Black Orpheus in Color
2003; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1559-7989
Autores Tópico(s)Asian Culture and Media Studies
ResumoBlack themes, a frequent political banner in Brazilian cinema from the mid 50s through the end of the 70s, practically disappeared from the film scene with the decline of the Left and the increasing depoliticizing of the arts which began in the 80s. Orfeu (Brazil, 1999), directed by Carlos Diegues, one of the few contemporary films to talk about blacks, takes the usual but ambivalent option of praising the Afro-descendants of Brazil for their musical gifts. It is wellknown that music and sports-in Brazil as well as in other former colonies with a history of slavery-are areas where blacks do not seem to be discriminated against; indeed, they are especially successful. Although this fact is due to the extraordinary talent of African peoples and their descendants for such activities, it means in reality a kind of segregation with a clearly deprecating element, which is constantly pointed out by blacks themselves, for both in music and sport physical gifts are supposedly predominant over intellectual ones. The popular phrase that 'samba (or football) cannot be learned at school,' while praising the instinctive vocation of the artist or the sports person (both, in Brazil, predominantly Afro-descendants), in a way excludes them from activities of an abstract nature. Carlos Diegues's good intentions are not being questioned here. He has in his CV a history of engagement in the black cause. He started his career as a filmmaker in the early days of Cinema Novo with Ganga Zumba (Brazil, 1964), a film about the rebel slave who became a leader of the maroon slave community of Palmares in the seventeenth century, a period drama, with an exclusively black cast, allegorizing the problematic of the black in contemporary Brazil. Xica da Silva (Brazil, 1976) and Quilombo (Brazil, 1984) are Diegues's further incursions into the slavery period, allegorizing situations of oppression and rebellion in the present. Thanks to him, several black actors became famous, such as Zeze Motta, who since Xica da Silva has been directing a non-governmental organization for black actors. In Orfeu, besides the already traditional presence of Zeze Motta, here in the role of Conceicao (the protagonist's mother), and other noted black actors such as Milton Goncalves (playing Inacio, Orpheus's father), Diegues placed his bet on a new talent, young Toni Garrido, the Cidade Negra pop band leader; of course, it is no coincidence that he is a musician. The director explains that for a long time he had been keen to shoot a new version of the play Orfeu da Conceicao, by Vinicius de Moraes, which would, so to speak, 'correct' the questionable interpretation of the same play made by French director Marcel Camus in his film Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus, France/Italy, 1958), which made Brazil known worldwide as a black musical country, and which won the Palme D'Or in Cannes as well as the Oscar for best foreign film in 1959. Diegues recalls in the press release of Orfeu: In 1959, I had already made some short films, mixed up in the primal soup of people and ideas that would soon result in the Cinema Novo. At that point, I saw with great disappointment the film Black Orpheus, a French production directed by Marcel Camus, based on Orfeu da Conceicao. Despite his sincere fascination for the human and geographic landscape of Rio de Janeiro, and although he even showed a certain tenderness for what he was shooting, the film gave an exotic and tourist view which betrayed the meaning of the play and completely abandoned its fundamental qualities. I truly felt myself personally insulted, and from then on I began to dream about the film which became our present Orfeu. In 1980, Diegues went as far as presenting his Orfeu project to Vinicius de Moraes himself, who promptly offered him the copyrights and prepared to co-write the screenplay with him. At that time, Diegues stated: 'I could only [write the script] with him! Because the dramatic situation of Orfeu is archaic, the beautiful thing about it is the verse, the idea of Orfeu, of the victory of art, the idea of love, and the understanding of how this happens in Brazil' (quotation from the press release). …
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