during his first visits, crystallized
an awareness that his relatively pampered middle-class background
had not prepared him to make such a film. He therefore decided to
offer training in filmmaking to the guards and to the prisoners as a
way of really getting to know the prison. In the end, the guards were
not interested but the prisoners were, so it was they who ended up
being the codirectors of the film.
The question for Sacramento then became: “How does one speak
with the prisoners, or at least enable their own speech?” The film thus
foregrounds the issue of the power relations between director and
subject, a relation that is necessarily asymmetrical but which becomes
overwhelmingly so in the case of those who have suffered the “social
death” of incarceration, those who normally lack all social power to
shape their own representation. “Hybrid authorship” becomes a par-
tial solution, then, to the problem of subaltern speech. In this experi-
ment in coauthorship, the subtitle reveals the film’s intention: rather
than portraits of the prisoners, we have self-portraits. Instead of char-
acters in search of an auteur, we have prisoner-characters as coauthors
of their own portrait.
Figure 9.1 Prisioneiro da Grade de Ferro [Prisoner of the Iron Bars] (Brazil,
2003), directed by Paulo Sacramento.
150 ROBERT STAM
Prisoner of the Iron Bars is premised on a kind of contract

between the director and the prisoners, whereby the filmmaker ini-
tiates the prisoners into the world of filmmaking and the prison-
ers initiate the filmmakers into the world of the prison. Breaking
with the tradition of the “sociological documentary” of the 1960s
where “experts” spoke in voice-of-God offscreen narration about
the socially excluded while subtly reaffirming their own power
and authority. Prisoner of the Iron Bars subverts the director’s own
authority. It does so through a number of mechanisms: first, pre-
senting the prisoners themselves as the real experts on the prison,
as those who know its secret codes, power arrangements and politi-
cal economy, and who are therefore the best equipped to analyze
the prison world for the director and the spectator; second, by
showing scenes that the director could not possibly have filmed, for
example scenes from inside the cells at night. (While Sacramento
had assumed the prisoners would film the inside of their cells, the
prisoners, quite logically, were much more interested in what they
could see outside). We look with the prisoners who are holding
the camera, and we watch the prisoners looking, but the prisoners’
look takes us back outside again to the world that we the specta-
tors inhabit and that prisoners hope to inhabit once again. Third,
through an inversion of the panoptical voyeurism of the prison film
genre, we do not look at the prisoners through the peephole like
the guards (or like Varela in the Babenco film); rather we look with
the prisoners at the guards as they look through the peephole.
Finally, the film domesticates the prisoners because we see them
in the cells that they have remade into a simulacrum of home with
their photos and artifacts. Thus, the film shows, and the prisoners
themselves demonstrate, that they are part of the larger middle-class
world. They exist on a continuum with the larger society; they come
from that society and will return to it. The effect is one of humaniza-
tion and normalization of the excluded. In the end, film also creates a
kind of self-subjectification. The prisoners become the phenomenolo-
gists of their own lives, practitioners of “consciousness consciousing.”
As they share their reflections on the most banal quotidian events
(falling asleep, preparing coffee) the spectator comes to inhabit their
subjectivity while the prisoners guide the spectators’ gaze and atten-
tion. The film thus condenses and fuses two roles usually separated:
the subjects/objects of the film, those who supposedly experience
without reflection, and the directors, those who are “supposed to
know” and positioned to reflect with intelligence and distance.
Prisoner foregrounds the agency—intellectual, practical, musi-

