Black Orpheus

A French-Brazilian-Italian co-production directed by Marcel Camus, Black Orpheus (1959) took the major prizes of its year: the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a Golden Globe. It moves the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the hillside favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the frenzy of Carnival.

Shot in saturated colour among real crowds and processions, the film is carried by its music as much as by its images. The soundtrack by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá helped introduce bossa nova to the world, and songs such as Manhã de Carnaval became standards that are still sung. Camus films the dancing, the costumes and the steep, sunlit streets with a sensual energy that makes the city itself a leading character, and the myth plays out under a constant sense of fate.

For many viewers abroad it was a first encounter with Brazilian music and culture, though later Brazilian artists, among them the film-makers of Cinema Novo, would argue with its romanticised outsider's gaze. Whatever one makes of that argument, its part in the global rise of bossa nova is beyond dispute, and as film-making it is still intoxicating: a Greek tragedy retold in colour, rhythm and song, with an ache of inevitability running under the celebration that gives the spectacle its weight.