The-Politics-of-Pedro-Costa-Jacques-Ranciere

TATE FILM
PEDRO COSTA
two centuries ago by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
in the Preface to The New Heloise. These family
letters, are they real or fictive, the objector asks
the man of letters. If they are real, then they are
portraits, and we expect portraits to be faithful to
the model. This makes them not very interesting
to people who are not members of the family.
‘Imaginary paintings,’ on the other hand,
interest the public, provided they resemble, not
a particular individual, but the human being.
Pedro Costa says things differently: the patience
of the camera, which every day mechanically
films the words, gestures, and footsteps of the
characters—not in order to make films, but as
an exercise in approximating the secret of the
other—must bring a third character to life on the
screen. A character who is not the director, nor
Vanda, nor Ventura, a character who is, and is
not, a stranger to our lives 2 . But the emergence
of this impersonal also gets caught up in the
disjunction in its turn: it is hard for this third
character to avoid becoming either Vanda’s
portrait, and as such enclosed in the family of
social identifications, or Ventura’s painting, the
painting of the crack and the enigma which
renders family portraits and narratives futile. A
native of the island says as much to Mariana, the
well-intentioned nurse: your skull is not fractured.
The crack splits experience into those that can
be shared [partageable], and those which cannot
[impartageable]. The screen where the third
character should appear is stretched between
these two experiences, between two risks: the
risk of platitude, in the life narratives, and of
infinite flight, in the confrontation with the crack.
Cinema cannot be the equivalent of the love
letter or of the music of the poor. It can no longer
be the art which gives the poor the sensible
wealth of their world. It must split itself off, it
must agree to be the surface upon which the
experience of people relegated to the margins
of economic circulations and social trajectories
try to be ciphered in new figures. This new
surface must be hospitable to the division which
separates portrait and painting, chronicle and
tragedy, reciprocity and rift. An art must be made
in the place of another. Pedro Costa’s greatness
is that he simultaneously accepts and rejects this
alteration, that his cinema is simultaneously a
cinema of the possible and of the impossible.
1 See Pedro Costa and Rui Chaves, Fora! Out! (Porto: Fundação de Serralves, 2007) 119.
2 Fora! Out!, p.115.
© Jacques Rancière
O SANGUE / Blood
Portugal 1989, 35mm, 1:1,33, b/w, 95 min
Direction and screenplay: Pedro Costa,
Cinematography: Martin Schäfer, Sound:
Pedro Caldas, Gérard Rousseau, Editing:
Manuela Viegas, Producer: Victor Gonçalves,
Produced by Trópico Filmes
with: Pedro Hestnes, Nuno Ferreira,
Inês Medeiros, Luis Miguel Cintra, Canto e
Castro, Isabel de Castro, Ana Otero, Manuel
João Vieira, Miguel Fernandes, Henrique
Viana, Luís Santos, José Eduardo, Pedro Miguel
Two brothers, 17 year-old Vicente and 10
year-old Nino. A tiny village on the bank
of the Tagus river. Between Christmas and
New Year’s Eve. The boys are united by
a secret closely related to their father’s
absence: he vanished because he got
sick or maybe because he was involved in
some type of suspicious activity. This time
he seems to have disappeared for good.
What has happened? The elder brother
and a very young girl are the only ones
to know the secret.
There were once two teenagers and a child.
If we look back to the classical American
cinema we find that same secret alliance that
existed among Nicholas Ray’s rebels. But these
teenagers are not really rebels, and they
don’t get mixed in that insolvable night in the
graveyard, when they get hold of the unshared
secret of the child. Their division lies in that
separation, in that journey that will isolate them,
without any roots, and that will make them as
lost in space as they were from their own time.
João Bénard da Costa, O preto é uma cor, ou
o cinema de Pedro Costa
‘Blood’ is a special first feature – the first
features of not-yet auteurs themselves forming
a particular cinematic genre, especially in
retrospect. Perhaps it was from Huillet and
Straub’s ‘Class Relations’ that Costa learnt the
priceless lesson of screen fiction, worthy of Sam
Fuller: start the piece instantly, with a gaze, a
gesture, a movement, some ‘displacement’ of
air and energy, something dropped like a
heavy stone to shatter the calm of pre-fiction
equilibrium. To set the motor of the intrigue
going – even if that intrigue will be so shadowy,
so shrouded in questions that go to the very
heart of its status as a depiction of the real.
