My AFVS 70 Final Paper
To kick start my updated site (I need a first post or else the gatsby build will throw a ton of errors lol) and the beginning of my blogging era (who knows how long this will last), I’ve decided to post my final paper for AFVS 70: The Art of Film. This was the first course I’ve taken at Harvard where I’ve truly felt out of my comfort zone but I am truly grateful to have take it. I’ve learned so much about film history, film analysis, and the art of storytelling. While I am by no means a film expert or a film critic at this point, I believe that I am a much more literate film viewer and I hope that this isn’t the end. And so, without further ado, here is my final paper for AFVS 70: The Art of Film.
Brazil for Foreign Eyes: Black Orpheus’s Co-optation of Representation
On the evening of April 4, 1960, on the grand stage of the cinema palace-esque Pantages Theatre, Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) would become the first of only four movies to ever win both the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or (Gan). Taking place in the favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro and featuring a cast list full of local Afro-Brazilian actors (Breno Mello, who plays the titular Orfeu, was cast by a producer who saw him walking on the street), Black Orpheus had all the characteristics of a film that would typically have not found appeal to those living outside of the borders of Brazil. Surprisingly, it was this very film with its black and brown characters and its destitute setting, that took the world by storm. Foreign audiences were captivated by the film’s stunningly colorful shots of Rio and vibrant bossa nova soundtrack that depicted Brazil as a paradisiacal land full of intoxicating music and jubilant people. Every scene was filled with chaotic dancing, invigorating drum rhythms, and kaleidoscopic colors.
Black Orpheus was directed in 1959 by the French filmmaker, Marcel Camus, and is a retelling of the famous, ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. However, instead of being set in ancient Greece, this time, the myth is transposed to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro during Carnival. In the film, Orfeu is a tram driver who is also a local celebrity who is known in his community for his dancing and singing. Opposite him is Eurydice (played by the American actress Marpessa Dawn) who comes to him seeking shelter as she is being pursued by another suitor who wants her dead. The film deals less with fate and the hero’s journey that the original myth focused on and rather highlights the love between Orfeu and Eurydice and the atmosphere of Carnival in the favela, but yet the core story still is about the tragedy that befalls the couple. The film itself is actually a loose adaptation of the play Orfeu da Conceição (Orpheus of the Conception) which was written by the famed Brazilian playwright Vinicius de Moraes but outside of the central story, the two differ drastically.
The inclusion of an American actress as the leading female role in this seemingly wholly Brazilian film might come as a surprise but when digging further into Black Orpheus, a completely different film is revealed beneath the exotic, Brazilian veneer. In reality, Black Orpheus was largely a foreign driven film, with mostly European and French influences at that. The film was genuinely shot on the slopes of Morro da Babilônia and featured many local Afro-Brazilian actors in its cast list. However, the director, producer, and the majority of the production crew were French. Camus and the production staff being French is not problematic in and of itself. However, when reflecting on the infantilizing portrayal of Brazilian life, the sanitizing effect of bossa nova music, and the reception of Black Orpheus by Brazilians, it is impossible to divorce the film from the foreign eyes through which and for which it was made.
In his seminal essay, The Aesthetics of Hunger, Glauber Rocha proclaims that “[f]or the European observer, the process of artistic creation in the underdeveloped world is of interest only insofar as it satisfies his nostalgia for primitivism” (Rocha 218) and it is clear that the portrayal of Brazilians in Black Orpheus is primitive to some extent. Take for example the scene at the beginning of the film when Eurydice first arrives in Rio (Camus 4:00). The first steps Eurydice takes off of the boat and into Rio are immediately met with the song and dance of Carnival as everyone around her, including her fellow newcomers, is joyfully partying. There is a frenetic chaos to the scene as Eurydice is tousled to and fro by the dancing bodies of other people on the street. Specifically, the people around Eurydice are less so characters and more so a part of the mise en scene, a part of the architecture of the space. In one shot, we are given a high up crane shot that shows Eurydice stumbling into a crowded intersection. Dancing bodies flow around her almost like water and Eurydice looks almost as if she is drowning in the sea of people until she is finally guided out by a stranger. In this scene, the people of Rio are portrayed as unceasingly joyful, content to just sing and dance all day long. It is almost as if they are driven by nothing else but their primal urge to party The urge is so great that Eurydice is almost swallowed up whole by the movement and this scene is not alone in its primitive portrayal of Brazilians.
