Black Orpheus airs at 10:00 AM on Wednesday, March 9th
Made in Brazil and stylized by French director Marcel Camus, Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro) (1959) made a global impact with its color, movement, youthful energy and infectious soundtrack - winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The film adapts the Hellenic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the contemporary favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval, a pre-Lenten celebration known for its costumed parades and celebrations. Orfeu (Breno Mello) is a streetcar conductor who makes such beautiful music, it is said that it makes the sun rise. Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) is a young woman from the countryside who has fled to Rio because Death, figured as a grimacing stalker in a skeleton costume, is threatening her life. Following the myth, the young couple falls in love and Orfeu travels as far as the underworld to be reunited with Eurydice. The film depicted Rio as a playful paradise full of beautiful and boisterous people. Black Orpheus captivated the European-American imagination with its audiovisual richness.
Though largely a European production, Black Orpheus can feel like an authentic representation of Brazilian life because actual, everyday Brazilians played an integral role on and off the screen. Along with cinematographer Jean Bourgoin (known for his work with Jean Renoir, Orson Welles and Jacques Tati) Camus seamlessly mixed the dreamy and elegant narrative film with video footage from the 1957 Carnaval in Rio. They also staged a smaller event using thousands of locals as extras. Breno Mello was well known as a Brazilian soccer player – not an actor. Marpessa Dawn was a singer and dancer from Pittsburgh, she moved to Europe as a teenager, and settled in France where she met Camus (and later married him). Though American, her bewitching call to her lover – “Orfeu, Orfeu” – which echoes throughout the film quickly assimilates her into the Brazilian backdrop. And both of the leads had their songs dubbed by Brazilian singers, Agostinho dos Santos and Elizeth Cardoso, respectively.
The film is loosely based on the 1956 musical play Orfeu da Conceição by Brazilian poet, playwright and lyricist Vinicius de Moraes, with a score by Antonio Carlos Jobim. French producer Sacha Gordine wanted an entirely new score so he wouldn't have to pay royalties to Brazilian music publishers. While the whole soundtrack popularized Brazilian music, three songs in particular remain standout tracks: Jobim’s “A felicidade” which opens the film, Luiz Bonfá’s “Manhā de Carnaval” and “Samba de Orfeu” which have become bossa nova classics. Jobim and Bonfá quickly entered the global jazz canon, but it was Gordine, having published the songs himself, who was able to claim royalties, making more money than the original composers.
Indeed, upon the film’s release, many critics and intellectuals felt the final product exploited rather than supported Black Brazilian culture. Especially detrimental, they said, was its exoticization of the country, which peddled a falsely romantic view of its favelas. Camus was criticized for glossing over the poverty in the slums. In general, Brazilians were less impressed with Black Orpheus than their European-American counterparts. It is rumored that Moraes hated the film so much that he walked out of the theater.
The film’s uncritical lens seemed particularly out of touch given that, in the late 1950s, a new generation of Brazilian filmmakers were coalescing into the political Cinema Novo Movement which – inspired by Italian neorealism – showcased the ugly truths of Brazilian life. Glauber Rocha, its leader, hoped that it would “make the public aware of its own misery.” Cinema Novo rebelled against “the cloak of Technicolor” found in European-American representations of Brazil and the rest of Latin America. It resisted the kind of unaware curiosity – the ‘slum tourism’ – that shapes Black Orpheus.
Perhaps the most well-known critic of Black Orpheus is former president Barack Obama who, in his autobiography, Dreams of My Father, recounts his experience watching the film for the first time. It was the early 1980s, his first summer in New York while a student at Columbia University. His mother, Ann, from whom he gets the white side of his mixed-race ancestry, came to visit. (His father, the Kenyan governmental economist Barack Obama, Sr. died in a car crash at the age of 46. The president hardly knew him.) Ann thumbed through the Village Voice one evening and saw an advertisement for Black Orpheus, one of her favorite films, so she took her son to see it. What was supposed to be a bonding experience left young Barack feeling incredibly distanced from his mother. He writes:
“The film, a groundbreaker of sorts due to its mostly black, Brazilian cast, had been made in the fifties. The storyline was simple: the myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice set in the favelas of Rio during carnival, in Technicolor splendor, set against scenic green hills, the black and brown Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree birds in colorful plumage. About halfway through the movie I decided I'd seen enough, and turned to my mother to see if she might be ready to go. But her face, lit by the blue glow of the screen, was set in a wistful gaze. At that moment I felt as if I were being given a window into her heart, the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized that the depiction of the childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad's dark savages, was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white, middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different."
The critiques of the president and others transformed how many people watched the film. They learned to consider it from a different position. It challenged, as one critic puts it, their liberal innocence.
According to Carlos Gutiérrez, co-founder of the nonprofit film organization Cinema Tropical, Black Orpheus can be seen as the origin of more recent favela films, even those made by Latin Americans like Amores perros (nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2001) or City of God (nominated for four Oscars in 2002: Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing). “The favela has become an imaginary place for people to project whatever they want,” he says, “either exotic takes on Latin America or post-apocalyptic fears.”
In 1999, director Carlos Diegues, one of the leaders of the Cinema Novo movement, made his own version of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend, Orfeu, set in contemporary Rio. Caetano Veloso – who famously called Camus “shameless” – did the score. Unlike Black Orpheus, Orfeu reflected the reality of Rio’s favelas. It remixed the samba with hip-hop to tell a more up to date version of the tragic love story. It was a bigger hit in Brazil than Black Orpheus was. But for many cinephiles, Black Orpheus remains a magical filmic experience with universal themes, a rare artistic moment that was never recreated by Camus – or any other filmmaker who has taken on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
