PEDRO COSTA

O Sangue (1989)
Costa’s first film the director himself describes as a “film film” or a “cinephile film” and a better description probably couldn’t be leveled on it. You know those old silent films that have a railroad-like attitude towards all space and locations in the plot (as in, every scene literally seems like it is located adjacent to the previous scene before it, as if the characters were simply walking through door after door into an endless series of adjacent locations)? Well that’s what this movie is like, only that it is each shot that seems to have a singular integrity, a singular purpose, a singular thought, motivation, reference point, and film behind it, but remain unconnected to the following shot which likewise maintains a hermeticism of its own. That’s not to say that every film necessarily needs such continuity and coherence, but in any case the result here is a film that feels over-mannered to such a point that sequences (and ultimately the film itself) cannot attain a life of theirown because each and every shot is shooting for its own moon. This is all a darn shame because the film is unabashedly gorgeous, with rich chiaroscuro (promises of the strong shadow-work to come from the director) and compositions that have a very promising attachment to the character of actors, that is, the characters they evoke primarily through their stance, blocking, and composition of the frame in combination with the actor’s own physical sensibility, rather than “acting” per se. This is all funneled through a plot bifurcated between a adolescent romance (the Nicholas Ray factor coming on very strong, especially in They Live By Night’s pre-Bresson Bresson vibe) and a bleak sense of orphanhood, familial bonds and estrangement, but narrative and story seem less Costa’s focus than the emotional sensibility of his characters expresses as much by the actors (see above) as by the locations so carefully chosen and arranged from them to inhabit (later in Costa’s work these locations become more and more natural that they reach a point of abstraction and strangeness in their quotidian reality).

Casa de Lava (1994)
A remarkable growth of assurance, rhythm, and focus in Costa’s second film. As much Stromboli (Rossellini, 1950) as the specifically referenced I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943), Inês Medeiros arrives on the island that is soon to obsess the films of Costa, Cape Verde, to care for a comatose worker who ambiguously tried to jump to his death at work in Lisbon and whose undead body has been returned to his home while he sleeps. There the nurse finds a population as strange as the island’s volcanic desert, the people stuck halfway between being drawn to Portugal and their hard-fought and deeply unique past as a colonial pit stop, a kind of purgatory for the inhabitants extended to the “living dead” situation of the comatose man and the film’s thematic, not to mention melodramatic, orbit around dormant passions. Like the montage of volcanoes that opens the film (to be followed by a montage of stalwart women’s faces, non-actor residents of the island), dead and undead become loose poetic analogies for sleep and wakefulness, past and present, Portugal and Cape Verde, and perhaps love and desire, perhaps men and women. As such, the sexual and romantic obsessions of the inhabitants, of the nurse, and of the comatose man become focal points around which swirls the beauty and desolate loneliness of Cape Verde, the forged community that nevertheless is constantly being siphoned to Portugal, and the location of the island and its inhabitants in Portuguese society and history. Inês Medeiros’ existential experience on the island is the film’s primary grounding, and Costa uses her to pivot the film to many digressions both narratively and stylistically: a documentary of the land and village around the island; portraits of the non-actor inhabitants, as well as their families, culture and home; the innate mystery that Cape Verde as an existing, living location seems to contain; and the integration or co-existence of all this with several romantic, melodramatic story strands, mostly involving the only professional actors in the film but also including a strand featuring a strange adolescent romance among two island teenagers. The variety of ways Costa shoots and directs these many strands may seem to suggest an over-abundance of aesthetic strategies as in O Sangue, but the director downplays the monumentality of his treatment at the same time he finds a natural rhythm in the film’s weaving style and interests.