This primitive portrayal of Brazilians is consistent with what Rocha sees as the way in which European observers perceive and consume the Latin American world which is through a “formal exoticism that vulgarizes social problems” (Rocha 218). When looking toward Black Orpheus, this formal exoticism manifests itself in the colorful and vibrant plumage of Carnival costumes that the characters adorn themselves in for the festivities, and the way in which Camus vulgarizes social problems is through the erasure of the social problems as a whole. Life in the favelas is portrayed as suspiciously idyllic where the inhabitants seem unencumbered by the material conditions that they must deal with — occupying the literal edges of society (the hillsides of Rio), destitute homes that look more like decaying cages — and instead seem to content to just celebrate Carnival in all its splendor, singing and dancing the days away. Take for example when Eurydice finally meets her cousin, Serafina, and tells her about a pursuer who wants to kill her (Camus 19:00). Serafina tells Eurydice not to worry about it and before even a minute has gone by, the gravity of the situation has been brushed off and women skip off into the distance, instead choosing to focus on seducing a local grocer so that they may get some free food. The characters can’t be blamed for their aloofness as the shot composition and mise en scène are crafted as if to intentionally draw attention away. The entire scene is lit in the absolutely gorgeous light of the afternoon sun, and in the final shot, Serafina and Eurydice skip off into a vista-like view of Rio.
Using Rocha’s argument as a lens, we can see that Black Orpheus is the quintessential example of the paternalistic and exoticised treatment of Brazil and Latin America writ large and the ramifications of such representations are not isolated. Immediate reactions to the film back in 1959 proved that Black Orpheus reinforced harmful stereotypes for foreign audiences. Take for example Bosley Crowther’s review of Black Orpheus in the New York Times where he describes it as a tale “ALL tangled up in the madness of a Rio de Janeiro carnival, full of intoxicating samba music, frenzied dancing and violent costumes” (Crowther 41). Even more recently, we can look towards a review from 2002 in the Black Camera film journal that states that Black Orpheus “provides the perfect vehicle to transport the jaded modern viewer into a not-so-unfamiliar reality” where “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).
Julio García Espinosa reflects in his essay, For an Imperfect Cinema, on the effect of “the applause and approval of the European intelligentsia” asking the questions, “[w]hy do they applaud us,” “[w]hy should we worry about their accolades,” etc (Espinosa 287). When Espinosa’s analysis is situated within Rocha’s argument, we understand that it is this paternalistic relationship — between Europe and Brazil, between the colonizer and the colonized — that motivates “underdeveloped nations” to seek the approval and applause of the “European intelligentsia.” Again, Black Orpheus is the quintessential example of this relationship seeing as it received almost universal praise internationally, having achieved success at the highest level in the film industry: Palme d’Or, Oscar, Golden Globe, etc.
What makes the case of Black Orpheus even more pernicious is that it is difficult to even describe Black Orpheus as “works produced by underdeveloped nations.” Even though, Black Orpheus is an adaptation of the play Orfeu da Conceição, the film departs both in content and aesthetic from the original. The differences were so great between the two that Moraes allegedly walked out when he first saw the filmic version and is on record having stated that Camus’s creation was just “an exotic film about Brazil” (Cory). Additionally, as previously mentioned, the director, producers, and production crew for Black Orpheus were largely European and French at that. This French influence was so great that Black Orpheus was listed under the French film section at the Cannes Film Festival and was described as a French film under the Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards.
It would be difficult to prove that Camus held any of these beliefs openly as it seemed on all accounts that Camus actually quite loved Brazil after having attended Carnival (Atkinson). However, regardless of his personal beliefs, it is clear that when viewing Black Orpheus through the lens of critique provided by Brazilians and other Latin American writers, Camus and Black Orpheus are not at all innocent. It is representative of all the problems of neo-colonization and it is no wonder that soon after, Cinema Novo movement would begin in earnest, spearheaded by Glauber Rocha.
The soundtrack and music of Black Orpheus is another instance of the export of a curated and manicured representation of Brazil that is provided by the film. For decades, the Brazilian music genre samba, was openly criminalized. With origins in African, Afro-Brazilian, and Indigenous cultural traditions, samba is known for its fast-paced rhythms, syncopated beats, and lively percussion and was mostly enjoyed in working class communities and urban centers, such as Rio’s favelas. Because of its origins and style, samba was despised by European settlers and upper class citizens for decades, with many viewing samba as lewd, obscene, and a symptom of racial miscegenation among black and brown people. This resulted in the persecution of those communities by police, stopping the playing of samba and even arresting musicians. It was only until the 1930s that samba became more widely accepted and celebrated by Brazilians as a whole when Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas used samba as a tool for propaganda as part of his nationalist project (Devito). Today, samba is an entrenched part of Brazilian society and especially tied with the festivities of Carnival.
