An International View of an “Authentic” Brazil  

Black Orpheus, a 1959 film that gained international acclaim, sets the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the slums of Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval. It is based on a play, Orfeu da Conceição, by the Brazilian writer Vinicius de Moraes, though Moraes denounced the film for not adhering to his work. In the film, Orfeo is a dancer in a samba school by day and a singer by night; Eurydice is a simple country girl who comes to the city to escape a mysterious man—possibly a physical manifestation of Death—who is pursuing her. The film was praised for its spectacular visuals, lush music, and portrayal of Afro-Brazilian characters. At the same time, it was criticized for portraying an exoticized vision of the country and the characters, for its lack of realism, and for exporting the idea that the poor black citizens of Rio did nothing but sing and dance their cares away.

When Black Orpheus was released internationally in 1959, it seemed to inject a dose of color and life into the gray landscape of previous art films, which had been dreary depictions of life in Germany, France, Japan, or Italy. It was the first internationally acclaimed film to take place entirely in a favela, with an all-black Brazilian cast (one of the leads was of mixed race, and from Pittsburgh, though this was rarely remarked upon), featuring a soundtrack by famous Brazilian singers Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá, who pioneered the new style of Bossa Nova.

International Reception

In some circles, Black Orpheus, directed by the Frenchman Marcel Camus and produced by several companies of various nationalities, was seen as a sign of Brazil’s rising globalization, even as the film that made Brazilian cinema internationally known as “one of the strongest creative forces in the medium of cinematic arts” (Ortolano, 22).

Certainly the film itself gained international attention, winning an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film—where, in both cases, it was credited as a French production—as well as the Palme d’Or, the highest recognition at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival.

To what extent, and in what respects, was the film Brazilian? This is a contentious issue. In the anthology of essays Brazilian Cinema, published in 1982, essayists repeatedly state definitively that Black Orpheus was French, that although it had a Brazilian cast and used elements of Brazilian culture such as samba and Carnaval, the Brazilian song-writers and performers benefited less than the French director and producers. Additionally, they argue, it created an image of Brazil that “represents nothing more than the Amazon, coffee, samba, and soccer” (95).

Reviews of the film support the claim that it created a somewhat stereotyped image of Brazil. In 1959, Bosley Crowther, a film critic for the New York Times, described Black Orpheus as, “a tragic love story of a Negro chap and a Negro girl all tangled up in the madness of Carnival, full of intoxicating samba music, frenzied dancing and violent costumes.”

That review can be considered on some level a product of its time, but a 2002 review of the film in an Indiana University journal of black film criticism describes the film in a similar way:

… The uncontrollable electricity of the Carnival is brilliantly captured in the film, the music makes everything including the streetcars seem to dance, and the cinematography is such that vivid images appear to leap off the screen. In addition to such aural and visual pleasure, Black Orpheus also provides the perfect vehicle to transport the jaded modern viewer into a not-so-unfamiliar reality. Here is the familiar sight of dark faces displaced by slavery, this time in South America, where they are sequestered on a hill high above the city, segregated in the poorest section of town. Some of the children who live on the hill have no shoes on their feet and no food to eat, but they still ready themselves with anticipation for the Carnival celebration (Steans, 15).

In 1959, shortly after the film’s release, the modernist poet Manuel Bandeira offered his commentary:

My disappointment was as great as my anticipation. I believe it was the same for all Brazilians. The film works outside Brazil, for foreigners that do not know Brazil or who only know it superficially. There is in it a parti pris of exoticism that, along with very marked French elements, make it very insipid to us, despite the intention of the director, and regardless the authentic presence of so many Black Brazilian folks (Ribeiro, 6).

Critiques along these lines would only become more common in later years.

The Rise of Cinema Novo and a Realist Critique  

After a period of cultural repression during World War II, French cinema took a chance to rebel against the domination of America and remodel itself as a center of culture with the rise of the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave. These films stressed the importance of individual thought and the dangers of indoctrination, often also denouncing the influence of other cultures on French society.

Brazilian Cinema Novo was based on a similar rejection of outside influence and a sense of disappointment with the developmentalist-nationalist presidencies of Getúlio Vargas and Juscelino Kubitschek. It also shared a focus on the nation’s history as a way to better understand the political climate of the time. The cinematographers who produced the films of Cinema Novo were strongly influenced by neorealism, focusing on faithful reproductions of customs and locations and refusing to separate art from politics.

