At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  Welles wrote that he immediately recognised that Carnival was too complex to be comprehensively documented on the fly and that re-stagings were inevitable. What’s more, the cemented structure normally provided by a screenplay in advance of production had to be postponed until the film and sound recordings could be assembled and synchronised back in Hollywood; the crew were obliged to “take out all the paying dirt and ship it halfway around the world from the place where it was mined. We won’t get the gold until we get back to where operations are possible.”

  Welles’s memo is a key provisional document about the ‘Carnaval’ segment while he was still working on it in Rio. It is his attempt to define the themes and structure of the work-in-progress under duress. Although Welles appended, at RKO’s request, a more traditional treatment – “a design for the main architectural lines of the Carnival film” – he did so under gentle protest. Both Kane and Ambersons had been meticulously scripted and planned shot by shot; it’s clear Welles was exhilarated to be improvising on location without a traditional script as he had done three and a half years earlier making the film segments of Too Much Johnson.

  The memo emphatically makes the case for the exceptionalism and cultural importance of ‘Carnival’. With great clarity Welles argues that logistical challenges had made it necessary to invent a new process of filmmaking. He clearly thrived on the challenge, but felt it unfair to be criticised for circumstances outside his control.

  It was understood by all concerned before I left that Carnaval would be shot on the cuff. […] The task of learning about Carnaval, and translating what we learned into film, has been very far from easy.

  It was, after all, a semi-documentary. Welles claimed he and his collaborators had been “writing the Carnaval picture every night” in the form of extensive discussions with local experts. This was “the sort of daily work which has necessarily taken the place of actual writing”. As an example, Welles appends excerpts of “minutes of these meetings” that document a democratic, well-informed debate on incorporating a romantic choro song and the practicalities of how the choro scene should be filmed. Welles makes a bold pitch for these notes as “the nearest thing we have to a script”. By this method, the ‘script’ serves as a detailed record of the collaborative creative process rather than a meticulous pre-plan to be executed with a minimum of needless expense. It leaves open wide space for improvisation during both the filming and post-production.

  In the future Welles would write screenplays that met strict industry standards only when he was working within an institutional context or when he was attempting to independently raise finances. Discussing his bullfighting project The Sacred Beasts in 1966, he said he planned to discard the many scripts he had written and shoot without one.39 Writing was a crucial part of Welles’s creative process – the mountains of messy drafts in the archives prove that – but as he said in 1964, “I prepare a film but I have no intention of making this film. The preparation serves to liberate me.”40

  Nevertheless, also appended to the memo is that ‘Treatment for the Film Itself’ demanded by RKO. It is possibly Welles’s earliest surviving attempt to lay out a formal plan for the Carnaval footage he was still shooting. He intends to use as the structuring conceit samba, which, in the words of Catherine Benamou, will provide “the lens through which to gauge the effects of modernization on human relations and social identity” in Rio de Janeiro.41 Welles writes:

  Samba comes from the hills that rise above Rio, from the people who live in those hills – but there are those authorities who maintain that Samba is principally a product of Rio’s Tin Pan Alley. The best opinion and, most importantly, dramatic interest, sustain the hill theory… The point needs to be proved and illustrated…42

  This ‘hill theory’ had not been unanimously supported by Welles’s ‘brain trust’ of experts. Local researcher Rui Costa reported:

  To say that the samba was born in the hills is as much a matter of opinion as to say that Venus was born in the waves of the sea… the truth is that all elements of the city, from all the sections, cooperate to produce the samba.

