An Orpheus, Rising From Caricature
By CAETANO VELOSO
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Zeca Guimaraes/ New Yorker Films (top), Lopert Films (center), The Associated Press (bottom)
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Toni Garrido and Patricia Franca in the Brazilian film "Orfeu," which has its American theatrical premiere on Friday, top. Marpressa Dawn and Bruno Mello in Marcel Camus's 1959 film "Black Orpheus," center. Caetano Veloso, bottom.
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IO DE
JANEIRO -- In 1956, Vinicius de Moraes's play "Orfeu da Conceição"
opened here, and the enthusiastic audiences that filled
every theater in the country in which the play was staged
reflected perfectly the significance and implications of
the event.
At that moment, de Moraes and Antonio Carlos
Jobim were coming together in a first, decisive step toward
bringing about the quiet revolution in samba that became
known as bossa nova; for the first time in Brazil, a stage play
had an all-black cast; and the play itself, by transposing to
Rio's slums at Carnival time the Orpheus myth of a musician
who loses his great love, was a defining moment in the very
Brazilian project of making samba the medium of choice for
expressing national identity.
Three years later, "Black Orpheus," the film by the
French director Marcel Camus that was based on the play,
enthralled non-Brazilians and went on to win the Palme d'Or
at Cannes and the Oscar for best foreign film. To say that the
film was received without enthusiasm in Brazil is an understatement. The contrast between the fascination that "Black
Orpheus" generated abroad and the contempt with which it
was treated by Brazilians, who saw themselves depicted as
exotics, invites thoughts on the loneliness of Brazil. Now there
is a new film, "Orfeu," inspired by the play. That it was
produced and directed by Brazilians only breathes new life
into the discussion. ("Orfeu" will have its American premiere
on Friday in the New York area and will open in other cities in
the United States over the next few months.)
Last October, the musician and record producer David
Byrne wrote in The New York Times of his disdain for the
term "world music." His essay warned of the dangers of those
in rich countries feeling entitled to judge the authenticity of
art from poor countries. In that sense, "Black Orpheus" is
almost a caricature. We Brazilians are frequently accused of
being inauthentic because we don't look enough like whatever
foreigners saw in that film. The fact that Brazilians thoroughly reject the Camus film has been hard for foreigners to
accept. The huge popular success that the new "Orfeu,"
directed by Carlos Diegues, met in Brazil last year brings the
debate to a deeper level.
I don't intend to judge the two films. In my youth I was a
film critic for a small provincial paper, and to resume this
activity now would be doubly inopportune: it would force me
to narrow my focus to these two films when a broader
discussion is called for; and furthermore, as I have
composed the score for "Orfeu" and my wife, Paula
Lavigne, is its producer, I've become an interested
party.
Rather, I believe there is much to gain from a
comparison of the two films, not as works of art but
from the point of view of the different reactions they
have produced.
Watching "Orfeu" and "Black Orpheus" again, I
was moved by how right de Moraes had been in
conceiving his play. Indeed, he unveiled Brazil as an
Orphean country, a country that expresses its soul's
sweetly tragic aspects through music.
Almost unconsciously, Camus's film, with its unreality and naïveté, manages to connect with this essential truth.
Beyond what had initially struck me as remarkable
in that film -- the actresses Lourdes de Oliveira and
Lea Garcia, not to mention the songs, the outrageously fanciful colors (so different from Rio's real ones)
and the general "voodoo for tourists" ambiance --
seemed to me now to give the film the dreamlike
quality of popular religious iconography, and that
touched me.
Yet since the days of tropicália, that brief,
rebellious and self-analytical movement of music
and visual arts in Brazil that I was part of in the late
60's, I've learned to greet with a mixture of gratitude
and concern the way foreigners see us.
In that
respect, "Black Orpheus" wasn't much different
from Carmen Miranda's phony fruit headdress. It is
from this perspective that one can understand why
"Black Orpheus" was rejected in Brazil and why I
stress the importance for non-Brazilian audiences to
open themselves up to the realism of the new film.
A critic from the French newspaper Libération,
commenting on "Orfeu," laments that Arto Lindsay
(who was co-producer of the soundtrack) had introduced rap music in some sequences. "Diegues doesn't need that," the critic wrote. "He knows how to get
melodious music to flow from one scene to another as
if it were pouring from the slum's very alleyways."
Well, rap is exactly the music that nowadays pours
from the alleyways of Rio's slums. Rap is in the film
as a documentary element, purposely put there by
the director. Melodious music is exactly what would
represent the artificial and fictional.
The slums in Rio have changed dramatically
since the Camus film opened in 1959. Life there has
improved materially, with brick and mortar replacing zinc and cardboard, and cement covering up the
alleys' mud. Outlaws who used to break into houses
have switched to the more profitable drug trade,
building a power base that is fiercely independent of
the law, in part because the criminals possess military-style firearms that are vastly superior to those
used by the police.
Rap groups made up of slum dwellers have
created a style that reflects this atmosphere, with an
emphasis on racial confrontation that has no precedent in our popular culture.
