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

TATE FILM
PEDRO COSTA
fine day you realize that it’s better to see
as little as possible. You have a sort of…
reduction, only it’s not a reduction – it’s a
concentration and it actually says more. But
you don’t do that immediately from one day to
the next. You need time and patience. A sigh
can become a novel.
Jean-Marie Straub
This is a film haunted by the power of the
silhouette, and the faces presented and that
we are allowed to glance at always tend to
gravitate toward that state: an abstracted
two-dimensionality that makes both Danièle
Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub exist at the
periphery of their own work in some patient
acknowledgement, pondering and shaping
of its physical properties. There is a rigor in
this abstracting of the human form, in this
willingness to be in such close proximity to
a figure and yet to never openly play the
game of tracking the revelatory explicitness
of an expression. The rhetoric of Costa’s
portrait goes against all the conventions of
film portraiture. We are not invited to witness
the blossoming of a memorized anecdote on
a face; we are not invited to decipher even
the force of conviction in the articulation of
an expression: we are just seeing bodies or
parts of bodies silhouetted by the tenuous
yet potent light that comes from the film
material they relentlessly try to shape.
Silhouettes by the glow of their work.
Jean-Pierre Gorin, Nine Notes on ‘Où gît votre
sourire enfoui’ ?
6 BAGATELAS
Portugal / France 2003, Beta SP, 1:1,33, colour,
18 min
Direction and cinematography: Pedro
Costa, Assistant: Thierry Lounas,
Sound: Matthieu Imbert, Editing: Patrícia
Saramago, Produced by: Contracosta Produções
with: Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub
Pedro Costa takes six unused scenes of Où
Gît Votre Sourire Enfoui? and edits them into
a new context. These fragments are not only
‘bagatelles,’ but a special look at Danièle
Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.
‘Though the brevity of these pieces is a
persuasive advocate for them, on the other
hand that very brevity itself requires an
advocate. Consider what moderation is
required to express oneself so briefly. You can
stretch every glance out into a poem, every sigh
into a novel. But to express a novel in a single
gesture, a joy in breath – such concentration
can only be present in proportion to the
absence of self-pity.’
Arnold Schoenberg on Anton Webern’s ‘6
Bagatelles’
JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA / Colossal Youth
Portugal / France / Switzerland 2006, 35mm,
1:1,33, colour, 154 min
Direction: Pedro Costa, Cinematography: Pedro
Costa, Leonardo Simões, Sound: Olivier Blanc,
Jean-Pierre Laforce, Editing: Pedro Marques,
Producer: Francisco Villa-Lobos, Produced by:
Contracosta Produções and co-produced by Les
Films de l’Étranger, Unlimited, Ventura Film,
Radiotelevisão Portuguesa and Radiotelevisione
svizzera
with: Ventura, Vanda Duarte, Beatriz Duarte,
Gustavo Sumpta, Cila Cardoso, Alberto Barros,
António Semedo, Paulo Nunes, José Maria Pina,
André Semedo, Alexandre Silva, Paula Barrulas
Ventura, a Cape Verdean labourer living
in the outskirts of Lisbon, is suddenly
abandoned by his wife Clotilde. Ventura feels
lost between the dilapidated old quarter
where he spent the last thirty-four years of
his life, and the new lodgings in a recently
built low-cost housing complex. All the
young poor souls he meets seem to become
his own children.
Nha cretcheu, my love / Our encounter will
make our life more beautiful, at least for
another thirty years. / For my part, I become
younger and return full of energy. / I’d like
to offer you a hundred thousand cigarettes,
/ A dozen snazzy dresses, A car, / The house
of lava that you so longed for, / A four penny
bunch of flowers. / But before anything else
/ Drink a fine bottle of wine, / Think about
me. / Here work is non-stop. / Now there are
more than a hundred of us. / The day before
yesterday, my birthday / Was the time for a
deep thought about you. / Did the letter they
brought arrive safely? / I receive no reply. /
I’ll wait. / Every day, every minute. / Every day
I learn some new and beautiful words, just
for the two of us. / Tailor-made, like a fine
silk pajama. Would you like that? / I can only
send you with one letter per month. / But still
nothing from your hand. / Maybe next time. /
Sometimes I’m frightened about building this
wall / Me, with a pick-axe and cement / You,
with your silence / Such a deep valley that it
pushes you towards oblivion. / It hurts me
inside to see these bad things I don’t want to
see. / Your beautiful hair falls from my hands
like blades of dry grass. / Sometimes I lose
my energy and imagine that I’m going to
forget about myself.
