The relationship between stillness and movement in the cinema has gained unprecedented visibility and theoretical currency over the last two decades.* Yet cinema had entertained a fascination with the dormant stillness of its photographic basis long before digital technology redefined film production and reception. As the introduction of Still Brazil illustrates, the use of freeze frames and stills has served a variety of uses and effects across the history of narrative cinema, including: as a means of introducing, with the aid of voiceover, characters in an ironic key (The Election, Alexander Payne, 1999); as a self-reflexive freezing of the action to direct the viewer’s attention to an occurrence within the fictional universe (Three Colours: Red, Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994); or more commonly, at the end of a film in order to preserve ambiguity (The 400 Blows, François Truffaut, 1959), or else suspend time and delay the death of characters (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, George Roy Hill, 1969; and Thelma and Louise, Ridley Scott, 1991).

More specifically, Still Brazil purports to examine the relationship between stillness and movement within the domain of one specific national cinema. It selects two case studies from Brazilian cinema that lend themselves to an especially fruitful comparison: Garrincha: Joy of the People (Garrincha: alegria do povo, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1962), and City of God (Cidade de Deus, Fernando Meirelles, 2002). In both cases, instances of stillness occur in the middle of football matches – a crucial symbol of national identity in Brazil – but the stilling of action serves different narrative and aesthetic purposes. In Garrincha, the stillness of newspaper photographs is continually thwarted by zooms and camera movements that seemingly attempt to reanimate the still images back to life. In City of God, stilling is dictated by the needs of the voiceover narrator and accompanied by the clicking sound of a photographic camera, which foreshadows and reinforces the importance of this instrument in the film’s diegesis.

The two films are also illustrative when considering the apparatic and technological contingency of cinema. As the voiceover explains, Andrade’s decision to include stills in Garrincha was partly to do with the fact that the director did not have at his disposal sound recording equipment. The stilled moments in City of God, for their part, are the fruit of digital manipulation – the same technology, incidentally, that enabled the workings of the video essay itself. Indeed, it could be argued that the video essay – in its propensity to slow down, pause and arrest images – is perhaps the form most suited for a study of the relationship between stillness and movement. In Still Brazil, moving images are stilled and the stills and freeze frames that were originally allowed brief moments are granted extra onscreen time, arrested even further as it were. As such, as the video essay arranges and re-arranges these images in time in an effort to account for their contextual specificities and visual allure, it displays a marriage between form and content that is as self-reflexive as it is affective.

*See, for example, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Laura Mulvey, 2006); Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image (David Green and Joanna Lowry, eds, 2005); Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, eds, 2008); Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms (Elvira Røssak, ed., 2011).

Not unlike a moment of silence in a pop song, the use of a freeze frame in film is a dramatic break from the medium itself. Immediately identifiable as important and pregnant with multiple meanings, Stefan Solomon studies the use of this device throughout Brazilian cinema in his video essay, Still Brazil. A significant improvement on the first version of this essay, which attempted to deal with six films in the same amount of time, Solomon’s revised analysis focuses on Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s 1963 documentary Garrincha, Joy of the People and Fernando Merelles and Katia Lund’s 2002 slumsploitation blockbuster City of God. Aside from being linked by their use of still frames, both films implicitly deal with class and race in Brazil, and employ experimental and documentary aesthetics to tell their stories. Solomon provides some excellent commentary about Garrincha, particularly in regards to how the stills de Andrade used links politics with the game of soccer. In moments like these, the author is at his strongest, successfully making a culturally specific aesthetic argument that is fresh, astute, and not belabored.

However, the political dimension is not fully extended to City of God, which was released the year that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, leader of the Workers’ Party, won the general election in a historic landslide. Although it is arguable whether movies choose their moment or if the moment chooses the movies, failing to mention the political climate diminishes the through line between these two films. The more glaring political omission is that of the military dictatorship—Garrincha was released the year before the coup, a gap more significant between these two films’ production than that of documentary and fiction. (Additionally, City of God takes place exclusively during the dictatorship, making at least a quick mention worthwhile.) Instead, Solomon’s analysis of City of God focuses on the film’s relationship to the medium of photography, managing to be critical (the author isn’t afraid to note when the freeze frames court cliché) and insightful, not always in ways that reveal its “Brazilianness.” (The wide variety of aesthetics that Merelles and Lund employ can be viewed either as postmodern sampling or an extension of Latin American syncretism and multiculturalism that’s been going on since 1492; in fact, it’s probably both.) Nevertheless, the connection Solomon makes between Lampião’s downfall and that of the street gangs in City of God is excellent, bolstered by the actual photos/footage of the cangaçeiros—it’s always wonderful to see relevant visual materials that are not films incorporated into video essays. This inclusion allows the viewer to make connections between the fictional and real bandits’ poses (and hubris) independently, the true benefit of using actual moving images rather than an author’s descriptive text. Throughout, Solomon’s voice is clear and succinct, and though I have outlined elements that could have been improved upon, he evinces an overall command of Brazilian film culture and history that serves this topic well. It would be interesting to see him revisit the other films included in the original essay, and draw more connections from them as a series.