“Black Orpheus” (1959), also known as “Orfeu Negro”, is a French-made, Portuguese-language film that tells the old Greek love story of Orpheus and Eurydice but set in black Rio at the time of the Carnival. While it does present blacks as childlike, you do get to see Carnival and hear music by bossa nova great Tom Jobim.
The film won a Golden Palm at Cannes, an Oscar and a Golden Globe.
Like “Carmen Jones” (1954) it uses an all-black cast and music to tell an old story.
The story (spoiler alert) appears in Ovid, Plato, Rubens, Titian, Monteverdi, Cocteau and even Neil Gaiman. In both the Greek story and the film, Orpheus plays amazing songs on his stringed instrument (lyre, guitar). He falls in love with Eurydice but then she is killed (by a snake, the electric current of a tram line). Orpheus goes to get her back from the dead (Hades, voodoo woman) but he is told that if he looks back at her before he leaves he will lose her forever. He looks back. Orpheus carries her body and is killed by some women who have gone mad.
Eurydice was played by Marpessa Dawn, who is not from Brazil at all but Pittsburgh! Although she is a light-skinned black American woman, in some of the posters she is pictured as a white woman. Not sure how they got away with that. She died in 2008 just 42 days after Breno Mello, who played Orpheus (and is from Brazil).
The film comes up in Barack Obama’s book “Dreams from My Father”. When he was going to Columbia University his mother and sister came to visit. One night “Black Orpheus” was showing. It was an old film that his mother loved, so they went.
His sister thought it was “kind of corny. Just Mom’s style”. Barack could not stand the way it pictured blacks and wanted to leave. He was about to get up and go but then he saw his mother:
But her face, lit by the blue glow of the screen, was set in a wistful gaze. At that moment, I felt as if I were being given a window into her heart, the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad’s dark savages, was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.
“Black Orpheus” had come out just before she met his father at the University of Hawaii.
Obama concludes:
The emotion between the races could never be pure, even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.
See also:
I always wanted to see this movie. They always had a copy on VHS at my old local library but for some reason I always forgot to check it out.
Is it as corny as many say it is?
Marpressa Dawn was a beautiful woman. Albeit not a particulary ‘light skinned’ one. IMO. How in the hell could she ever “pass” for anything other than black?
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It’s amazing the things that are going on around the country and how much it can/will affect Amreicans. I was once told all that is going on is a Holy war even attacks made on our Country…hmph!
Go .
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I do not think Marpessa Dawn herself could pass for anything but black, but in some of the posters I saw her character was pictured as a white woman. Here is one:
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huh. i never really thought about black orpheus as portraying black/brazilian people as childlike. i’ve always thought that roles in old movies were written really over the top… and combined with the fact that this was a retelling of a greek myth, i guess i just kinda took the one dimensional nature of the characters as having to do with the type of story being told. like if it were white french people in the main roles, they would be written just as one dimensional. does that make any sense? i think i’ll have to watch this movie again.
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Marpessa Dawn was actually *biracial*, not black. Half Asian, half black. In Brazil she is considered mixed as well.
I saw this film as a little girl and always thought she looked like my mother, who is Indian from the Caribbean.
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wow, Marpessa Dawn not Brazilian ? Amazing. Was her Portuguese overdubbed in the film?
I love this film, I saw it in 60 or 61 on Chicago tv and it made a very strong impresion on me about Brazilian culture, Little did I know , several decades later I would move down to Brazil
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I hated Portuguese before I saw this film. Idk what to think about it. It had lots of great music, a beautiful setting, but the story didn’t seem all that developed to me.
I wasn’t the least bit offended by it. The only scene that came off a bit weird was at the end when Orpheo says something about being poorer than the poorest black man. I side-eyed the hell out of that part. Besides that, I believe the film was meant to be dreamy and romantic. This made the characters (most of whom were blk) come of as child-like. Don’t think it was intentional though.
Mahna de Carnaval
This last scene was epic (don’t worry, no spoilers)
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Damn… wrong clip. SPOILER ALERT. This is the spoiler-free video I meant to post
I loved the carnaval scenes. It’s nice seeing the enduring African culture (drums) in Brazil.
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Such a beautiful film! Amazing music, amazing community of Afro-Brazilians, beautiful city. It’s rare to find depictions of Afro-Brazilians that are not racist or dehumanizing. Latin American film and television loves racist stereotypes just as much as the US!
@Abagond
Have you written about City of God? It’s another popular Brazilian film where Afro-Brazilians are the main characters. Domesticas is also worth watching out for a comedy about domestics, or maids, in Brazil (set in Sao Paulo, I think).
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