Ventura’s Letter
Ventura and Desnos were destined to meet.
It took place in this film. It’s History. It’s
Cinema. One line from Desnos, ‘I’d like to
offer you 100,000 cigarettes.’ One line from
Ventura, ‘the house of lava that you so longed
for.’ Both are condemned, destroyed men,
ghosts of other men that despite torture,
madness and exploitation still managed
to resist. This love letter had to become a
moral and political testament, a declaration
of war. This letter attempts to appease their
suffering while announcing far worse horrors.
(...) Ventura arrived in Portugal in 1972, he
found a well-paid mason, job and he believed
that he would succeed, that he would be
able to save up enough money to bring his
wife from Cape Verde. Then the revolution
took place and he told me the secret story of
African immigrants in Lisbon after April 25th
1974. They feared they would be deported or
imprisoned. For Ventura this was a moment
of condemnation: chaos, delirium, sickness.
He was simultaneously a prisoner and guard
in his wooden shanty house in Fontainhas.
He survived by repeating and memorizing ‘ad
eternum’ his love letter. I realized that the April
25th Revolution, that for me was a moment of
lyrical exaltation and enthusiasm, constituted a
nightmare for Ventura. I was a kid at the time.
I went out to the streets, demonstrating, and,
probably, already dreaming about cinema.
A while ago, I looked for some photographs
of the May 1st crowds with thousands of
people celebrating. It’s incredible - you don’t
see a single black face. Where were they?
Ventura told me that they were all huddled
together, absolutely terrified, hidden in the
Estrela Garden, worried about their future. It
is precisely because I film these things in this
manner that I don’t believe in democracy.
No one in Fontainhas believes in democracy.
People like Ventura built the banks, museums,
theatres, schools and condominiums of the
bourgeoisie. And it’s precisely what they helped
build that defeated them. You have the cruelest
proof of this failure in the other rooms, the
agony of Paulo, Vanda, Zita, the permanent
collapse of those rooms.
Pedro Costa
TARRAFAL
Portugal 2007, 35mm, 1:1,33, colour, 16 min
Direction and cinematography: Pedro
Costa, Sound: Vasco Pedroso, Olivier Blanc,
Editing: Patrícia Saramago, Produced by Luís
Correia, LX Filmes
with: José Alberto Silva, Lucinda Tavares,
Ventura, Alfredo Mendes
Tarrafal is part of ‘The State of the World’ film,
commissioned by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
José Alberto, 30 years old, receives a letter of
extradition. The inequities of the past and the
injustice of the present situation of migrant
labourers forced to leave Portugal, meet in a
plea for memory and resilience.
Tarrafal, sixteen minutes, fifteen shots, stories
and dialogues stretching over in the stillness of
the night and of the the countryside. The place
is before anything else one of these ‘filmmaker’s
room’ (Jacques Rancière), where voices emerge
from the darkness and dwell on endlessly. The
disinherited speak to master their own lives, their
own survival: here a woman and her grown up
boy with dreadlocks, in his thirties. Nothing is
more common, more concrete than the situations
and the informations that we’re offered. The first
word is ‘mum’, the family ties are omnipresent, it’s
about returning to Cape Vert, about where to live,
how to build a house, what to eat. The places are
named and listed: Mourão, Montinho, Achada,
Ungueira, Raçatcho, Montinho de Cima, Montinho
de Baixo, Milho Branco, Santana near Assomada.
The mother shivers, she coughs, her hands
under her arms, she warms herself just thinking
about her homeland and feels like putting her
bones to rest. Then it’s all about bewitchment