cal, cinematic—of the prisoners by showing (1) the filmmakers in
the act of filming, often in pairs, in a mise-en-abyme of collective
authorship; (2) their capacity to make art; (3) their creative way of
communicating with women neighbors through an invented sign
language; (4) their capacity to narrate their own lives; and (5) their
capacity to shoot film. The prisoners are so much at ease with the
director, so convinced that he is not an agent of the state, that
they proudly display their illegal activities, such as making rum,
planting marijuana, and fabricating weapons. (If the perspective of
the Babenco film is voyeuristic, that of Prisoners is exhibitionistic).
At the same time, the film makes us aware of the limits of “giv-
ing voice,” since at any given moment we are not completely sure
who filmed what we are seeing. So Sacramento gives the camera to
the other, but also reveals the limits of this gesture. The control
remains, in the end, in the hands of the director and the editor. At
the same time, the film shows prisoners who not only want to be
visible but who also want their point of view registered and under-
stood. In a case of what Jean-Louis Comolli (2004) calls “auto-
mise-en-scene,” their desire shapes the mise-en-scene. Yet they do not
angelize themselves; they know they have committed crimes. But
what matters to Sacramento is not that they be heroes but that they
be complex, fully human subjects.
The C oncert F ilm

The final genre example to treat Carandiru, and more broadly to
treat state and police violence, is the concert film or filmed musi-
cal performance, in this case by Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso
and his song “Haiti.” The CD of which “Haiti” forms part exem-
plifies a striking feature of Brazilian popular music—its political
and intellectual ambition. As engaged intellectuals who also inspire
large dancing crowds, artists like Caetano and Gilberto Gil form
the contemporary equivalent of Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals,”
or, melding Gramsci with the figure of Orpheus, “orphoganic
intellectuals.” The Caetano CD, called “Nights of the North,”
is a kind of historicized commentary on slavery and its sequels
in Brazil. As a polyphonic orchestration of voices addressing the
Middle Passage, slavery, and discrimination, the CD constitutes
an essay on the history of the Black Atlantic, with references to
Nigeria (two naira fifty kobo); Angola (“congo benguela manjolo
152 ROBERT STAM
cabinda mina”); to the sugar plantations and to the black leaders of

rebellions against them, to the abolitionism of Joaquim Nabuco,
and to May 13, the day of the official celebration of the abolition
of slavery. With each song, the chosen musical genre itself makes a
comment. Nabuco’s text, for example, a white man’s melancholic
ref lections on the legacy of slavery, is linked to the romantic style
of the German lied , while the celebration of abolition takes the
form of a festive samba de roda. In the end, the CD stages the
history of the African diaspora in musical form, and the DVD, in
audiovisual form.
Within this broader frame, the song “Haiti,” addresses the trou-
bling social issue of police brutality. Here, Caetano places the story of
Carandiru within the frame of the variant modalities of oppression in
Brazil and in the Americas. As an analysis of the intersectionalities of
race and class in white-dominant societies, the song is more enlight-
ening than many academic dissertations in that it conveys a sense of
how race, to cite Stuart Hall, becomes “the modality through which
class is lived.” The lyrics describe a scene in which Caetano himself
played a role. Just as he was being given a “citizenship award” on
a stage overlooking Salvador’s historic Pelourinho square, Caetano
saw mostly black police beating up mostly black, or mestizo, or poor
white people.
When you are invited to go up to the top

Of the Jorge Amado Foundation
To see from above the line of soldiers, almost all of them black
Hitting on the nape of the neck
Black hustlers, mulatto thieves, and others almost white
But treated like blacks
Only in order to show to the others almost black
(and they are almost all black)
And to the almost white poor as blacks
How it is that blacks, poor people and mulattos are treated.
The first point to make here is that Caetano recognizes his own
social advantage and privileged voyeuristic position. He is not the
victim of the violence; he is the observer. Moreover, he stages a racist
voice which is not his own personal voice but rather a harsh expres-
sion of what might be called the racist common sense, the world
of the doxa, of “everyone knows.” In a case of what Bakhtin calls
“double voiced discourse,” he articulates the discourse but frames it
in a critical a way.
Interestingly, Caetano’s poem also practices intermediality, with

two references to television, to the TV News and to the Globo net-
work program “Fantastic Lens.”
And that is where Carandiru comes in.

