The Shock of the Real

The gun shots, the crying of women, the hustle of police clanging with their gear to the scene--this is a shock of the real.

Beatriz Jaguarbe's essay "The Shock of the Real" recalls what she believes shock to fall under. Jaguarbe wrote that shock of the real is a "specific representation on the unwritten narrative and visual imagery that unleashes an intense, dramatic discharge that distabilizes notions of reality itself" (Jaguarbe 70).

This can be best seen in the haunting film about a bus hijacking, "Bus 174." The shock Jaguarbe wrote is a "breakdown of representation by events so large or so unexpected in dimension that htey momentarily spress conceptual coinage of the 'shock of the real;' rapes, murders, muggings, fights..." (70).

Sandro de Nascimiento, as the film points out, was another one of the victims of favelas in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Because violence is such a central part of this city, not necessarily wanted nor is it the only thing involved culturally with Brazilian life, it still has made an impact on how the poor live. Children are forced to live on streets and band together to survive. Most of them will get into drugs. The ethnographic authority in this film gave the voice very much to everyone involved in the scene as much as possible.

The shock of this film was that Sandro's deep disturbance that no one, not even his Tia could remove from having lost his mother at such a young age. Yet at the root of it, the filmed repeatedly to how Sandro could not truly shoot anyone, and how one of the bus survivors recounted that she didn't believe that he would shoot anyone.

Jaguarbe wrote, "[Shock of the real] unleashes a cathartic release but contrary to the response elicited by Greek tragedies or romantic poetry. The catharic element here does not necessarily here does not necessarily wish to provoke the classic sentiment of compassion or pity" (page 70).

From Nichol's essay one of the three methods of realism; empirical realism, was probably the most present in the film. Every side from the police, to the victim (kidnapped in the bus, who kidnapped the bus) every side of the story was told as exhaustedly as possible. The psychological realism of the film was what the people who knew Sandro what they could best defer was going on in his mind, once again leading to his run with violence with and without the police.


Lorang's Way, a less violent film about a man who gained success through his many wives and livestock.The film was very muc life under toned reality life show. People came into his home and wanted to film and he gladly obliged. Yet the element of story telling is very imminent in the movie.


As for realism, I was slightly confused by Nichol's interpretation of realism in teh literary sense making it sound very naked and bare without much feeling that he pushed towards when defining it in the cinematic sense.