5 CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

Black Orpheus Marcel Camus (1959) Brazil

Camus, Marcel. Orfeu Negro = Black Orpheus. [New York] :Janus Films : Criterion Collection[distributor], 2006.

Brazil is the largest country in South America with 208 million people on 3.2 million square miles. The capital is Brazilia. Sao Paolo is the most populous city. Rio De Janeiro, the second largest city, located in Southern Brazil, was founded by the Portuguese in 1565. It’s a business hub for oil and mining as well as tourism and universities. Brazilian people descend from the indigenous people of Brazil, the Portuguese Colonists, and Enslaved Africans who arrived in Brazil in the 1700s.

Much of Brazil is rainforest. The Amazon bisects the equatorial section of Brazil running east from Manaus to the Atlantic Ocean. Most major rivers run North to South, the Amazon runs West to East.

French filmmaker, Marcel Camus, filmed Black Orpheus in the favelas of Rio De Janeiro during Carnival, the celebration that precedes the season of lent in this predominantly Catholic country. Camus’ film presented this celebration and the city of Rio to to world in 1959. It won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

This is a scripted narrative movie created for European and American audiences. Camus used the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice which would have been familiar to educated film enthusiasts. The actors are Brazilian, the language is Portuguese, but the story from Greek Mythology is imposed on their exotic culture for international audiences. This is one way for filmmakers from the former colonialist empires of Europe to appropriate aspects of native culture for outside audiences.

Barack Obama saw Black Orpheus with his mother and sister in New York City when he was a student at Columbia University. It was his mother’s favorite film. Obama did not share his mother’s enthusiasm.

We took a cab to the revival theater where the movie was playing. The film, a groundbreaker of sorts due to its mostly black, Brazilian cast, had been made in the fifties. The story line was simple: the myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice set in the favelas of Rio during Carnival. In Technicolor splendor, set against scenic green hills, the black and brown Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree birds in colorful plumage. About halfway through the movie, I decided that I’d seen enough, and turned to my mother to see if she might be ready to go. 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.^[1]