This Movement (which is
what Brazilian hip-hop artists call the phenomenon)
has become a strong advocate of the idea that Brazil
is moving toward biracialism while the United States
moves toward multiracialism. One rap group, Racionais MC's, is led by a singer who emphasizes
being black, and its lyrics are racially radical. It has
sold nearly a million copies of its most recent record,
supporting sales mainly through live appearances in
the slums while refusing to go on the large television
networks.
Clearly "Orfeu" was conceived with these very
real elements as its background. Is it not possible,
then, to see the French critic's complaint about rap
in the slums as the same kind of paternalistic distortion described by Mr. Byrne? But the Libération
article was only a brief review written by a film
critic who doesn't know much about Brazil.
There is, however, something not entirely different in a long article by the historian Kenneth Maxwell, published last year with great fanfare in the
newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. This respected Brazilianist, author of several books about our colonial
history, says that he became interested in Brazil
after seeing "Black Orpheus" in the early 60's while
a student at Cambridge Univeristy.
After seeing
"Orfeu" in São Paulo recently, he proclaimed his
astonishment at a scene in which a "middle-class
white man" is executed by a group of "predominantly black" drug traffickers; then he adds his disappointment in seeing Orfeu sporting his hair in dreadlocks; and finally he is skeptical about the woolen
cap worn by the film's drug lord, something, he says,
is "more appropriate to the Chicago cold than to
Rio's warm weather."
Well, the guy the drug traffickers execute is a
slum dweller just like them, a point made abundantly
clear in the scene's dialogue; dreadlocks are almost
as common in Brazil as they are in Jamaica, and
they have been worn for a long time by Toni Garrido,
the singer-actor who portrays Orfeu in the film; and
finally everybody who lives in Rio knows that it is
rare to find a slum drug lord who doesn't wear a
woolen cap.
To what should we credit this willful show of
ignorance of daily life in Brazil by a scholar dedicated to a country he frequently visits? Mr. Maxwell
himself offers an answer when he says that, being a
fan of "Black Orpheus," he had to accept that
Brazilians might brush aside Camus's film as "exotica for tourists." As time went by, however, he came
to the conclusion that this reaction against the film
by "Brazil's middle class" was similar to that of
Bahia's police in the 30's, arresting tourists who were
caught photographing "nonwhite children" in Salvador's streets and confiscating their film.
In both
cases, he argued, one could see the horror that
Brazilians experienced in being perceived as blacks
by foreigners.
While mistaken, Mr. Maxwell's reading of Brazil's reaction to the film as an effort to conceal our
blackness isn't a fantasy hatched in a vacuum.
Consider the press release, written
by Brazilians, that accompanied
the opening of the film in Rio. "In a
country like Brazil," it says, "with
a population of 65 million people, of
which 20 million are black, the idea
of making this film was deemed
strange by many of its 45 million
whites."
Mr. Maxwell, however, seems
to ignore that, first, the play,
staged by an all-black cast, wasn't
met with such aversion. Quite the
opposite. Second, de Moraes, who
had insisted on the all-black cast,
hated the film so much that he left
the theater halfway through the
screening, shouting that his Orpheus had been "disfigured." It
would be illogical to attribute his
reaction to negrophobia. And, third,
the play's enormous success created a positive expectation for the
film, one of optimism and excitement. The fact that "Black Orpheus" had been crowned in glory
in Europe filled Brazilians with pride and hope. And,
of course, everybody knew that the film had an all-black cast. How can we attribute the disappointment
to racial prejudice?
An anecdote about Mr. Diegues, however, sheds
light on the issue. In the mid-70's he made a film
about the legendary Chica da Silva, a black slave who
in the 18th century became a powerful lady in central
Brazil's diamond industry.
While negotiating the
film's release with a major Brazilian distributor, Mr.
Diegues heard him say that, although he had loved
the film, he planned to show it only in a very small
theater because "Brazilian audiences don't like films
with blacks." But Mr. Diegues convinced him to give
the film wider distribution.
"Xica da Silva" became
one of the biggest commercial successes in the
history of Brazilian cinema.
The distributor's reservations about the tastes of
Brazilian audiences echoed the concerns about
"Black Orpheus" expressed in the press release.
Both reflect a prejudice that neither seems willing to
admit but instead attributes to the audience. It's not
absurd to imagine that the distributor had vivid
memories of the resounding failure of "Black Orpheus" in Brazil and interpreted that failure along
the lines of Mr. Maxwell's point of view.
The box office proved the distributor wrong. But
that success did not prove that there is no racism in
Brazil, then or now, contrary to the popularly held
belief that it is a racial democracy. Instead, the
contradiction between such success and the distributor's expectations exposes the anxieties of foreigners
and Brazilians alike when it comes to dealing with
the problem of race in Brazil. This anxiety is, in fact,
a theme crucial to any sort of self-knowledge
throughout the Americas.
I frequently see surprise -- and sometimes a
strange pleasure -- in the eyes of people who find
evidence of racism among Brazilians. But I'm always astonished that these flashes can provoke such
naïve surprise.
