A retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, set during the time of the Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro.
Barack Obama notes in his memoir "Dreams from My Father" (1995) that it was his mother's favorite film. Obama, however, didn't share his mother's preferences upon first watching the film during his first years at Columbia University: "I suddenly realized that the depiction of the 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."
An interesting interpretation. Indeed, what I find interesting is how what it means to be black varies so much from one country to the next. What we see here could never have been an American film in 1959. It is just so far outside of what was possible. And yet, it seems perfectly natural for Brazil.
The Greek mythology parallel is nice, but it is most interesting to see what passed for Brazilian culture in the 1950s. What an entirely different world from what we knew in the United States.
Barack Obama notes in his memoir "Dreams from My Father" (1995) that it was his mother's favorite film. Obama, however, didn't share his mother's preferences upon first watching the film during his first years at Columbia University: "I suddenly realized that the depiction of the 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."
An interesting interpretation. Indeed, what I find interesting is how what it means to be black varies so much from one country to the next. What we see here could never have been an American film in 1959. It is just so far outside of what was possible. And yet, it seems perfectly natural for Brazil.
The Greek mythology parallel is nice, but it is most interesting to see what passed for Brazilian culture in the 1950s. What an entirely different world from what we knew in the United States.