![]() ![]() Ironically, Black Orpheus became a goad to Brazilian creativity, acting as a negative catalyst for progressive filmmaking. “While Latin America laments its general misery, the foreign observer cultivates a taste for that misery,” he wrote. To the artists of Cinema Novo, Camus’ film, with its sunny favelas, was a sentimental work that gratified the European vogue for the exotic. The leader of Cinema Novo, Glauber Rocha, described the movement as an “aesthetics of hunger” that would “make the public aware of its own misery” and cast a critical eye on Brazil’s social ills.Ĭinema Novo films, mostly shot guerrilla-style in black and white, rebelled against the “cloak of Technicolor” found in foreign portrayals like Black Orpheus and in the homegrown chanchadas or musical comedies that dominated Brazilian pop culture. In the late 1950s, a new generation of Brazilian filmmakers were coalescing into the Cinema Novo movement-a political cinema, influenced by Italian neorealism and French New Wave, that portrayed the ugly realities of Brazilian life. Castro says that Jobim and Gilberto’s music came to be called bossa nova “just because they didn’t know what else to call it.” After all, everything in Brazil felt new.īlack Orpheus seemed particularly out of touch when compared to Brazil’s revolutionary film culture. In the 1950s and 1960s, “bossa” was simply slang for an idiosyncratic way of doing things and was applied to just about everything, from shoes to hairdos. Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto were creating the sound that became bossa nova, or “new flair,” a simplified samba beat with less percussion and greater harmonic complexity. Rio’s Black Experimental Theater gave black actors a platform to combat racism in Brazilian culture and society several members of the troupe appeared in Black Orpheus, including Lea Garcia and Lourdes de Oliveira in the two most prominent supporting roles. In 1960, the nation erected a new capital, Brasília, which endures as a monument to architectural Modernism. Favela growth surged in the 1950s and 1960s, as a nationwide industrial boom spurred a mass rural-to-urban exodus of migrant workers.Īt the same time-the time of Black Orpheus’s release-Brazil was in the midst of its own artistic flowering. Many rural ex-slaves sought work and housing in Rio, but slum clearance policies forced them to set up shantytowns in the hills surrounding the city. ![]() ![]() The origins of Brazil’s favelas can be traced to the abolition of slavery in 1888, which conferred only nominal freedom and few economic opportunities. As Brazilian author Ruy Castro put it, “It’s amazing that people who live in cardboard houses can be so happy.” Directed by French one-hit wonder Marcel Camus, Black Orpheus was, according to NYU film scholar Robert Stam, as authentic as a “French person making a film about American baseball.” Camus rendered favelas and festivities alike in scintillating Eastmancolor, glossing over the endemic poverty of the slums. For one thing, the film was a foreigner’s take on Carnival, a subject with which they were already intimately familiar. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection Courtesy of the Criterion Collectionīrazilians were less impressed with Black Orpheus than the rest of the world. Black Orpheus was a literal coming-out party for Brazil in the European-American imagination. ![]() The film’s colorful vistas depicted Rio as a paradise of beautiful people, extravagant costumes and boisterous revelry-a nonstop Carnival. The soundtrack, by Brazilian music legends Antônio Carlos Jobim, Luiz Bonfá, and João Gilberto, popularized the nascent genre of bossa nova, whose cool syncopations soon entered the global jazz canon. Shot in Rio and starring predominantly local actors, the film became a worldwide sensation and the first of only four films ever to win both the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. The story of Black Orpheus may be as old as time, but the film’s audiovisual splendor made it startlingly new to contemporary audiences. ![]()
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