Ossos (1997)
Tracing the Cape Verde residents of his Casa de Lava (1994) back to their friends and family in the Fontaínhas slum of Lisbon, Pedro Costa captures the uneasy, emotionally and spatially fragile transience of human relationships by following the disruption the birth a child to a young, unmarried Fontaínhas couple has on their lives and that of their friends and immediate family. Costa has here honed his style to its most Bressonian, not so much in terms of the abstracted actions and gestures of O Sangue but rather of a carefully and intensely focused sense of minimal exposition for maximum emphasis and a separation of all things unto themselves. The result is less a Bressonian fragmentation than a unique expression of character and cinematic space, and specifically that of the Fontaínhas slums, of a kind a blackhole effect where each sequence is almost invariably the length of any given shot, and that shot has such a power and draw to it as to condense its power and emotion to a simple composition, an elegant blocking of an actor, or the dank suggestiveness of a shadow. (If you note my comments/complaints about O Sangue this description might read as a positive version of the very problems I had with that movie, but there is a humility and a sense of the quotidian in this film that completely counteracts the overwhelming attempts at potency of the images of that film.) Costa is focusing more and more on bringing in non-actors and real life into his stories and his film world, his previous female center point Inês Medeiros here relegated somewhat coyly to nearly a cameo as a prostitute, and the film finds more and more power in what had been, in Casa de Lavas, “just” one of a multitude of fascinations on Cape Verde, namely in the sharply defined faces of the movie’s female protagonists (though, like the Dardennes’ somewhat similar L’Enfant, the male-with-the-baby gets considerable focus, the softness of Nuno Vaz’ face, its lack of the distinctive bone structure of, say, Vanda Duarte, makes the actor and therefore in Costa’s style the character less rich and interesting). In fact, it is the young mother’s startling similarity to Inês Medeiros that introduces one of the film’s stranger motifs, of doubling characters and people inside the shadowy corridors and dilapidated corners of Fontaínhas.

In Vanda's Room (2001)
If it seems as if with each movie Costa is taking dramatic steps narratively and stylistically, In Vanda's Room is clearly the revolution, the giant step. Costa is now basing his film almost entirely on the semi-biographical reality of the lives of Fontaínhas residents, letting them co-create his films both in terms of character, dialog, and story, but perhaps most importantly in the creation of their setting, their homes and lives in the slums. Costa orbits very closely to documentary in this technique, especially in his move away from 35mm film production and instead employing the far more innocuous (though hardly un-effecting) presence of a digital video camera, natural light, and minimal crew (often just the director himself). The resulting, almost three hour film is without story and almost completely anarrative and is unbelievably, painfully intimate both in terms of what is shared with the camera and in terms of the literal way the camera narrows the social and locational sprawl of the film's setting and subject to closed corners of rooms, interrupted views down alleyways and other stunted, claustrophobic viewpoints (also used extensively in Ossos) that suggest a greater world sensed but unlived outside the film frame. And like Colossal Youth after it, the film's modest means, lack of pretension, and almost total focus on the social lives of real people does not eliminate the metaphysical or poetic as means of expression, as everything from patterns on dilapidated walls, a character, person, or location (as in the film all characters are people, and all people are inseparable from the location they inhabit) introduced in but a single interstitial shot but never shown again, or the dusky, muted light filtered into the slum rooms and then into the pixelated imprecision of the digital camera all hold wonders of their own outside of such disturbing specificities as Vanda Duarte's hacking, crack-produced cough. But of course this latter element is vital in its own right, especially coming off the heals of Duarte's performance and Fontaínhas itself in Ossos, both of which come off as glamorous and artificial now in the light (literally) of In Vanda's Room removal of a layer of conventional movie-ness that has (unknowingly for me) obscured much of the very subject and location of that previous movie. In fact, what seemed like a compelling dramatic and representational approach in Ossos, that of making the film's many characters appear as somnambulists or sleepwalkers is disturbingly "revealed" in In Vanda's Room as being due to the narcotic effect of extensive drug use, something cut out of or around the previous film.