And if, when you go through the red light, the old, usual red light
And you notice a man pissing on the street corner onto a shining
garbage bag
In Leblon / And when you hear the smiling silence of São Paulo
During the Massacre . . .
111 defenseless prisoners, but prisoners are almost all black
Or almost black, or almost white almost black because so poor
And poor people are like rotten people and everyone knows how
blacks are treated
And when you take a trip around the Caribbean
And when you fuck without a condom
And offer your intelligent contribution to the embargo of Cuba
Think about Haiti, Pray for Haiti / Haiti is here / Haiti is not here.
A pause in the music allows for a dramatic announcement of the

massacre. In a minimalist presentation, the events are evoked in
words alone, without any audiovisual support beyond the perfor-
mance itself. Caetano evokes the real through spoken words in their
referential dimension. At the same time, there is a kind of reen-
actment, in that Caetano performs the shock felt the first time he
heard the news, even if he is singing the song many years later. In
“Haiti,” the words take on more force precisely because the song is
interrupted, as if for a dramatic announcement of a tragic event. The
effect is of an eruption of the real into a musical entertainment: “We
interrupt this performance to announce a catastrophe. The show
must not go on.”
We return to an apparently precinematic form—mere words relat-
ing an immense reality, like Shakespeare’s bare stage representing the
battles of Agincourt—yet everything is changed by the fact that the
words are filmed. We are not just hearing the words or reading them
but also seeing the music performed. We see who is playing which
instruments, we observe the performance style and body language
of the musicians. In an acousmatic effect whereby we hear speech or
music without seeing its source, we hear the audience singing along
with the refrain without seeing them. The audience too serves as our
surrogate; it reverberates to the music as we do. (The song would
not have had the same impact if we had heard it on the radio for
154 ROBERT STAM
example, and if we did not hear the audience singing along). The
music of “Haiti” also sends a message through its harsh dissonance,
with its own modernist or postmodernist beauty. The song offers a
tense aesthetic, not Freyre’s homeostatic description of Brazil as an
“equilibrium of antagonisms”; it offers, rather, a disequilibrium of
antagonisms. It offers, in the end, the politicization of avant-gardist
dissonance.
C onclusion
So what have we learned from our journey across the mediatic spec-
trum? Overall, we have seen a trend toward intermedial hybrid-
ization. First, all the segments mingle documentary and fiction
(even the Caetano song includes documentary-style verbal reports on
the police beatings that he personally witnesses in Salvador, and on
the prisoner massacre that he learns about on the news). Secondly,
given the subject of the massacre, all of the texts touch on the subject
of death, even though they approach it differently, whether through
words (Caetano) or literal restaging (Babenco). Death, in this sense,
still forms a kind of gold standard of the real even in a simulacral
mass-mediated age. Third, all five segments, including the news and
documentary, involve acting or performance of some kind. Caetano
is a musical performer, an actor-singer, so the issue of performance is
obvious, but he is also performing even when he reports on the mas-
sacre, enacting his outrage at the news. Globo Reporter, meanwhile,
features the acting typical of TV anchors, a mixture of Stanislavsky
and Brecht, combining a pose of cool objectivity with facial expres-
sions that evoke feelings of empathy or offense. The Babenco film,
for its part, features only actors, some well-known and others rela-
tively unknown. Yet even the extras are playing roles, since Babenco
refused, for ethical reasons, to use actual inmates from the prison.
With Babenco, the acting is virtuoso, sententious, grandiloquent,
even bombastic, in line with the melodramatic approach he has cho-
sen. The documentary Prisoner of the Iron Bars is the most minimalist
in terms of performance and acting. The performance is limited to
what Ismail Xavier calls the “process of theatricalization generated
by the camera-effect and the real instigated by the experience of the
filming itself with its consequences for all those involved.”
Each text refracts and mediates the real in distinct ways depending
on the medium, the genre, and the artists. Each offers its own coef-
ficient of realism, stylization, reenactment, performance. Television
news offers immediacy, direct transmission, a polyphony of voices, and
the horizontal camaraderie of a shared experience, including direct

