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Black Orpheus
Directed by Marcel Camus
Produced by Sacha Gordine
Written by Play:
Vinicius de Moraes
Screenplay:
Marcel Camus
Jacques Viot
Starring Breno Mello
Marpessa Dawn
Lourdes de Oliveira
Léa Garcia
Music by Luis Bonfá
Antonio Carlos Jobim
Cinematography Jean Bourgoin
Distributed by GAGA Communications
Release date(s) France June 12, 1959

USA December 21, 1959
Running time 100 min.
Country France
Language Portuguese
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro in Portuguese) is a 1959 French film directed by Marcel Camus that is based on the play Orfeu da Conceiçāo, which was written by Vinicius de Moraes. Produced and filmed in Brazil, the title for the movie is taken from 'Orphée noir' by Jean-Paul Sartre. 'Orphée noir' was the preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache edited by Léopold Sédar Senghor, an anthology of poetry featuring black and Madagascan poets.[1] In the preface Sartre endorses Négritude—a literary and political movement developed in the 1930s by a group that included the future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and the Guianan Léon Damas. The Négritude writers found solidarity in a common black identity as a rejection of French colonial racism. They believed that the shared black heritage of members of the African diaspora was the best tool in fighting against French political and intellectual hegemony and domination. The film was reinterpreted in 1999 by Carlos Diegues under the title Orfeu.[1]

Contents

[edit] Plot

The movie opens with images of white Greek statues that explode to reveal black men dancing samba to drums in a favela. Orpheus (Breno Mello) is a trolley driver in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as a playboy. Although engaged to be wed, he does not seem very enthusiastic about the concept of marriage and spends the majority of the film trying to avoid his fiancée, Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira).

The film begins with Orpheus and his fiancée going to get a marriage license. The clerk at the courthouse makes reference to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, causing Orpheus's fiancée to get jealous and assume that there is another woman in his life. After they get the license, Mira agrees to buy her own ring because Orpheus wants to get his guitar out of the pawn shop for the carnival. When Orpheus gets home, he finds that his neighbor Serafina's (Léa Garcia) cousin named Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) has been visiting. Death is after Eurydice (the man in the skeleton suit). This is shown in a scene in which the man chases her down and Orpheus gallantly goes to her rescue.

Orpheus, upon seeing Eurydice, wins her graces by playing her a song on his guitar. He is impressed upon her telling him the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and letting him know that she knows he knows of it also because of the song which he had just been playing. Orpheus is a pleasant break from the insanity of Carnival, which seems to agitate Eurydice’s already frightened state. The two of them fall in love, yet are constantly on the run from both Mira and death, both of whom wish to kill Eurydice.

On the day of Carnival, Eurydice dresses in Sarafina's costume in order help Sarafina spend more time with her navy man which keeps her face concealed. During the festival, Orpheus uses every excuse to be able to dance with Eurydice (which is supposed to be Sarafina) rather than Mira. He consistently tells Mira to get back to her place.

Eventually, Eurydice’s identity is revealed and she is forced once again to run for her life from both Mira and death. This time she is not so lucky and is killed accidentally by Orpheus in his own trolley station when he turns the power on and electrocutes her. Death says "Now she's mine" before knocking him out. Despite the obvious fact that she is dead and the less obvious fact that he is the one who actually killed her, he looks for Eurydice within the Bureau of Missing Persons. The janitor there tells him that the place only holds papers and that no people would be found there. The janitor seems to be illiterate and Orpheus's reading ability is also presented as highly questionable. The janitor, taking pity on Orpheus, takes him down the stairs and to the place of a Hoodoo/Voodoo ritual in a scene that seems to mimic Candomblé.

At the gate, there is a dog named Cerberus, after the three-headed dog of Hades in Greek mythology. At this ritual, Orpheus is able to channel the spirit of Eurydice through the body of an old woman. Orpheus calls out to her and asks to see her, but Eurydice begs him not to look toward the voice, lest he lose her forever. When he looks back to see Eurydice, her spirit leaves the woman and he loses her forever (This is in direct correlation to the Greek myth in which Orpheus is able to save his love Eurydice but loses her forever when he looks back at her).

He wanders in mourning for the remainder of the film. The Greek Orpheus also wandered around after Eurydice's death, refusing all other women until he is killed by Thracian women in the heat of Dionysian ritual. Like the Greek Orpheus, this Orpheus is killed by a group of apparently crazed women. As we see Orpheus' and Sarafina's shack burning (set by Mira, no doubt), it is finally Mira's stone that hits him in the head and knocks him over a cliff to his death as he carried Eurydice's limp body.

There are two children, Benedito and Zeca, who seem to follow Orpheus around throughout the plot (especially Benedito) who believes that it is Orpheus's guitar that causes the sun to rise in the morning. After Orpheus dies, Zeca is compelled by Benedito to pick up the guitar and play so that the sun may rise again. Zeca is able to play the guitar and the sun does rise. A little girl comes by, gives Zeca a single flower and the film ends with the three of them dancing.

