A Film Canon

Beneath its exotic, even racist surface, Black Orpheus provides a compelling account of the structural necessity of Carnaval in Brazilian society, and carnivalesque in post-colonial societies: "The happiness of the poor is the great illusion of Carnaval". Most generally, Camus presents the event as a mode of transportation, facilitating and guiding movement from one part of the city to another, while ensuring that this fluidity never lapses over into social mobility, insofar as each part of the accompanying bossa nova is identified with a different demographic - the foundational percussion with the working-class favelas, as if to emphasise their role in the samba communities from which the genre arose; the brass accompaniment with the middle-class and aristocratic heritage that populates the inner-city; and the nylon-string guitar - the most critical ingredient - with Orpheus' (Breno Mello) self-consciously fantastic journey between the two, and to the Underworld. The depictions of the latter are the most memorable part of the film, equating it with the inky, bureaucratic limits of the parade - or, more generally, with the parade itself, insofar as it descends from the airy, Olympus-like splendour of the central favela - culminating with an extraordinary elaboration of a Gothic hospital, in which bodies are reclaimed from the crowd, and, finally, the alien, indigenous ceremonies that these bureaucratic spaces are ultimately designed to repress. In fact, Camus' elaborations of the crowd effectively surpass the parade in terms of spectacle, gesturing towards a collectivity - or even Hellenism - that has become somehow unavailable in American and European cinema, and constituting the first systematic analogy between it and the bewildering flux of Technicolor.