Thus, the members of the Cinema Novo movement rejected Black Orpheus for two reasons. First, it was an incursion from outside, made by a French director and produced jointly by production companies in Brazil, France, and Italy; the French producers reportedly became rich off the royalties from the film’s songs, while its Brazilian composers made almost nothing. Second, despite taking place entirely in a favela, it shows not the day-to-day difficulties of slum life, but rather the joyful celebration of Carnaval, the week where all of Rio supposedly puts aside its work and its struggles and celebrates in the streets. The Brazilian author Ruy Castro said of the film, “It’s hard to believe that people living in cardboard houses can be that happy” (Brown, 2).

Black Orpheus and the Movimento Negro

A decade before Black Orpheus was released, the name already had connotations of race politics. In the introduction to a collection of essays and poetry by colonial writers with African roots, Jean-Paul Sartre compared the task of Afro-colonial writers, who imagine a return to their homeland or delve into their identity, to the myth of Orpheus: “And I shall call this poetry ‘Orphic’ because the negro’s tireless descent into himself makes me think of Orpheus going to claim Eurydice from Pluto.”

Yet the film did not reflect such thorough investigations of racial identity. Black Orpheus was released at a time when overt political activity in the Afro-Brazilian community was more or less dormant. Shot entirely in the favela Morro da Babilônia with many black or mixed-race actors, the film has been criticized for projecting stereotypes of its characters as simple-minded, overtly sexual, and interested only in singing and dancing.

Many of these criticisms emerged in later decades, when artists and filmmakers were interested in making political statements and reflecting the situation of the nation’s disadvantaged citizens. Black Orpheus was made only a few years after Carmen Miranda’s bright, cheerful musical escapes, and the country had not yet shaken that cultural trend. As one critic noted, the film holds up much better when compared to Hollywood’s attempts to portray Brazil and Carnaval, littered as they were with racialized slurs against Brazilians and confusions of the country’s customs with those of other Latin American nations.

The music that was featured so prominently in the film was generally unconcerned with politics. Unlike future musical forms, like Música Popular Brasileira, tropicália, black soul—which encouraged young Afro-Brazilians to think beyond the borders of Brazil to situate themselves within an international black community—bossa nova, the style that rose to prominence in part because of Black Orpheus, was seen as a largely apolitical, innocuous musical form. While samba rose out of the favelas, bossa nova had its roots in upper-middle-class beach communities in Rio. It was part of a community kept separate, by class and race, from the characters onscreen, a fact that was likely unclear to the international audience watching the film.

The climax of Black Orpheus, in which Orfeo seeks to return his beloved to life, shows a ritual of Candomblé, a uniquely Brazilian religion with roots in West African religion.

This is one example in which Camus deviated from Moraes’ original story, in an attempt to document actual cultural practices in Rio de Janeiro. Ironically, it was these attempts at realism, combined with the fact that the film was marketed at an international audience, that garnered Black Orpheus such criticism. If it had been targeted only at Brazilians, the portrayals of events in Rio likely would not have mattered so much. But since this film was a form of cultural exchange, it did not uphold many artists’ and critics’ standard of what image of Brazil should be exported to the world audience.

Further Reading

• Michael George Hanchard’s Orpheus and Power compares the formation of black movements in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the middle of the twentieth century. Though not dealing specifically with the film, it explains the lack of any strong, unified black movement during the 1950s and early ’60s.

Sources

• Atkinson, Michael. “Black Orpheus: Dancing in the Streets.” Current. www.criterion.com/current/posts/7-black-orpheus.
• Johnson, Randal and Robert Stam, ed. Brazilian Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
• Ortolano, Glauco and Julie A. Porter. “Brazilian Cinema: Film in the Land of Black Orpheus.” World Literature Today 77: 3/4 (Oct. – Dec. 2003).
• Ribeiro, Marília Scaff Rocha. “Variations on the Brazilian Orpheus Theme.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 11:3 (2009).
• Steans, Natia L. “Black Film Classic: ‘Black Orpheus’ (1959).” Black Camera. Indiana University Press 17:1 (Spring/Summer 2002)