[edit] Production

[edit] Writing

The screenplay for Black Orpheus, according to the film's opening credits, was "inspired from the play Orfeu da Conceicao by Vinicius de Moraes." However, the original text for the play and that of the screenplay are quite different, though there are some parallels regarding their production. Vinicius de Moraes first conceived of the idea to write his play while in Brazil in 1942, there as a guide for writer Waldo Frank (himself there to research Latin America). The two visited local favelas, terreiros (ritual worship sites) and samba schools in Rio de Janeiro. After having read a neo-classical version of the Orpheus story, Vinicius began to "Hellenicize" the life of blacks living in the favelas.[2] In one night he composed the first act of his play, completing the second act and third act later in 1946 (this version of his third act was subsequently lost or discarded). Sacha Gordine, a French film producer, asked for a synopsis of the play and set out to acquire the rights to it. Vinicius submitted a rough draft for the film script, which he knew would be edited by a screenwriter. Sasha Gordine hired Jacques Viot as the writer to adapt the rough draft into a screenplay. After failed attempts by Gordine and Vinicius to find funding for the film in Brazil, Viot's script was given to Marcel Camus in June of 1956.[2]

[edit] Direction

The director went to carnaval in February 1957, and a year later he shot hundreds of meters of footage of street revelry. In September 1958, Camus filmed with actors (many amateur) and a local supporting cast of 4,000, staging a small carnaval in December. Considerable logistical help was lent by the Kubitschek administration.[6] The six-year gestation of the film culminated in 1959 when, with a Portuguese-language title, the film won the Palme d'Or [Golden Palm] at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was released in Brazil with the title Orfeu do Carnaval and in the U.S.--where it won an Oscar in 1960 for best foreign-language film--it was called Black Orpheus.

[edit] Cinematography

[edit] Music

The music was written by Brazilian composers Luis Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim, both of whom became icons of the bossa nova movement in the 1960s. The film score introduced audiences to the music of Brazil, particularly listeners in the United States. The score helped to start Jobim's international career in music and "[set] the stage for a bossa nova craze in the next decade."[3]

[edit] Cast

[edit] Reception

[edit] Critical response

Critics have charged that Black Orpheus offers a "postcard idealization" of life inside the Brazilian favelas.[4] The film was also not well received by Vinicius de Moraes, the author of the play the film was based upon. He reportedly walked out on the screening, telling friends that he felt it was full of stereotypes and clichés about Brazil.[5] Marcel Camus, the film's director, came under additional fire from some Brazilians for comments he had made in interviews about the country.

In interviews, Camus described Brazil as a "country without roots, made of transplanted races, without a tradition of expression," where "blacks live in favelas in order to flee from civilization." The Brazilian film critic Walter de Silveira responded that Brazilians were hardly a "people without roots or a tradition of expression....Nor do blacks live in favelas as an escape from civilization. Blacks live in favelas out of economic necessity....Furthermore, there are many poor and working class whites in the favelas."[5]

Comparisons have been made between Black Orpheus and West Side Story in that both tended to idealize life in the slums. To the credit of Black Orpheus, however, the film "did not ethnically cleanse the slums of black people" as West Side Story had done. What the film did do was leave an impression in the minds of non-Brazilians of pervasive happiness experienced by those living in the favelas. The movie offers a depiction of favelas as areas filled with quaint living quarters that have excellent views of Rio de Janeiro, places where residents are "'poor but happy,' with samba and carnival playing a major role in that 'happiness.'"[6]

More than any other film, Black Orpheus created in the international consciousness a powerful association between three related concepts: Brazilianness, Blackness and carnival....[It] advances a romantic and mystified vision of carnival and Brazil. The Brazilian characters play out the archetypal patterns provided by a European myth, all against the backdrop of Rio's photogenic beauty and the contagious energy of carnival. The film suggests a primitive capacity on the part of happy Black Brazilians to enjoy life no matter how devastating the conditions....Black Orpheus enlists all the elements of carnival—dance, rhythm, music, color, laughter—but ultimately in the service of a stereotypical vision.[7]

[edit] Influence

[edit] Other versions

In 1999 Brazilian film director Carlos Diegues created a new rendition of Orfeu da Conceiçāo by Vinicius de Moraes titled Orfeu, a film which sought to provide a different interpretation of the play from the one offered by Marcel Camus in Black Orpheus. Disappointed with the Camus version of the play, Diegues felt that Brazil had been portrayed in the film as an exotic location—the story told from an outsider's perspective. he has remarked, "I truly felt myself personally insulted, and from then on I began to dream about the film which became our present Orfeu." In the Diegues film, the role of Orpheus is played by Tony Garrido—a musician with real-life "street credibility" among Brazilians who is the lead singer for the reggae band Cidade Nigra.[8] Lúcia Nagib writes:

Orfeu's plot develops in a purpose-built favela, so that none of the sordid or picturesque details that exist in reality are forgotten. There are the labyrinthine stairs, the filthy trash deposits, and also the pirate radio station with its loudspeakers dotted everywhere, reporting the favela news in the flexible and creative local language in rap/funk rhythm. There are the scuffy bars where samba players get together (and the film does not fail to pay homage to such celebrities as Nelson Sargento) and the small evangelist temples for those who wish to flee from alcohol and corrupting pleasures of music.[8]

[edit] Awards

Awards
Preceded by
Mon Oncle		 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
1959		 Succeeded by
The Virgin Spring
Preceded by
Woman in a Dressing Gown		 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film
1960		 Succeeded by
The Virgin Spring
Preceded by
The Cranes Are Flying		 Palme d'Or
1959		 Succeeded by
La dolce vita

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b Nagib, Lucia. pp. 83-84
  2. ^ a b Perrone, Charles A.
  3. ^ Axelrod, Alan. p. 224
  4. ^ Stam, Robert. p. 164
  5. ^ a b Stam, Robert. p. 172
  6. ^ Stam, Robert. p. 174
  7. ^ Martin, Michael T. (editor) & Stam, Robert. pp. 281-282
  8. ^ a b Dennison, Stephanie & Shaw, Lisa. pp. 224-226

[edit] Bibliography

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