How Mar­cel Camus’ Black Orpheus brought bossa nova to the world

Most accounts of Mar­cel Camus’ Black Orpheus include the anec­dote of Vini­cius de Moraes, the Brazil­ian poet who wrote the orig­i­nal sto­ry, walk­ing out of the film in an out­rage. Moraes claimed that Camus had mere­ly made ​“an exot­ic film about Brazil,” but accord­ing to French his­to­ri­an Anais Flechet, Moraes lat­er admit­ted that it was thanks to the film that the play was ever produced.

While he may not have shared the hal­cy­on vision of the French direc­tor, and in spite of his appar­ent dis­plea­sure at the result, Moraes was instru­men­tal, along with French pro­duc­er Sacha Gor­dine, in devel­op­ing Black Orpheus from his musi­cal play ​‘Orfeu da Con­ceição’. It was through his efforts in get­ting the adap­ta­tion off the ground that he attract­ed enough inter­est to put on a stage ver­sion. Even though it ran for just one month and suf­fered from a stalled start, the the­atri­cal pro­duc­tion brought togeth­er leg­endary musi­cians Antônio Car­los Jobim and Luiz Bonfá.

Praised for its black cast, most­ly com­prised of local actors, and laud­ed for Jobim and Bonfá’s sound­track, the film won the Palme d’Or at the 1959 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val and the Best For­eign Lan­guage Film award at the Oscars, Gold­en Globes and BAF­TAs. All the world seemed to fall under the film’s spell.

Like the play, Black Orpheus sets the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eury­dice in the slums of Rio de Janeiro dur­ing Car­naval. Breno Mel­lo (a local soc­cer star) plays Orfeu, a tram dri­ver who dances in the local sam­ba school, while Amer­i­can-born French actress Marpes­sa Dawn plays Eury­dice, a qui­et girl who is vis­it­ing her cousin Ser­a­fi­na to escape a mys­te­ri­ous man who is pur­su­ing her.

Loose­ly anchored to the clas­si­cal myth, Camus’ film cen­tres more on the lovers and their com­mu­ni­ty and less on the mys­ti­cal tragedy of death and the faith­less hero. Set dur­ing the lead up to the big night of the Car­naval parade, the action bursts through a mar­ble frieze of the fat­ed lovers, sweep­ing the view­er up in a fes­ti­val of colour and move­ment as the towns­folk dance and sing their way up the hill to the beat of the sam­ba band.

In the dis­tance, the con­crete land­scape of Rio de Janeiro com­petes with the bril­liant blue of the ocean, while bare­foot women car­ry­ing bas­kets on their heads inspect cos­tumes for the parade, and chil­dren play with a stray dogs and fight over a foot­ball on the dusty slopes of Mor­ro da Babilô­nia. All the while, the fre­net­ic ener­gy of the fad­ing sam­ba beat is slow­ly replaced by the laid-back rhythm of ​‘A Feli­ci­dade’ – a pic­turesque scene of jovial har­mo­ny under the warm glow of the Brazil­ian sunshine.

It’s the per­fect set­ting for a mytho­log­i­cal tale. Or so it would seem. Camus dis­cov­ered that set­ting a film in the fave­las dur­ing Car­naval – even one firm­ly steeped in mythol­o­gy – would inevitably take on a polit­i­cal dimen­sion. At the time of film­ing, the Old Republic’s strict ban on sam­ba music was still fresh in the public’s mem­o­ry. Hail­ing from Africa, sam­ba was seen as a dan­ger­ous expres­sion of black slave cul­ture, sym­bol­ic of unrest and protest. It was even­tu­al­ly legit­imised as a com­mu­ni­ty recre­ation with the for­ma­tion of Sam­ba Schools and is now con­sid­ered a fun­da­men­tal part not only of Car­naval but Brazil­ian iden­ti­ty. Even today, the per­for­mances at Car­naval are often used as a plat­form for social protest and awareness.

But it wasn’t the sam­ba that the French director’s film became known for. Bossa nova – the fusion of sam­ba and jazz – a style of music being played in Rio at the time, although even this new sound wasn’t immune from pol­i­tics. The laid-back, low-key music that favoured gen­tle lyri­cal themes, belonged to the mid­dle class and the arty crowds on the beach front – it was not the music of the slums. Hav­ing the Mor­ro com­mu­ni­ty sing bossa nova was thought by some to be inau­then­tic and insen­si­tive to the true sound of the fave­las. Nonethe­less, it was the film’s sound­track – rich with both sam­ba and bossa nova styles – that bought this music to the world at large, influ­enc­ing a gen­er­a­tion of musicians.

To the French, Black Orpheus is con­sid­ered Brazil­ian because it employs a most­ly native cast and crew. But to the Brazil peo­ple, it’s Euro­pean, as it was pro­duced by French and Ital­ian stu­dios, and most of the roy­al­ties and prof­its went out of the coun­try. Camus was nei­ther part of the social real­ist move­ment of Brazil­ian Cin­e­ma Novo nor the French New Wave. He was a man apart, unaf­fil­i­at­ed with any spe­cif­ic scene or polit­i­cal group. That’s not to say he turned a blind eye to domes­tic social issues – he under­stood per­fect­ly well what life real­ly looked like in the slums of Rio, he just chose to tell a dif­fer­ent story.

In spite of what Moraes felt Black Orpheus should have been, Camus’ vision was nev­er going to focus explic­it­ly on the harsh­ness of favela life. It is not a film about divi­sion or dis­sent. Instead, Black Orpheus pays homage to the pow­er of myth, dance and song (per­son­i­fied in the mytho­log­i­cal Orpheus), high­light­ing the cul­tur­al impor­tance of these sim­ple every­day plea­sures. Camus want­ed to cel­e­brate the har­mo­ny and hope that can flour­ish even in the poor­est places on earth, and it’s for this rea­son that the film con­tin­ues to res­onate today.