A Briefing for Descent

In Revolution in Poetic Language Julia Kristeva psychoanalytically understands the myth of Orpheus to be indicative of the perilous journey of the poet in danger of losing his or her subjectivity in the process of writing. While Kristeva's approach may offer a beginning to reading poetic practice, I will use an additional ally in my underworld journey of critique. Not entrenched in the psychoanalytic paradigm, Benedict Anderson's influential Imagined Communities examines how writing, in the form of print, newspapers, and novels, produces an imaginary, a set of fictional mechanisms by which community can be imagined. Curiously, he focuses on prose forms and novel writing as a crucial ensemble of the “imagi-nation”. Anderson pays attention to neither cinema nor poetry. Yet, the case-study central to the discussion that follows, namely Marcel Camus's film Black Orpheus (1959), helps me to map out an unfamiliar path – where one encounters dysfunctional families and hears previously unheard voices – towards a possible future community both imagined and idealized as family.

Set in Rio de Janeiro during carnival time, Black Orpheus offers a site where a visually poetic discourse exposes the liminal spaces between non-Western community, poetic practice, and a family structure that throughout the film never entirely finds its shape. The movie is based on the Greek myths surrounding Orpheus, the poet and musician whose talents can propitiate the dead. In the myth, Orpheus ventures into the Underworld to rescue Eurydice, his newlywed. However, the Orfeu of BLACK ORPHEUS is an unmarried tram-driver who has earned local fame as a singer and guitarist. Engaged (not married) to the wrong woman (Mira), Orfeu falls for a visitor, Eurydice. It is her serendipitous misfortune to find herself being stalked by a man dressed up as Death. This character of uncertain credentials lures Eurydice to a desolate tram station to execute her by electrocution. Poetic excellence and its inheritance are exacted at the price of sabotaged marriages and non-existent families.