Marcel Camus

Director

"My father made the first Black Power film in 1971. But more than a decade earlier, you have Orfeu Negro, which showed people of colour with three-dimensional humanity. It didn't take on race issues, and this was revolutionary. In America, we were making films that were very conscious of class and race and struggle. The film ignores the whole race question. It shows people having a self-sufficient life that doesn't depend on a white person giving them their rights. My goodness, what a wonderful piece of cinema. I first saw it as a kid and it made quite an impression - so lush and colourful and rich. It shaped my vision and still holds up." —Mario Van Peebles

Biography

French motion-picture director who won international acclaim for his second film, Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) in 1958. The film was praised for its use of exotic settings and brilliant spectacle and won first prize at both the Cannes and Venice film festivals as well as an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Camus, educated as an art teacher, spent most of World War II as a prisoner of war, after which he entered the film industry as an assistant and technical adviser to directors Jacques Feyder and Luis Buñuel and others.

Morte en fraude (1956; Fugitive in Saigon, 1957), Camus’s first feature film, was a protest against the war in Indochina and received little attention. Later films—such as L’Oiseau de paradis (1961; Dragon Sky, 1964), Le Chant du monde (1965; “The Song of the World”), and Otalia de Bahia (1976)—also failed to attract the interest of critics and the public in the way that Orfeu Negro had. — Encyclopædia Britannica read more