The Brazilian Invasion
This is a recent piece I was commissioned to write for the Tribeca Film Festival Newsletter:
Ask the average moviegoer to name one Brazilian film, and there’s a good chance they’ll mention Black Orpheus, the 1960 Oscar winner which retold the Greek Orpheus myth against the backdrop of Brazil’s annual Carnival celebration. With its dazzling photography and infectious bossa nova score, Black Orpheus is widely considered a classic (it was one of the first DVDs issued by The Criterion Collection). The only catch is that it was actually made by a French director. What’s more, it has also long been criticized by Brazilian filmmakers for misrepresenting of favela life and fetishizing Afro-Brazilian culture.
Still, Black Orpheus’ massive success helped ignite international interest in the country’s burgeoning Cinema Novo movement, which had emerged the previous decade when a new generation of Brazilian filmmakers began independently producing low-budget, black-and-white social-realist films that focused on the plight of the country’s poorest and most oppressed citizens. After the 1964 military coup which toppled Brazil’s leftist government, state censorship forced Cinema Novo filmmakers to begin masking their critiques with abstracted narratives and wild Tropicalist aesthetics. This new allegorical style resulted in works like Glauber Rocha’s frenzied agitprop Land in Anguish (1967), which earned worldwide acclaim, and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s cannibalist comedy Macunaîma (1969), one of the rare films to achieve both critical and commercial success. Though no Cinema Novo film ever received as much attention as Black Orpheus, the movement has come to define Brazilian cinema, with filmmakers from Werner Herzog to Martin Scorcese citing it as a source of inspiration.