eyewitness accounts in the heat of the moment. Babenco’s Carandiru,
meanwhile, reconstructs the taboo image of the massacre itself, but he
does so in the style of the art film, where the hyperdensity of artfulness
seems to cry out “This is great art!” In a paroxysm of artistic excess,
the film combines melodramatic sentimentality with the most brutal
naturalism, wrapped within a tragedy that culminates in a cathartic
purgation of the pathos generated by the mythos. At the same time,
the style recalls the confessional dramas of the telenovelas.
Prisoner of the Iron Bars, meanwhile, reduces the gap in a different
way, through shared authorship. The Caetano song “Haiti” finally
uses words, music, and performance, without any attempt to represent
the events in audiovisual form. Yet, the song is powerfully effective in
its own way. Ironically, it is precisely the moment when the artist does
not use music or lyrics but only words that has the most impact—the
announcement of the massacre. Yet, everything in the concert film—
the music, the mise-en-scene, the performance—has been a necessary
prelude that makes possible the efficacy of that moment.
We have analyzed five mediated versions of the same actual event,
refracted through different media, formats, genres, and ideologies.
For Bakhtin, human consciousness and artistic practice do not come
into contact with the real directly but rather through the medium
of the surrounding ideological world. Audiovisual media, in this
sense, not only register the sounds and images of world; they also
represent the languages and discourses, which refract and interpret
the world. Rather than directly reflect the real, or even refract the
real, audiovisual media refract a refraction, in a mediated version of
an already textualized, discursivized, and ideologized socioideologi-
cal sphere. In this sense, each text conveys different ways of reflect-
ing and refracting the real through art and ideology: the common
sense humanism of Globo Reporter, the bien-pensant melodramatic
humanism of the Babenco film, the bottom-up social anger of the
rap video, the dialogically hybrid authorship of Prisoners of the Iron
Bars, and the double-voiced critique of the Caetano song, as a sterling
example of what Caetano calls, speaking of Brazilian music generally,
“the sweetest protest music in the world.” Art is incontrovertibly
social, not so much because it represents the real but rather because
it constitutes a historically situated utterance—a complex of utter-
ances addressed by one socially constituted subject or subjects—a
TV network, a filmmaker and his collaborators, a documentarist and
his inmate subjects, a singer-composer and his audience—all deeply
immersed in historical circumstance and social contingency.
156 ROBERT STAM
Note
1. Globo was seen at the time as the personal fiefdom of conserva-
tive media magnate Roberto Marinho, the same figure who was
denounced in a British documentary by Simon Hartog as enjoying a
power that went “BEYOND Citizen Kane.”
B ibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.
Commolli, Jean-Louis. Voir et pouvoir. L’innocence perdue: cinema, télévision,
fiction, documentaire. Paris: Verdier, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of Prison. Translated by
Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1995 [1975].
———. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley.
London: Penguin, 1990 [1976].
Gaudreault, André. Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema
[Cinéma et attraction: pour une nouvelle histoire du cinématographe].
Translated by Timothy Barnard. Champaign: University of Illinois Press,
2011.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1988.

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CH A P T ER 9

In this chapter, I hope to demonstrate a critical, theoretical, and ped-

show Jornal Nacional, as a way of contextualizing the screen image of

voices, these are outnumbered and, more important, discredited by

The F eature F iction F ilm

“disciplinary spectacle.” While a public hanging of the kind Foucault

reportage means that the film can also be seen as a documentary,

prisoners themselves see very little. In Carandiru, in contrast, the

sexually transmitted diseases, but it is noteworthy that such figures

The F eature D ocumentary

the Judeo-Islamic censure of “graven images” and the preference for

camera in the hands of the disempowered. Although this usually very

Spivak (1988), riffing on Foucault, called “subaltern speech.” One

Prisoner of the Iron Bars is premised on a kind of contract

Prisoner foregrounds the agency—intellectual, practical, musi-

The C oncert F ilm

cabinda mina”); to the sugar plantations and to the black leaders of

When you are invited to go up to the top

Interestingly, Caetano’s poem also practices intermediality, with

And that is where Carandiru comes in.

A pause in the music allows for a dramatic announcement of the

the horizontal camaraderie of a shared experience, including direct

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