Orpheus Distending

"The cinema has replaced the church, and people seek truth at the movies instead of at the Mass," says French Director Marcel Camus, whose sweeping ideas sometimes run a little too fast for the projector. Camus (no kin to the late writer-philosopher) reached the upper crest of the French cinema's New Wave with his Black Orpheus, a rambling but intensely poetic movie he produced by hiring amateur actors and coaxing action out of them against wild festival backgrounds in Rio de Janeiro. The formula worked so well that last fall Camus returned to Brazil, hired two professional actors, more amateurs and some of the old cast--notably Lourdes de Oliveira, a supple housemaid who played the jilted girl in Orpheus--and set out to swallow one of the biggest countries in the Western Hemisphere.

Writing the script as he went along, he dragged his crew for more than five months in all Brazilian directions, and used up enough Eastmancolor to make a film that would last for nearly 48 hours. Cut down for the public--Camus was adding final touches in Paris last week--the picture will be titled The Pioneers and released next month. Its plot will have to go some to rival the saga that went into the filming itself.

Off with the Prize. To begin with, Camus set up a motive for travel by starting off his story with a group of gem and gold hunters bickering over a rich find. One shoots up the others and goes off with the prize; two survivors spend the rest of the film chasing him. Following his plot 1,000 miles up the Amazon, he stayed open to suggestions from real life. Seeing a woman suspected of theft fleeing through a market crowd, he whipped out his camera, shot the scene, and used it to introduce one of the film's heroines. During ten days on the Belem-Bracanga railroad, the company lost some of their clothes to sparks from the wood-burning engine; the train had no brakes and derailed itself at least once a day. Also aboard were refugees from back-country drought land, and when one woman bore a baby on a rolling flatcar, Camus kneaded that into the story. Drawing on nearly every member of his crew, which included a Vietnamese script girl and mechanics from Guinea and Japan, he ordered them before the lenses whenever new roles came to mind.

The company survived a minor revolution by malcontents in the Brazilian air force (which paralyzed air travel for days), soaked up all the electricity in the Manaus area and virtually blacked out the city for three weeks, provoked citizens' wrath when Camus hired a nightclub and filled it up with prostitutes, the only extras he could find who were willing to work all night. Camus carried luggage, dug ditches, designed and built nearly every set but the Amazon delta and the Mato Grosso, applied makeup, shifted props, arranged lights, hammered nails, served food. "He's very easy to work with," said one actor, "provided you let him dominate you completely."

Lights Out. Camus himself has been dominated only twice in his life: first by his father-in-law, later by the Nazis. Son of a provincial schoolteacher, he studied art in Paris, married the daughter of an aging sign painter. While Camus listened, the old man spun out his wisdom drawn from yoga, Greek philosophy and less classified sources--and the young man soon called him "my master."

"He taught me," says Camus, "that the heart beats to the vibrations of the sevenstringed lyre of Orpheus, representing the seven planets. The vibrations are vital." With Camus' wife, the master was killed during World War II. Camus today will not even reveal his name, but includes an aging "master figure" in each of his films (the present one is an old Negro he came upon in Bahia).

After the war, Camus spent more than a decade as "France's best assistant direc tor" before he made it on his own with Black Orpheus. Now, with the completion of Pioneers, it has occurred to him somehow that love should be the great theme of his life, and he is swept away on plans to produce an unending series of love films--carnal and spiritual, full-length and short--for TV. straight cinema, schoolrooms, garden clubs, anyone who wants to hear the gospel of human affection and tenderness. Says he: "I will become the colossus of love."

Tousle-haired, wild-eyed, glowing with his new7 mission and blackened by the sun of Brazil, Camus toasted his friends in the nation's new capital city just before he left. "How I love you," he cried between dollops of Scotch. "Here in Brazil there is no hate, only love. Here we are all brothers." Just then, Brasilia's power failed, and waiters made their way through the dark to light candles. For some reason, Marcel Camus did not shoot the scene.

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