Word: orpheus
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...classical figure of the philosopher, Plato or Seneca, among his students was pressed into service as Christ teaching.The gestures of Ciceronian rhetoric lent authority to the poses of carved apostles; Orpheus with a ram on his shoulders was transformed into Christ the good shep herd. Winged victories became angels. Bacchus turned into the drunken Noah; a late 3rd century carving of Jonah resting under the gourd tree was based on the older Greek image of Endymion asleep. The more refined an early Christian work was, the more subtly it might display its classical affiliations...
Camus could have done the same thing in Bahia, his sixth film since Orpheus. Like Orpheus, Bahia takes a rather simple story, sets it in Brazil with beautiful camerawork, music and color. But the main story is a comedy, ending in marriage instead of death; it is complicated by subplots, colorful but distracting; and its climax does not have the heart-wrenching power of the Orpheus myth. In the end, Bahia is a very pretty, very joyous movie, but it is not a masterpiece...
...MANY WAYS, Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus was a revelation for American audiences. Surrounding a Greek myth with the swirling colors of a Brazilian carnival made the story completely universal; Camus's film gave the tragedy new depth, and audiences could not resist its graceful sadness...
...Bahia is something like the green world of the second half of A Winter's Tale, where nothing can possibly go wrong--to the point where a woman who has been dead for 25 years comes magically to life. Happiness, Camus seems to be saying, is as mythical as Orpheus, and even less likely to materialize...
...even the Romans admired their bravery and preferred them as gladiators (Spartacus was Thracian). Yet there was more to them than banditry alone, as this range of art works dating from around the 16th century B.C. to the 2nd century A.D. proves. For Thrace was the land whence came Orpheus, mythical musician-king who enchanted the most ferocious beasts and defied Pluto, the king of the underworld; it was the country where the Horseman--a god combining aspects of Apollo, Dionysos and Asclepius--was at once the object of popular veneration and emulation. People and culture were sufficiently influenced...