So ‘Blood’ begins sharply, after the sound (under
the black screen) of a car stopping, a door
slamming, footsteps: a young man has his face
slapped. Cut (in a stark reverse-field, down an
endless road in the wilderness) to an older man,
the father. Then back to the young man: ‘Do
what you want with me.’ The father picks up his
suitcase (insert shot) and begins to walk off …
The beginning of ‘Colossal Youth’ also announces,
in just this way, its immortal story: bags thrown
out a window, a perfect image (reminiscent,
on a Surrealist plane, of the suitcases
thrown into rooms through absent windows, the
sign of a ceaseless moving on and moving in, in
Ruiz’s ‘City of Pirates’) of dispossession, of beings
restlessly on the move from the moment they
begin to exist in the image. (…) Costa uses fiction,
gives it a body, but simultaneously abstracts,
hollows out that body into something ghostly and
incorporeal: it is a vibrant paradox, and a rare
combination in cinema. What this means is that
Costa achieves ‘moments’ which are pure cinema,
pure fiction, pure intrigue, while at the same time
conserving their mystery, their ‘secret side’ (‘don’t
go showing every side of a thing’, cautioned
Bresson, advice which Godard quotes).
Adrian Martin, The Inner Life of a Film
Pedro Costa’s BLOOD (O Sangue)
is available NOW on Second Run DVD
www.secondrundvd.com
CASA DE LAVA
Portugal / France 1994, 35mm, 1:1,66, colour,
110 min
Direction and screenplay: Pedro Costa,
Cinematography: Emmanuel Machuel,
Sound: Henri Maikoff, Editing: Dominique
Auvray, Producer: Paulo Branco, Produced by
Madragoa Filmes in co-production with Pandora
Film and Gemini Films
with: Inês Medeiros, Isaach de Bankolé, Edith
Scob, Pedro Hestnes, Sanda do Canto Brandão,
Cristiano Andrade Alves, Raul Andrade, João
Medina, António Andrade, Manuel Andrade
Leão, a Cape Verdean immigrant and a
bricklayer in Lisbon, falls off the scaffolding
and enters a deep coma. Arrangements are
made for him to return to his homeland, in
Cape Verde. A nurse, Mariana, eager for a
change of scenery, volunteers to accompany
him. When she arrives, nothing is like she
expected. No one seems to be waiting
for Leão or even to care for him. Mariana
waits for someone to claim Leão and waits
for him to wake up. She gets increasingly
involved with the mysterious Fogo
volcano community; the adventure begins…
I have dreamed so much of you,
Walked so often, talked so often with you,
Loved your shadow so much.
Nothing is left me of you.
Nothing is left of me but a shadow
among shadows,
A being a hundred timwes more
shadowy than a shadow,
A shadowy being who comes, and
comes again, in your sunlit life.
Robert Desnos, Last Poem (Terezina
Concentration Camp, May 1945)
‘Casa de Lava’ starts several times. The opening
shots of a volcanic eruption – borrowed from
a film called A ‘Erupção do Vulcão da Ilha do
Fogo’, provided to Costa by the geographer
Orlando Ribeiro - impose a sense of the
pre-human, a pure inhospitability. The next
sequence is a series of close shots of women
standing in a rocky landscape. The women are
looking at something; or, rather, since Costa
never establishes that these women are in the
same place facing in the same direction, let’s
say they are looking at various somethings:
orientation without orientation. Some of
these women will be (and maybe are not yet)
characters in the film – in the same way that
the people in ‘In Vanda’s Room’ and ‘Colossal
Youth’ are characters in those films: quasi-real,
quasi-fictional, not firmly located on either side
of the nonexistent border. (…) The characters are
all exiles; any position they take is provisional.
(‘Not even the dead are at peace here.’
Chris Fujiwara, The Mystery of Origins
Costa’s people are often disembodied, zombies,
never quite here. Jacques Tourneur, not Straub.
Does Costa instruct his actors not to think,
meditate, or be one in their body? Vermeer’s
and the Straubs’ people dominate their space;
Costa’s are visitors. They are shapes, figures
in incredibly beautiful compositions. ‘Casa de
Lava’ is a suite of wonderful plays on depth-