Black Orpheus

Black Orpheus does not sound to the bottom of the deep well of the past. But reaching almost effortlessly back to Hellenic time, it suffuses the carnival in Rio de Janeiro with a timeless mystery.

The Greeks knew this: Orpheus, the peerless and beautiful singer, won the charming Eurydice. But Aristaeus, ancient kin of Pan, whose very name meant the good, pursued her one day, and she was killed in the flight. Overcome by grief, Orpheus sought her and persuaded Hades to release her from the underworld. Orpheus started back to earth with her, but violated the condition that he should not look at her until he left the underworld--and so he lost her. Back on earth, Orpheus was torn apart by women jealous of his love for Eurydice.

But Marcel Camus has surrounded a legend that was old when the Greeks told it, with the rhythm of Negro music and singing, with magic borrowed from a dozen lands, and finally with the beauty and color of Rio's carnival. Black Orpheus recaptures not only the myth, but also the frenzied rites of the dancers who made their torchlit way from Athens to the Eleusinian shore. With brilliant color that revels in the setting's crotic intensity, the filming captures visually the vibrant joy and sad lyricism of the soundtrack.

Orpheus becomes a demigod, standing beyond mortal sympathies and sorrows, while Eurydice, by contrast, is even more appealingly human and defencelessly child-like. The power of his song, to charm and subdue, is beyond question--drawing, perhaps, on credence strengthened by myths leading back far past Orpheus and the Sirens.

Orpheus is the hero of a double legend--for the great singer is also he that was dead and yet lives again. "There was an Orpheus before me, and there will be one after, but now I am Master," he tells a child. And in a child Orpheus' skill is reborn.

He never succumbs, as his ancient worshippers did, to thinking more of those who came before and will come after than of himself. He carries eternity as a very light burden. Yet there is also a strange incongruity in the Christian touches which Camus tries to introduce. When Orpheus is counseled to trust to charity, as when he thanks the dead Eurydice for the new dawn, the unity of the myth is broken, and the interpolations do not ring true.

Any film like this becomes a masterpiece if it succeeds at all: what is remarkable is that the myth does work. Largely, Camus has accomplished his end through surrealism and through appeal to a whole secondary set of myths: the archetypal image the audience holds of the rhythmic and sexual Negro. Only in Kio, and only with black stars could this incredible tale become real. But in this strange, lovely land, Orpheus does live again.