  Costa notes the one-time usefulness of the favelas as a rehearsal space because it had been easier there to evade the police, who tried to prohibit late-night noise. However, the composers deserted the favelas following the invention of radio and recording studios down in the city. He describes the subsequent state of the favelas’ samba schools as “mediocre affairs, without any of the choral discipline of the old times”. Costa concludes:

  At any rate, perhaps it’s just as well to allow the people and the literal-minded to keep the sweet conviction that the samba was born in the hills. It’s a sweet and poetic tale which after all doesn’t harm the real trend of things…43

  The American Robert Meltzer’s long and entertaining memo to Welles on the musical genealogy of samba lamented the lack of existing written studies, which meant that the music’s origins were still mythical and debated. He sought advice in Rio from such experts as composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and encountered conflicting opinions. Meltzer settled for the imprecise conclusion that

  it’s neither the Colonist of the North nor the composer of Rio, neither the barefoot bacteria from the hills nor the Fireman’s Band, neither the European and American influence nor the troubadours, neither the denizens of Villa Isabel nor the sons of the slaves – none of these can claim responsibility for Samba’s birth and appearance. All of them together, each in its own way, had a great deal to do with that appearance, too, a very great deal. […]

  It takes all sorts of things to make a world, but it seems to take even more to make a Samba.44

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Welles went for the sweet and poetic ‘hill theory’ as the structural device of this version of ‘Carnaval’. This served to highlight the central contribution of Afro-Brazilians to Rio de Janeiro’s culture and to recognise the city’s peripheral, impoverished underclass. It also provided the opportunity to canvas the city’s many diverse spaces.

  Welles mentions Rio’s “kinship” with New Orleans and how “between American Jazz and American Samba there is much in common” (one of several instances where Welles’s Good Neighborliness extends to calling the entire hemisphere ‘America’ in the South American fashion). Meltzer, himself a jazz pianist, had come to the conclusion that samba is quite different from jazz because it privileges composition over performance.

  But no matter. Welles lays out his plan:

  Here we are, up in the hills. Here is the jungle, trying to push its way back down into the city; and below us, profuse and glittering, is the city itself, the bays and the beaches, the skyscrapers – beyond, the breathtaking monuments of other hills. We’re up the Favellas [sic] now, rude dwellings (now being replaced by the Government of Brazil with better homes for the people). Here, in a special place of its own, distinguished by its special structure, its flowers, its curtains, its large fenced-in yard, is a typical School of the Samba.45

  Welles introduces the Afro-Brazilian composer, musician, and dancer Grand Otello as a central figure. In the weeks before Carnaval, Otello introduces a new samba to the musicians at a samba school. The film will cut to the same song being recorded in one of the city’s radio stations by a sophisticated female singer. Now “the city has taken up the new Samba”.

  Welles introduces the percussion instruments of samba, as well as other props of Carnaval: “perfume-throwers … masks, serpentina, confetti, noise-makers”. He then cuts to four representative and “widely contrasting locations”46 of the bailes or dance venues: the Teatro Municipal, the Independencia, the Teatro da Republica, and the Rio Tennis Club. Each represents a different class of carioca and each is alive with festivities and music (‘marchas’ rather than ‘sambas’). A woman in the Tennis Club sings a romantic choro during an interlude before the festivities resume.

  The people come down from the hills early, dressed up in the costumes they’ve been preparing for weeks: clowns, Hawaiians, Cossacks, Bahiana
s, tramps, animals, Indians, monsters – everything and anything. Down they come from the hills, down the paths and rough roads to the paved streets and the little plazas in the suburbs […] The crowds jamming the city’s outskirts choke the narrow streets and the wide streets: a rising river of humanity that moves together in the channels defined by the shops and houses. There is nothing placid about this movement. It is all whirlpools and eddies. And always there are the rhythms of Carnaval’s music, the gay noise of thousands of voices singing without inhibition in the open air.47

  The revellers appropriate the city’s public transport in their movement towards the city centre. An open street car is so overcrowded it becomes

  a great clinging globule of humanity with a trolley sitting on top. By this and by other means, the people move and gather in the center of Rio. The tens have become hundreds, the hundreds thousands, and the thousands a million. Their voices combined in song now produce a mighty roar that sifts into the farthest alley and rises up to the top of the tallest skyscraper.48

