Film Log: Bus 174 (a documentary)

Title: Bus 174
Maker: Jose Padilha
Release Date: 2002 Length: 150min Format: b/w & color, sound, video, audio
Credits: Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, Sandro do Nascimento, Rodrigo Pimentel
Luiz Eduardo Soares.

Description:
Narration, v/o and helicopter view of the city. Film, video, low-fi camera shots
Sandro – (main character) a kid that has lived on the street since he was 6, now twenty some, hijacked a street bus. Covered by the media, the director himself also covered with the street surveillance cameras I like the voiceover. The real footage, the specialist and sociologist explain what’s going on while we are waiting for things to happen in the bus. Interviews of people that knew Sandro, telling the back-story. ”La Candelaria massacre”. One declaration fills in the other, like a conversation. Cool drug dealer testimony, shooting on location, following Sandro’s face. Night vision camera in jail. This is only one of many stories of delinquents, and how that system doesn’t know how to deal with them. Slow motion in the tensest moments, dramatizing emphasizing the situation holding the moment, creating suspense, replay of the scene, in slow motion from different angles, a lot of red hues… dramatizing.

José Padilha’s foreword:
Talks about TV’s top ratings during this situation
Newspaper didn’t cover the story; he decided to make the film after he saw the kidnapping from TV. The other reason was to sensitize the people about violence. Observational documentary – current event. Two parallel stories 1. bus highjacked, 2, Sandro’s story. He created dramatic tension on purpose. The editing was based on Sandro’s speech during the bus high jacking moments. The system the director created to get good declarations from his subjects. Projected the stock footage, and then they talked about it in front of the camera. MANIPULATION…
He found out about Sandro’s family by doing research at the penitentiary. Control of visibility.

Contents:
Bus 174 is the story of the highjacking of a bus in Brazil based on the real event that was broadcast live for 5 hours. Thru interviews, testimonies, stock footage and photographs, the director uses parallel storytelling, revealing minute by minute information about the highjacker’s social and economic troubled background.

Style: The style of this documentary could pass as a now a day regular reality TV television documentary . The aesthetics are simple and solid. Padilla combines old Hi8 stock footage, sharp colorful video HD aerial shots of the city of Rio, testimonials, stock footage from the Brazilian Networks and shots made by multiple surveillance cameras. Stock footage is all handheld, giving the film its sense of reality. During the most intense moment of the event, the director plays the actions in slower motion, adds a red hue to the image, and continuously replays the actions to emphasize and dramatize the event. The editing style is clearly parallel. Sandro’s back story and the event are interwoven. The cuts where guided by Sandro’s violent and desperate speech during the highjacking, guiding the viewer from Sandro’s troubled childhood and adolescence as a street kid from Rio. The film tries to be objective and informative, tries to flesh a character and not condemn him as someone who is “bad”, but as a rotten apple, a product of the social and economic problems of the country.

Formal and Technical Innovations: None, this is something that I’ve seen before on TV. I could maybe recall the way he got the victims to talk about the event. I think it was highly effective but at the same time manipulative. He projected the stock footage of the event ina dark room, they were able to stop the tape if they wanted, -apparently they didn’t- and that way they lived thru the situation again.


Significance/Contributions to documentary tradition:
It’s reality feel.

Personal Response: I think this is a very accurate portrait. It had good pace and kept my interest. I don’t feel its innovative, I’ve seen similar films made for television. It was very smart of the director to come up with the idea to make a documentary about the back story of what made Sandro highjack the bus and on the social and economic conditions of Brazil. Padilha also got his slice of cake from this disastrous event. I still feel the film is sensationalist, he picked a current event, did his research, manipulated the testimonials, and re-filtered the stock footage that was already mediated by TV, to once again give the event a new meaning, another layer, another point of view.