Pixote (1981) — Hector Babenco

Pixote is a young boy living on the streets of Sao Paulo. As part of a crackdown on homeless people throughout the city, he is picked up by the police and sent to a juvenile detention facility. These types of facilities are intended to assist with youth rehabilitation, but in reality are nightmarish scenarios in which the children are regularly abused by the guards, and each other. Pixote witnesses rape, abuse, and the harsh realities of a corrupt criminal reform system. Another boy in the prison is killed by the guards the murder is blamed on the transwoman Lilica’s lover. After this incident, Lilica and her new lover Dito alongside Pixote, escape the juvenile detention facility. They eventually make their way to Rio for a potential drug deal, though it ultimately falls apart. The trio continues operating throughout the city, and eventually become pimps for Sueli, a prostitute. They conspire to rob Sueli, but a complicated relationship with Dito leads to Lilica leaving and an eventual fight in which Pixote inadvertently shoots and kills Dito. Pixote, still a young child, turns to Sueli as a mother figure in his life, but is turned away. The film ends with him being seen wandering down a railroad track, gun in hand, and headed toward an uncertain future. Through the corrupt police system, and conditions of Brazilian delinquency, Pixote has his innocent childhood ripped away from him as he is forced into a life of crime.

Hector Babenco was a highly influential Brazilian filmmaker — not just for his involvement with the development of the nation’s unique cinematic movements, but for demonstrating the significant power of the medium in general. Through his work, Babenco showed that cinema has significant power to effectuate real social changes. He is perhaps most well known for this 1981 film Pixote which showcases the difficult realities of life for homeless and at risk youth in Brazil’s cities during a time of rampant crime and police corruption. The film operates at a somewhat uncomfortable middle-ground between fiction and documentary to present its audience the gritty and difficult realities of Brazil’s juvenile reform system. Rather than offer a form of escapism, Babenco’s Pixote forces the audience to confront this difficult social issue directly, and as such is incredibly representative of the significant Brazilian film movements of Cinema Novo and the Aesthetic of Hunger.

Though Brazil was one of the three largest producers of film products within Latin America, its two counterparts — Mexico and Argentina — had become much more globalized in the form of increased exchange with Hollywood and other markets. Brazil, on the other hand, developed its own independent styles and remained more separated from global film markets which led to the development of its unique film movements. The idea of Cinema Novo is to reject a purely commercial cinema and instead use the medium as a mechanism to understand the nation as a whole. It was heavily influenced by Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave, adopting similar styles such as non-professional actors, localized narratives, and the use of “micro-realities” to represent the overall nation. Glaubar Rocha specifically references the movement in his film manifesto, The Aesthetic of Hunger. Rocha explains that “Wherever there is a filmmaker … ready to place his camera … at the great causes of his time, there will be the living spirit of cinema novo” (12). In other words, the movement posits that cinema should be used to confront the reality of social situations and use it to influence change for the future of the nation. Cinema novo is the antithesis of escapist cinema, which instead offers audiences an opportunity to escape from their social realities for the duration of a film. Through its distinct narrative and style, Babenco’s Pixote is highly emblematic of these Brazilian film movements.

Throughout the narrative, the traditional “good guys” turn out to actually be the “bad guys,” as the police and directors of the reform school continually abuse the children there and create an environment in which violence in normalized. When Pixote first arrives, the director says “You don’t get hit for no reason here,” which is a blatant lie given that adults and authority figures in Brazil regularly exploit children and push them to a life of crime. Brazilian law prevented minors from being punished for crimes, essentially giving adults a blank check to use children for criminal purposes. From the very beginning of the film, Pixote — and the audience — are immediately plunged into a violent and uncomfortable environment. One of the first scenes within the detention facility is a graphic rape scene involving children who are incredibly young. The blank and emotionless expression on Pixote’s face as he lies by telling the guards that he didn’t see anything is particularly striking. Even at his young age, Pixote already knows that his best option is to remain silent, and the audience knows immediately that he has lost his childhood innocence and has no hope of regaining it. The narrative is presented in somewhat of an episodic style; not every scene flows directly into the next. In a sense, the audience is viewing brief snapshots of Pixote’s life story. Sadly, in every snapshot his outlook is largely the same. Due to his origins as one of Brazil’s homeless youth, he is unable to escape a life of crime and violence.

This bleak reality is reinforced by the cinematic style that Babenco uses throughout the film. For one, Babenco employs some styles that are typical of documentaries. The film opens with a monologue from Babenco himself, in which he cites specific statistics of Brazil’s conditions, and introduces Fernando Ramos da Silva, the youth actor who plays Pixote. In addition to the monologue, the film creates a documentary style by using non-professional actors for many of the roles, as well as including limited non-diegetic soundtrack throughout. Even in the sections that are not in a documentary style, Babenco’s film plays into the conventions of Cinema Novo. For one, the narrative and editing of the film is relatively slow-paced. Rather than embellish the shots with fast editing or lots of action, Babenco allows the sad reality of Pixote’s situation in the detention facility and on the streets to speak for itself. The film simply presents the audience with the children’s emotions and their reactions to a situation that was a simple reality of Brazil’s present situation as a nation. Finally, the film includes many long tracking shots that were filmed in a single continuous take. This style is highly representative of Cinema Novo, and is used to represent the situation exactly as it is, without the use of editing for extra embellishment. Notably, the scene when Pixote first enters the detention facility is a single long take. Additionally, the final shot of the film is a single long take as well — lasting a full 56 seconds before fading to black. In it, the camera pans left-to-right, tracking Pixote as he walks down some railroad tracks. In a childlike manner, he balances on the rails, and playfully kicks rocks as he continues alone down the track. The camera comes to a stop, and we see Pixote shrink to a small dot as he continues into the distance, and into the unknown. This is a particularly haunting final shot given the “real” future that Pixote faced; da Silva was gunned down by police just a few years after the release of Pixote (Hart 74). This is just part of the uncomfortable effect that Babenco’s film has.

Through his distinct cinematic styles and narrative based in the reality of Brazil’s youth, Babenco’s Pixote is a film that confronts social realities and attempts to use cinema to create change in the nation. The film is incredibly difficult to watch, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Not all movies need to have the “magic” and happy-endings typical of Hollywood. Rather the medium is incredibly powerful for influencing social awareness and change for a nation as well. This is why Pixote is perhaps one of the best examples of Cinema Novo, and an example of the important role that all filmmakers and media producers have in the “real world” events of their societies.

Works Cited

Babenco, Hector. Pixote. 1981. Film.

“Cinema Novo.” Film Reference, http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Academy-Awards-Crime-Films/Brazil-CINEMA-NOVO.html. Accessed 21 Feb. 2018.

Hart, Stephen M. Latin American Cinema. Reaktion Books, 2015.

Rocha, Glauber. An Esthetic of Hunger. 1965.