2024 Essays

Fantastical Realism: The Individual Imagination in the Films of Héctor Babenco

Jones, Ryan Clough

Though often grouped together with earlier Brazilian filmmakers in Cinema Novo and beyond, Héctor Babenco distinguishes himself from his forebears through his radical recentering of the individual imagination. Refusing the homogenizing effects of allegory, flouting the “message” in favor of the subject, Babenco’s filmography melds brutal social realism with surrealist touches, subjectifying the camera’s lens and situating the spectator firmly in the world of his protagonists.