In the film, City of God, there are certain camera techniques which do provoke the audience into taking a particular point of view towards characters. The main character that the audience may side with is Rocket, a young man who aspires to be a photographer. Rocket is not a hoodlum, like the people he grew up with such as Lil' Ze, he just wants to become a photographer and get out of the City of God. I personally took the point of view about certain situations in the film from Rocket as I thought he was always in the middle of things. You can see this by where the camera saw him. Rocket was always situated in the centre of conflict. An example of this is in the beginning/end sequence where Rocket is between Lil' Ze's gang and the police. The use of camera rotation and close up at this point shows that this has been the case since Rocket was very young, as the film goes back in time to when Rocket and the others were younger.
Rocket is very similar to a character in La Haine, which is another film I have studied. This character is Said. Throughout the film, Said is constantly seen to be in the middle of conflict which is exactly like Rocket. In La Haine you can see that Said is in the middle throughout conflict whenever Vinz and Huburt get into an argument. Said is placed in the middle of the camera shot and this shows the audience that Said is the peacemaker in the trio.
The same, however cannot be said for Rocket. Despite always being in the middle of the shot, Rocket does not actually attempt to fix the conflict which occurs throughout the film. Rocket continues to follow his dream of being a photographer. Rocket's aspirations are very similar to the hoodlum's. The hoodlum's, such as Lil' Ze just want to shoot people with guns, whereas Rocket wants to take pictures of things which could be considered shooting things too, as this is what you do with a camera.
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