  Surviving frames from Welles’s Technicolor footage of the Carnaval of Rio de Janeiro, February 1942 (Source: It’s All True: Based on a Film by Orson Welles, 1993)

  * * *

  Next, Welles includes a fictional scene, playing himself as a newcomer to Rio:

  A roof garden on top of a skyscraper in the middle of the city. All around are more skyscrapers, some finished, some in work. Beyond are Rio’s sumptuously beautiful hills. From the street there rises the huge roar of Carnaval, throbbing like a powerhouse. Close to us people are singing the samba ‘Farewell, Praça Onze’. This is distinct from the multiplicity of other sounds, other rhythms – increasingly so during the following scene.

  An architect’s stand on trestles displays a plaster model of part of the city. Standing beside this is a young lady whom we will call Donna Maria. She looks efficient and attractive. There is no mistaking her officialdom or her sex appeal.

  Welles and Donna Maria discuss the samba song and the important public square whose imminent disappearance it laments. Welles remarks that “now it has to go to make room for a big new street”.

  DONNA MARIA

  The people love it very much – so they made up this song about it to bid it goodbye. Senhor Orson, you’ve never been to Rio before, so you can’t know how our city’s been changing. Over there we used to have a mountain. A little while ago we moved it away. Now the city is several degrees cooler and the traffic problem is simplified.

  WELLES

  I think Rio can spare a few mountains and still be the loveliest city in America.

  DONNA MARIA

  We thought so, too. Now here’s a model of our new Avenue – Avenida Getulio Vargas.

  INSERT – MODEL OF AVENIDA GETULIO VARGAS

  WELLES

  Right there (my hand points) – Isn’t that where Praça Onze is now? (back to scene)

  DONNA MARIA

  It won’t be by the time this picture’s shown onscreen. The city’s going to be tremendously improved, but, of course, lots of people will still have saudades for Praça Onze.

  WELLES

  Saudades – Ladies and gentleman, I’m no interpreter, but I now offer you a Portugese expression the English language ought to adopt because we haven’t got its equivalent – saudades.

  DISSOLVE during the next few words to title:

  SAUDADES

  Over this I continue.

  WELLES (Cont’d)

  It means heartache – something like that – Sentimental memory, lonesomeness – a longing remembrance of something past, or of someone gone away…

  Welles believes ‘Farewell, Praça Onze’ will become a standard like ‘Basin Street Blues’ or ‘Swanee River’.

  WELLES

  No, Donna Maria, I don’t think you Cariocas are going to forget Praça Onze – that song won’t let you. Next year, of course, there’ll be a new samba about the new street, and I’m all for that – for new sambas and new streets. (to camera) You know, Rio’s one of the only beautiful old towns where new things are even more beautiful than the old ones. Of course, it’s just as hard here as it is anywhere else to say goodbye to the past – but you can always keep your mind off the past if you’re busy enough with the future, and Rio’s plenty busy. Right, Donna Maria? You’ve got even more plans here than you’ve got memories – more hopes than regrets, more dreams than saudades.

  DONNA MARIA

  The hills up there, for instance, where the poor people live, where the Schools of Samba come from – you were up there photographing one of them, Senhor Orson – do you know we’ve got new housing projects for all those places – model homes? They’re going up right now.

  WELLES

  That’s fine.

  DONNA MARIA

  Just wait and see…

  The ‘Praça Onze’ tune sounds louder, more insistently. She smiles, acknowledging its effect.