Où gît votre sourire enfoui? (Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?) (2001)
Costa's documentary on filmmakers/couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet during the editing of their film Sicilia! (1999) is in the mode the director's films have resembled after In Wanda's Room, namely murky digital photography using an unmoving camera pointed in long takes at, for the most part, spatially blocked locations. This is actually Costa's most spatially ascetic film, the majority of which is in a single editing room with (roughly) three shots in a theatre/classroom somewhere else, one shot outside that same space, and an undetermined space where we spy one other post-production technician. Thus the main focus falls on the single editing room and its two main features: the Moviola editing table where Huillet can be found (where she is the hands-on editor of the film) and the often-open door to the editing room, in and out of which Straub paces as he exposits on film, films, Sicilia! and other things, all the while giving occasional comments or directions to Huillet in her editing. The result is an impression of Huillet as a methodical, if not materialist worker (the sound design is pretty banal except for the thick, sharp sounds of her rewinding and playing the footage on the table and the massive snipping sound of her scissors cutting film) focused on the "window" of the Moviola and Straub as more abstract and theoretical as he (absently? energetically? nervously?) enters and leaves the room through the door. We also get a considerable amount of their relationship through even Costa's minimal recording of their interaction, much of which is funny (the first fourth of the film almost seems a comedy, as verbal in their banter as it is physical in Straub's interaction with the door) and also contentious, but seemingly always productive for their filmmaking. And indeed their filmmaking, at least in the sense of editing, is to a large degree what the movie is about, as they absorb themselves in the differences between a single-frame during the edit between shots. The broad, casual dialectic here, between the door and the "window", Straub and Huillet, the process of combining two shots in infinite small variations seems to say as much about cinema as it does about the couple (generally and specifically) and even about Costa's cinema, strangely transposed from the slums to the editing room and once again finding just as much of life outside a closed room paradoxically existing in that very darkened, closed space. The concluding shot, featuring Huillet ascending stairs to (presumably) the room projecting their finished film as Straub seats himself at the bottom of the stairs waiting for the final music of Sicilia! to finish playing is especially heartbreaking and prescient considering Huillet's death last year.

6 Bagatelas (2001)
6 Bagatelas (2001) is a short feature made up of six short scenes excised from Costa's documentary on Straub/Hulliet editing Sicilia!, called Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?. They are mostly further, shorter examples of the many pleasures of that film: hearing Straub's hyper-intelligent and partially exasperated rambles, seeing the humorous interplay between Huillet and Straub, and later even going outside, a singular moment in the project, to see Straub kick up his feet as he and Huillet wait for laundry to dry. There is significantly less time spent on actually seeing their editing process, although one of the short scenes is made up "merely" of the couple playing the credits with its music on the Moviola, Straub leaning over to say something (as always) and Huillet having to keep stopping the music with a screech to hear what he is uttering.

Ne Change Rein (2005)
Ne Change Rein(2005) is a short made up of three shots of what seems to be a larger and more informal project, that of the filming of actress Jeanne Balibar as she performs publicly and rehearses in preparation for the release of her music debut, with lyrics apparently written by other filmmakers. The first shot is an acoustic practice song sung in a dressing room shot in a densely framed long shot of Balibar, her guitarist and a percussionist around a table, the second a live performance close-up of Balibar, mouth to a chrome mic and hair in curls, the third a long shot in concert where the singer and her band are only barely lit by the stage lights. Not much of real interest here, although the first and last shot are juxtaposed by the banality of over-lighting and under-lighting, where we see too much or not enough, but in the second shot Costa's habitually and perhaps inadvertently glamorous use of rich, suggestive shadows in digital video, in combination with Balibar's curly 'fro, sharp nose and soft jaw line really, really strongly calls to mind Sternberg's photography of Dietrich (like this or this).

Colossal Youth (2006)
See Full Review

Tarrafal (2007)
Tarrafal(2007) is a short from an omnibus film, and its opening channels Tourneur's Curse of the Demon, except instead of an occultist handing out slips of paper marking people for death, it is the government that hands out expulsion notices to slum residents. The film is a continuation of the aesthetic and production technique Costa has used since In Vanda's Room, but like the jump between that film and Colossal Youth, Costa seems to be distancing his later films from that movie's "purer" documentary impulse, adding layers of obliqueness, mystery, and cine-influences more overtly. The young man given the deportation notice crosses paths with Colossay Youth's inimitable Ventura, who is hanging around a friend who seemingly has returned from the dead, either metaphorically (he may have been released from prison or knocked around by the police) or truly (he may have been picked up by the police and beaten to death). Except for a long interior shot where the boy hears about and tries to express interest in his soon-to-be exiled home of Cape Verde from his mother, the film is unusually shot mostly outside by Costa, first facing the urban slums in long shot but later and more poetically (and more elliptically genre-based) in a strange, almost magical-seeming forest, the compositions all atangle by roots and stumps, branches and shadows. The two "stories" of the short cross paths but never merge, and one is left with the eerie feeling, with that strange, dark suggestion wherein Costa often comes closest to evoking horror in terms of genre (rather than the actual feeling of horror), that the conversation with the living dead (despite its humor) and the man walking around with the "death sentence" are intrinsically, deeply connected.

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