Visions of paradise: how Brazilian cinema educated the United States about the racial issue in Brazil

Abstract

The international image of Brazil was forged during the 20th century through cinema and music presented abroad. As the United States held a leading role in cinema and music production, the country had a great influence on public opinion around the world. Americans imported  Carmen Miranda, during the World War II and in the post-War period, as an actress, singer and dancer that showed Brazil as an exotic place, with carnival rhythms and a happy and tolerant people. In 1959-1960, French cinema presented another vision of Brazil, based on the hills of Rio de Janeiro, with the film Black Orpheus. In this film, for the first time there is a focus on the Black population of a favela with a view to the Guanabara Bay, Where impoverished and happy Blacks sing and dance, while experience the joys and tragedy of love. It achieved enormous success among Americans, by showing Brazil as a place where economic inequality did not generate racial conflicts. The idea of ​​Racial Paradise presented in Carmen Miranda's films was reinvigorated in Orpheus. At the beginning of the millennium, the film Cidade de Deus contributed to the desmantle of the myth of racial tolerance and the happiness of Black Brazilians, in an extremely violent film that showed part of the reality of the favelas. The three films contributed, over sixty years, to projecting the image of Brazil and educating Americans about this distant land.