  DONNA MARIA (Cont’d)

  Of course, we can’t deny we’re sentimental.49

  Welles’s dialogue with this fictional Brazilian official is characteristic of his interpretation of his mission on behalf of the Good Neighbor Policy. It would have been another exercise in charismatic but calculated diplomacy. Rather than attack the cynicism of the Vargas regime in what was surely an authoritarian usurpation of public space, Welles calls the dictatorship’s bluff, accepts its urban development plans at face value, and pushes the most utopian and progressive reading of those plans. The destruction of the culturally important square is permissible because it is linked, Welles indicates, to socially progressive aspects of the city’s modernisation, including the housing projects that will replace the slums of the favelas. It would have been a passive-aggressive attempt on Welles’s part to publicly defy the Brazilian dictatorship not to come up with the goods – in other words, the internal radicalisation of a policy by excessive endorsement. As pitched, Welles’s ‘Carnaval’ segment would have served like that ambiguous workers’ obelisk to President Vargas near Praça Onze – both a commissioned tribute and a reminder.

  In this interpretation ‘Farewell, Praça Onze’ is not exactly a protest song against authoritarian control of the spaces of the city. Instead, the song gives popular expression to a very Wellesian sense of loss. Welles’s discovery of the Portuguese word saudade couldn’t have been more timely. His work in film to date is seeped in it.

  Carnival had been increasingly institutionalised under Vargas; the samba schools had been forced to register with the authorities.50 Simon Callow is right to describe Welles’s endorsement of the Vargas regime as an “extraordinary piece of ideological flexibility”.51 At the same time Welles does not compromise on his radical commitment to celebrate the city’s marginalised black and indigenous people. And to be fair, this scene was sketched in a memorandum directed to RKO in the midst of trouble, as he was losing control of Ambersons.52 Welles had been forced to justify the It’s All True project and his methods, defend himself against damaging accusations, and present the segment as both commercially viable and in line with the OCIAA propaganda mission. But Welles was in risky territory. Welles had alienated officials in the Vargas regime by focusing on Afro-Brazilian and caboclo culture in both his documentary footage and his recreations.53

  * * *

  The treatment continues. Welles plans a “montage concert” of what he calls the ‘Praça Onze Suite’ which will show varied arrangements of the song as it is played in many venues of the city, beginning in Praça Onze itself. A similar montage occurs for the other samba hit of the year, ‘Amelia’, and introduces the character of a lost young boy named Pery who seeks his mother in the crowd. The two songs merge in the square and the competing singers busy themselves with a capoeira, the Brazilian fight dance.54

  Welles intends to show the singer Linda Baptista performing in the racially segregated Casino de Urca, where Carmen Miranda was discovered;55 this is to be intercut with the same samba, ‘Batuque no Morro’, as sung in the streets in a parody
of Carmen Miranda by Grand Otello, who has appropriated various pieces of women’s clothing. Welles explains:

  The contrast is not only of voices, but of directions: the Carnaval of tradition is a celebration of the streets alone. But recent years have send a trend indoors to the Baile and the Casino. The contrast, as it’s illustrated by this song, isn’t extreme – but the raucous raggle-taggle jamboree of the streets and the more professional, if equally enthusiastic atmosphere of the nightclub, is interesting in juxtaposition…

  We’ve seen people inside the clubs and dance halls at night; we’ve seen them outside during the day. Now we see them outside at night. We see them from the level of the streets themselves, and from the roofs of buildings. The total effect is breathtaking.

  Welles also dubiously lauds the “unpoliced good behavior of Carnaval’s mob. Drunkenness has no part of the world’s biggest good time, since only champagne and beer are obtainable on Carnaval days, and besides, Brazilian good humour is so unaggressive that brawls are hard to find.”

  The segment continues with footage of the parade down the city’s main avenue. There is an orgy of Pan-American propaganda. One float depicts five tall columns, the fifth symbolically toppled – “as the people believe it should be”. Then there are several spectacular musical numbers played by the Ray Ventura Orchestra in the Urca Casino, which ends as

  Rio’s Carnaval becomes Pan-America’s Carnaval. Here, you realize, is one way of saying something that all of us in the Western Hemisphere are coming to recognise. The Americas, all the Americas together, are joined in fact as well as in idea, today rather than in the future.56