ABSTRACT
From before the origins of the ghetto in Renaissance Venice, the fabric of the city has repeatedly wrapped around spaces of poverty in a fashion that both displays and conceals the realities of contemporary immiseration. Such spaces are invariably the product of both political economies of residence and eschatologies of stigma. The combination of the empirical measurement of the former and the semiotics of the latter may at times confuse analysis. In any description it is possible to invoke sets of meanings that are already known about the ghetto, the banlieue, the township or the favela. Yet the strange realities of such places can also confound. Early in Matthieu Kassiewitz’s 1995 film La Haine,1 a pan shot across a Parisian banlieue blown by ganja smoke and the riotous soundtrack of ‘Fuck the Police’ intercut with Piaf ’s ‘Je ne regrette rien’ is suddenly interrupted by the presence of a cow on a derelict post-riot landscape. Likewise, the narrative through which the barrio is made visible in the film Ciudad del Dios is bookended by the sudden appearance of a chicken running through the street. The uncanny appearance of the strange animal in both cases disrupts the familiar and already known story of social immiseration in the ghettoes of the francophone and the Latin American city.