However, it was bossa nova, not samba, that Black Orpheus adopted in its soundtrack. Born from the upper-middle-class beach communities of Rio de Janeiro, bossa nova was a blending of Brazilian samba rhythms with American jazz harmonies that came out of a local guitar school in the Copacabana neighborhood. What resulted were the distinctive rhythm, lush instrumentation, and themes of youth, leisure, and natural beauty that characterized bossa nova.
The featuring of bossa nova on the soundtrack was no accident either. During its stage run, the original Orfeu da Conceição had as its song writer, Antônio Jobim who was at the time just an up and coming bossa nova artist in Rio. Therefore, as the play was being adapted into the film that would become Black Orpheus, Vinicius de Moraes and Jobim were tasked with creating a soundtrack for the film and as a result, the music of Black Orpheus was created. With the immediate success of the film and soundtrack, Jobim would gain international notoriety, and have a long lasting career with continued partnerships with Moraes for many years to come. With so much involvement throughout the process and so much success as a result of the film, it might come as a surprise that Jobim was critical of the film, having been once quoted saying that Black Orpheus was “a commercial film without much artistic value” (Plan-Séquence). Even he, as a native Brazilian, recognized the lack of authenticity permeated throughout the film.
Reflecting on the political and social history of samba and bossa nova, the choice of bossa nova and its sanitizing effect operates on the filmic level as well. At the time of release, bossa nova “was seen as a largely apolitical and innocuous musical form” (Green and Skidmore) and perhaps Camus’s choice to expressly feature bossa nova was to curate a certain aesthetic for the film that was more laid-back. However, the choice was in and of itself a political choice because bossa nova “was part of a community kept separate, by class and race, from the characters on screen” (Green and Skidmore). The soundtrack was not true to the communities that the film claims to represent. Bossa nova would not have been played in the favelas.
Very clearly, bossa nova in its origins and also in terms of its communal roots was not the music of the favelas and through its use in scenes throughout Black Orpheus, we can see clearly how bossa nova is used as a means of manipulating the representation of Brazil. Even in the first scenes of the film where we are introduced to the favela and its community, bossa nova is used as an aesthetic cudgel (Camus 0:00). The movie begins with a long scene depicting people going about their daily life with children playing soccer on the hill side and women carrying baskets on top of their heads. Most interestingly, there is a driving samba beat that plays over the scene which we soon realize is coming from the men who are playing on makeshift drums on the side of the path. The constant music provides a diegetic soundtrack to the scene and gives it energy and life that will define the rest of the movie. The music of the favelas begins to fade away however, and is soon replaced by Antônio Carlos Jobim’s melodic bossa tune, A Felicidade, which completely drowns out the samba drums that are still in shot being played by the background characters. In this case, Camus uses the soundtrack and bossa nova to recontextualize the primitivism of the hillside community back into the dialectic of civil society. This scene establishes a binary that posits the West is refined and quiet, while the foreign is loud and chaotic. This is made even more apparent by how the scene starts: with a marble relief of Orpheus and Eurydice that is suddenly shattered by a line of samba drummers.
Almost poetically, the film is bookended with another scene where bossa nova is used seemingly ironically. In the final scene of Black Orpheus, Orfeu carries Eurydice’s deceased body all the way from the innards of Rio’s city morgue up to the top of the hill where his home resides (Camus 1:43:30). As Orfeu finally makes it to the top of the hill, with Eurydice draped across his hands, we are met with a spectacular scene. Orfeu’s home is up in flames and the women of the favela are running about in panic. Out of the chaos, we see Mira, Orfeu’s (ex) fiance, sprinting toward him with rocks in hand, screaming to high heaven about his infidelity. As Orfeu backtracks in horror, Mira flings a stone at him which glances off Orfeu’s head and knocks him backward over the side of the cliff, along with Eurydice’s body. Orfeu and Eurydice crash down the side of the hill until they fall onto a plant, where their dead bodies lie.
