Black Orpheus



Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. With its eye-popping photography and ravishing, epochal soundtrack, Black Orpheus was a cultural event, kicking off the bossa nova craze that set hi-fis across America spinning.

Disc Features

- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
- Archival interviews with director Marcel Camus and actress Marpessa Dawn
- New video interviews with Brazilian cinema scholar Robert Stam, jazz historian Gary Giddins, and Brazilian author Ruy Castro
- À la recherche d’“Orfeu negro,” a feature-length documentary about Black Orpheus’s cultural and musical roots and its resonance in Brazil today
- Theatrical trailer
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Michael Atkinson



Criterionforum.org user rating averages

My favorite film of all time. Period.

Even any little mention of this film gets me all excited. Never been able to see it in a theater, though.

Black Orpheus is the first "foreign" film with subtitles that I saw in a theatre way back when.

The next week I returned to the same theatre and watched The Virgin Spring.

Those two are what got me hooked.

Has anyone here seen the documentary, Looking For Black Orpheus?

Yes, I've seen it. Rather a disappointment. It shows the same places in Rio where the film was originally shot, and also has some of the crew members and actors remember the shooting, but it only serves to de-mythologize the film. Of course it's important to see how life in the favelas really IS (or was, way back then), but if you're interested in finding out more about the film itself or understand why it is so entrancing, this documentary will leave you cold.

As to "Orfeu" itself: I agree, one of the most beautiful films ever made. As an adaptation of the Orpheus story it would be matchless if there wasn't Cocteau's version...

I agree with what you say, Tommaso: such a documentary would only serve to de-mythologize the film. I would be more interested in seeing the documentary if cinematographer Jean Bourgoin had been interviewed. The lighting in Orfeu Negro is simply extraordinary. Bourgoin also shot, Mr. Arkadin; Mon oncle and The Longest Day. But he also shot The Counterfeit Traitor, which is blandly photographed.

Has anyone got the recent R2 Second Sight release to compare with the Criterion? I'm not managing to turn much up with Google.

The R2 looks stunning. Truly gorgeous. Not very impressed with the film though - it's quite pretty but terribly slight and 95% of it has nothing to do with the Orpheus myth at all. The title is a shameless bait-and-switch.

Cheers, I'll probably plump for that one then since the Criterion doesn't have much in the way of extras either.

Did you pick this up? I've got the CC but I like the film so much I'd double dip if the transfer is significantly better than the CC.

I did get it, but I haven't watched it yet. Obviously I've not got the Criterion to compare, I'll post up some stills later on so you can judge for yourself.

OK, here we go - I just jumped through the film randomly and took a few grabs, bare in mind I have ffdshow doing scaling and other fancy stuff in addition to the resizing to make them a manageable size. Hopefully they'll be enough to get a decent idea. If not, let me know if there are any specific sequences you'd like to see and I'll try and get as dry an image from it as possible.

Thanks a lot for these. They look good, though not much different from the CC. Hope u enjoy the film!

AR question: I saw this tonight in the new print that was struck by the BFI a couple of years ago. It was projected in 1.85 and looked ok, but I see now that both the R1 and R2 discs are full-frame. The compositions in the Beaver review don't look particularly tight, so I suppose it could get away with a bit of masking/cropping (or, at least, the problem would not be glaringly obvious) - is there a possibility that the film could have originally been projected in widescreen (given the muddled circumstances of this period in terms of aspect ratios), or was this just a simple screw-up?

The film is a lot of fun - vibrant, kinetic and expertly shot (whilst admittedly playing rather fast and loose with its source).

Anybody know whether or no the recent Black Orpheus "Janus" re-issue has a new/different master than the regular Criterion release with all the extras?

It's not and what extras? The criterion disc was barebones too.

I asked Jonathan Turell a while back if there were any plans to re-do Black Orpheus, and he said no, so I'm assuming the Janus edition is from the same source.

It is not? And the CC was bare-bones too? Then WTF is with this re-issue? I mean, why bother?

Sheeesh!

The CC is one of their old releases (oldest package design, too--two designs before the wacky C) and is bare-bones, save for a trailer.

The Janus releases are bare-bones editions of the films released under the Janus imprint instead of Criterion's. If you own the CC of any film, there's no reason to double-dip.

It's cheaper and they figure it might attract new customers that way. Same reason for all the "Essential Arthouse" discs.

I got one of those new fangled turntable's that take LPs and rip them to CDs, so I figured I'd post this sound track that I ripped up on here. I might re-rip this one since the stereo that I used likes to leave gaping holes in between tracks and quite a few of these tracks meld into one another making the gaps really annoying.

Plus I goofed on a couple of the tracks at the end of side A. I tried following the time guides on the back cover, unfortunately they weren't correct and I should've just listened with my ear instead. For now this works... here.

Hopefully this isn't frowned upon here. if so, a mod is welcome to take this down.

I just had to buy an emergency copy of the Essential Arthouse version of this film to show my students (and at full Barnes and Noble retail too-- gah, retribution for all the good Criterion deals they've given me this year) and there's actually a missing feature I haven't seen mentioned: No English dub. Not that I'd show a dubbed film anyways, but just for those who'd think at least the audio options would remain. And there's an essay inside which I don't think was in the regular Criterion edition, so win some lose some. Let me reiterate though, I just paid retail for a (tangentially) Criterion release.

^ You lose your stripes for paying retail.

Mind you, I'm the guy who coughed up Edition Filmmuseum's monstrous shipping charges, so it's the slammer for me.

Saw "Black Orpheus" over the weekend (Criterion DVD). Shame Marcel Camus didn't trust the chemistry between his actors and the beauty of his movie's setting/locales to abandon the Greek side of the story. "Black Orpheus," ironically, works best when you think of it less as a loose 'Orpheus' adaptation than a simple (but doomed) 'boy meets girl' romance set in 1950's Brazil. The attraction between shy Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) and life-loving Orfeo (Breno Mello) takes on a life of its own that trascends the masked man's stalking and the inevitable fate that awaits the young lovers. Léa Garcia's Serafina is a hoot as Eurydice's cousin (the woman is just plain A-L-I-V-E!!!) and Lourdes de Oliveira's 'attributes' sure are fun to watch during her Carnival dancing scenes. I've seen movies with more nudity/sex scenes that aren't a tenth as erotically charged or romantic as the nudity-free "Black Orpheus." And that color photography and music beat sure are picturesque. The backdrop of the Rio Carnival (great use of location stock and movie-shot footage seamlesly integrated) and the effect this annual party has over the mostly-poor/black citizens living in surrounding favelas is an interesting backdrop that bookends the flick with the children Eurydice and Orfeo befriended continuing the circle of life as they know it. Though it has very little to do with the Greek mythology that inspired it (besides the characters' names and basic plot marks) "Black Orpheus," like Clouzot's "Wages of Fear," makes the most out of its French filmmakers' curiosity in setting the romantic story it wants to tell in a different cultural setting than Frances' own.

DVD and Blu-ray re-release announced for August 17, 2010. Specs in first post updated.

I can't believe this, for every classic i buy on DVD, there is a blu-ray edition announced the next week...