Is it possible that anybody would
really believe that there was someplace in the New
World where the sins of the brutal enslavement of
Africans would have miraculously vanished?
Everywhere in the Americas, however, our basic
humanity has found ways to assert itself, precariously but insistently, over the racist theories that supported these brutal practices.
And none of us have
the right to throw away what has been achieved in
the process. The Brazilian experience must be enriched by the criticism of the racial democracy
myth, not invalidated by it.
At the dawn of the 20th century, Europeans were
afraid to invest in Brazil for fear of "the tropics'
insalubrity." In his book "Black Into White," Thomas Skidmore, an American who has written extensively on Brazilian history, tells of a Brazilian author
who wrote a book in 1891 in French to be published in
Europe as a propaganda effort. In it, the author
complains bitterly that until then his French friends
"knew only that there were apes and Negros in
Brazil -- and half a dozen whites of dubious color."
The Brazilian dream of "whitening" European immigration would then be an effort to create an
acceptable nation.
When the noted Brazilian sociologist Gilberto
Freyre published his book, "The Masters and the
Slaves," in the 30's, the judgment of people of mixed
color went from negative to positive, helping create a
euphoric self-image for Brazilians.
The term racial
democracy became an appropriate label for this
euphoria. It also became the obsessive target for
acerbic criticism from social scientists and political militants.
In his 1994 book "Orpheus and
Power: The Movimento Negro of
Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988," an interpretation of
the relatively unsuccessful Brazilian black consciousness movement, the black American political
scientist Michael Hanchard, not
surprisingly, condemns the idea of
racial democracy.
He wants us to
believe that our supposed multiracialism has hindered the effort by
Brazilian blacks to solve their
problems. Many black militants
here agree with him. These militants seem to advocate the old
American "one drop of blood"
principle as a way to unravel the
black issue in Brazil.
But the "whitening" process
can, quite frankly, be thought of as
an inevitable dream of all the
Americas.
Witness Ella Fitzgerald's blond wigs, Tina Turner's
and Whitney Houston's bleached hair and the sphinxlike Michael Jackson.
Freyre's book, on the other
hand, rejected the colonial presumptions of whitening while praising miscegenation. To say, as Mr.
Hanchard and others do, that such praise is but a
veiled form of whitening is to give way to a simplification that leads to racial intolerance.
Critics like Mr. Maxwell used race to explain the
negative reaction to "Black Orpheus." To me, however, that reaction was more a result of a national
anguish over cinema than over race. In the 50's, the
multiracial middle class to which I belong was much
more ashamed of our cinema than of our blacks: to
hear Brazilians in the movie utter dialogue that was
unconvincing and irrelevant to the narrative was a
torment.
There were other inconsistencies: voices
with Southern accents dubbed for those of Rio
rogues, samba school divisions dancing four times
faster than the music being played (which, by the
way, is comprised of careless montages of assorted
drumming patterns that jump crudely from one time
signature to another), the procession of a parade to
the sound of a samba entirely different from real
"sambas-enredo," or theme sambas.
In the end we
realized that all of this was an artificial device with
the sole intention of astonishing those who knew
nothing about the city and its people.
Cinema, which
could have been a potent symbol of modernity for
Brazilians, became instead a source of bitter frustration.
n his article Mr. Maxwell, the historian, accuses
us of both fearing to seem archaic and adoring
progress. "They have not learned the lesson," he
says, without explaining what that lesson is.
Maybe what he's saying is that all progress is the
perogative of 19th-century Britain and 20th-century
United tates.
When "Black Orpheus" was released, the
French director Jean-Luc Godard complained that
Orpheus was a tramway conductor instead of a fare
collector on one of the new mini-buses in Rio; he also
protested that Euridice didn't arrive in Rio by plane
"in the beautiful Santos Dumont airport, between the
ocean and the skyscrapers." I have always thought
of that review by Godard as something Brazilians
could subscribe to.
It was a reaction against Camus's
ways of choosing backward elements to make his
film look "poetic." The review also represented
Godard's imagining of a movie he might make about
Orpheus in Rio, one in which the city's real urban life
would provide genuine poetry.
Mr. Diegues's "Orfeu" is a real, realist, very un-Godardian film (although Euridice does arrive in Rio
by plane) and maybe, as Mr. Maxwell says, it will not
attract the youth of the First World to Brazil.
One
might argue that would be all to the good. I don't
think so. I'd rather have this discussion between
Brazilians and foreigners concerning race, backwardness and national identity go on.
The American scholar Robert Stam, author of
the book "Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparitive
History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture,"
wrote in a recent article: "It would be a serious
mistake to see Carlos Diegues's 'Orfeu' as a remake
of Marcel Camus's 'Black Orpheus.' The slums, for
Diegues, are a place of creativity and injustice." For
filmmakers and audiences alike, it is hard to equate
injustice and creativity. Brazil, as a place where both
co-exist, tries to prove that the effort is worthwhile.
Caetano Veloso is a Brazilian singer and songwriter. This article was translated from the Portuguese by Ana Maria Bahiana.