This specific scene, even with all its violence and drama, ends with almost insulting passivity. Benedito and Zeca, two village boys who worship Orfeu, believe that his guitar, when played, has the ability to call the sun to rise. With Orfeu’s house still ablaze in the background, Benedito with guitar in hand runs to Zeca insisting that he play so that the sun may rise. As Zeca strums vigorously, the horizon breaks and the children are basked in golden light. The film ends with a shot of Benedito, Zeca, and a little girl dancing on the favela hillside to Antônio Jobim’s Samba de Orfeu as the camera pans over to a vast vista shot of Rio de Janeiro. The last 30 minutes of the film are completely occupied with death and danger, and yet without so much as a second thought, the film still ends with the same vigor and joy as it started with. The people of the favela are still left dancing and singing, as if nothing happened at all.
To this day, Black Orpheus continues to be celebrated as a cinematic masterpiece and the world’s introduction to the magic of Brazil. Through an analysis of Black Orpheus’s scenes and music utilizing the lens of Brazilian and Latin American directors/critics, it is clear that this introduction of Brazil is anything but proper. The people of Brazil are infantilized and made primitive as shown. The culture of Carnival is made one dimensional. The music sterilizes the history of protest for those that most need it. However, in spite of the harmful representations propagated through Black Orpheus, its legacy does not end there. In the years since, Black Orpheus has come back in many forms, including a reinterpretation in the form of a musical which is set to head to Broadway sometime in 2023 (Evans). These reinterpretations take the original concept of the film and recontextualize it in ways that reclaim these harmful representations and add complexity to the characters and story because there is truly so much beauty in the people, Carnival, and the country of Brazil. For Black Orpheus (1959) to remain the only introduction to Brazil would be a shame.
Works Cited
Atkinson, Michael. “Black Orpheus: Dancing in the Streets | Current.” The Criterion Collection, 18 August 2010, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1559-black-orpheus-dancing-in-the-streets. Accessed 7 May 2023.
Camus, Marcel, director. Orfeu Negro [Black Orpheus]. Dispatfilm, 1959. HBO Max, https://play.hbomax.com/player/urn:hbo:feature:GXnvVkgmFW4CgwwEAAA5p.
Cory, Lara C. “How Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus brought bossa nova to the world.” Little White Lies, 21 December 2019, https://lwlies.com/articles/black-orpheus-marcel-camus-bossa-nova-music/. Accessed 7 May 2023.
Crowther, Bosley. “Screen: Legend Retold; ‘Black Orpheus’ Bows at the Plaza.” The New York Times, 22 December 1959, p. 41, https://www.nytimes.com/1959/12/22/archives/screen-legend-retold-black-orpheus-bows-at-the-plaza.html.
Devito, Liani. “Brief History of Samba.” Samba de Rainha, 12 February 2021, https://sambaderainha.uk/brazilian-culture/f/brief-history-of-samba. Accessed 6 May 2023.
Ehrenstein, David. “Black Orpheus | Current.” The Criterion Collection, 7 June 1999, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7-black-orpheus. Accessed 7 May 2023.
Espinosa, Julio G. “For an Imperfect Cinema.” Film and Theory: An Anthology, by Robert Stam and Toby Miller, Blackwell, 2000, pp. 287-297.
Evans, Greg. “‘Black Orpheus’ Heading To Broadway With New Music By Sergio Mendes; Pulitzer-Winning Playwright Nilo Cruz Adapting 1959 Classic Film.” Deadline, 20 January 2022, https://deadline.com/2022/01/black-orpheus-broadway-musical-sergio-mendes-nilo-cruz-sergio-trujillo-1234916165/. Accessed 7 May 2023.
Gan, Vicky. “Black Orpheus: How a French Film Introduced the World to Brazil.” Smithsonian Magazine, 4 March 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/black-orpheus-how-french-film-introduced-world-brazil-180949956/. Accessed 6 May 2023.
Green, James N., and Thomas E. Skidmore. Brazil: Five Centuries of Change. 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2021. Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, https://library.brown.edu/create/fivecenturiesofchange/.
Plan-Séquence. “The Double Life of Black Orpheus - Orfeu Negro (1959).” YouTube, 19 February 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hgN19rl218&t=388s. Accessed 7 May 2023.
Rocha, Glauber. “The Aesthetics of Hunger.” Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, edited by Scott MacKenzie, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014, pp. 218-220.
Steans, Natia L. “Black Film Classic: ‘Black Orpheus’ (1959).” Black Camera, vol. 17, Indiana University Press, 2002, 9, 15. 1 vols. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27761597.