TATE-PEDRO COSTA.pdf

Pedro Costa Casa de Lava 1994 © Pedro Costa 

Pedro Costa

Pedro Costa No Quarto da Vanda 2000 © Pedro Costa Jean Eustache Le Cochon 1970 © The Artist 

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillxet Itinéraire de Jean Bricard 2008 © The Artists 

Pedro Costa Ossos 1997 © Pedro Costa 

Pedro Costa Casa de Lava 1994 © Pedro Costa 

DW Griffith The Struggle 1931 Courtesy BFI Stills 

Pedro Costa Tarrafal 2007 © Pedro Costa 

Pedro Costa O Sangue 1989 © Pedro Costa 

Pedro Costa Où Gît Votre Sourire Enfoui? 2001 © Pedro Costa 

Pedro Costa Ne Change Rien 2009 © Pedro Costa 

Pedro Costa Juventude em Marcha 2006 © Pedro Costa 

Pedro Costa Casa de Lava 1994 © Pedro Costa

TATE FILM PEDRO COSTA 

Pedro Costa 

Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium 

25 September – 4 October 2009 

Acclaimed Portugese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s work 

is marked by extraordinary intimacy and trancelike 

stillness. His films present the lives of Lisbon’s 

disenfranchised migrants with unflinching honesty 

and dignity. This first UK retrospective of Costa’s 

risk-taking, beautiful work includes his new film, Ne 

Change Rien, as well as four programmes of films 

that have inspired him, including work by Jean 

Eustache, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Jean- 

Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, and Andy Warhol. 

With support from the Calouste Gulbenkian 

Foundation, UK Branch, and Centre for Iberian and 

Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS), Birkbeck, 

University of London. 

£5 (£4 concessions) 

Season ticket £40 (£30 concessions) 

The Politics of Pedro Costa 

Jacques Rancière 

How are we to think the politics of Pedro Costa’s 

films? The answer appears simple at first. His 

films are about a situation seemingly at the 

heart of the political issues of today: the fate of 

the exploited, of people who have come from 

afar, from former colonies in Africa, to work on 

Portuguese construction sites; people who have 

lost their families, their health, sometimes even 

their lives, on those sites, and who yesterday were 

dumped in suburban slums and subsequently 

moved to new homes—better lit, more modern, 

not necessarily more livable. A number of other 

sensitive themes are joined to this fundamental 

situation. In Casa de Lava, for example, there is 

the repression of the Salazar government, which 

sends its opponents off to camps situated on 

the very spot from where African immigrants 

leave in search of work in the city. And, starting 

with Ossos, there is the life of young people from 

Lisbon who, due to drugs and deteriorating social 

conditions, have found themselves in the same 

slums and under the same living conditions. 

Still, neither a social situation nor a visible display 

of sympathy for the exploited and the neglected 

are enough to make art political. We usually 

expect there to be a mode of representation 

which renders the situation of exploitation 

intelligible as the effect of specific causes and, 

further, which shows that situation to be the 

source of the forms of consciousness and affects 

that modify it. We want the formal operations to 

be organized around the goal of shedding light on 

the causes and the chain of effects. Here, though, 

is where things become difficult. Pedro Costa’s 

camera never once takes the usual path from 

the places of misery to the places where those 

in power produce or manage it. We don’t see in 

his films the economic power which exploits and 

relegates, or the power of administrations and the 

police, which represses or displaces populations. 

We never hear any of his characters speaking 

about the political stakes of the situation, or of 

rebelling against it. Filmmakers before Pedro 

Costa, like Francesco Rosi, show the machinery 

that regulates and displaces the poor. Others, like 

Jean-Marie Straub, take the opposite approach. 

They distance their cameras from ‘the misery 

of the world’ in order to show, in an open-air 

amphitheatre designed to evoke ancient grandeur 

and modern struggles for liberation, the men and 

women of the people who confront history and 

proudly proclaim the project of a just world. We 

don’t see any of this in Pedro Costa. He does not 

inscribe the slums into the landscape of capitalism 

in mutation, nor does he design his sets to make 

them commensurate with collective grandeur. 

Some might say that this is not a deliberate choice, 

but simply the reality of a social mutation: the 

immigrants from Cape Verde, the poor whites, 

and the marginalized youth of his films bear no 

resemblance at all to the proletariat, exploited and 

militant, which was Rosi’s horizon yesterday, and 

remains Straub’s today. Their mode of life is not 

that of the exploited, but that of a marginalized 

group left to fend for itself. The police is absent 

from their universe, as are people fighting in 

the name of social justice. The only people from 

the city center who ever come to visit them are 

nurses, who lose themselves in these outskirts 

more from an intimate crack than from the 

need to bring relief to suffering populations. The 

inhabitants of Fontainhas live their lot in the way 

that was so stigmatized during the time of Brecht: 

as their destiny. If they discuss it at all, it is to 

wonder whether heaven, their own choice, or their 

weakness is responsible for their lot. 

What are we to think of the way Pedro Costa 

places his camera in these spaces? It’s common 

to warn people who have chosen to talk about 

misery to remember that misery is not an object 

for art. Pedro Costa, however, seems to do the 

very opposite. He never misses an opportunity 

to transform the living spaces of these miserable 

people into objects of art. A plastic water bottle, a 

knife, a glass, a few objects left on a deal table in a 

squatted apartment: there you have, under a light 

that strokes the set, the occasion for a beautiful 

still life. As night descends on this space without 

electricity, two small candles placed on the same 

table lend to the miserable conversations or to the 

needle sessions the allure of a chiaroscuro from 

the Dutch Golden Age. The motion of excavators 

is a chance to show, along with the crumbling 

buildings, sculptural bases made of concrete and 

large walls with contrasting colors—blue, pink, 

yellow, or green. The room where Vanda coughs 

so hard as to tear apart her chest delights us with 

its aquarium green walls, against which we see the 

flight of mosquitoes and gnats. 

The accusation of aestheticism can be met by 

saying that Pedro Costa has filmed the places just 

as they are. The homes of the poor are on the 

whole gaudier than the homes of the rich, their 

raw colors more pleasant to the eye of the art 

lover than the standardised aestheticism of petit 

bourgeois home decorations. In Rilke’s day already, 

exiled poets saw gutted buildings simultaneously 

as fantastic sets and as the stratigraphy of a way 

of living. But the fact that Pedro Costa has filmed 

these places ‘as they are’ means something else, 

something that touches on the politics of art. After 

Ossos, he stopped designing sets to tell stories. 

That is to say, he gave up exploiting misery as 

an object of fiction. He placed himself in these 

spaces to observe their inhabitants living their 

lives, to hear what they say, capture their secret. 

The virtuosity with which the camera plays with 

colors and lights, and the machine which gives 

the actions and words of the inhabitants the 

time to be acted out, are one and the same. But 

if this answer absolves the director of the sin 

of aestheticism, it immediately raises another 

suspicion, another accusation: what politics is this, 

which makes it its task to record, for months and 

months, the gestures and words which reflect the 

misery of that world? 

This is an accusation which confines the 

conversations in Vanda’s room and Ventura’s 

drifting to a simple dilemma: either an indiscreet 

aestheticism indifferent to the situation of the 

individuals involved, or a populism that gets 

trapped by that same situation. This, though, 

is to inscribe the work of the director in a very 

petty topography of high and low, near and 

far, inside and outside. It is to situate his way of 

working in an all too simple play of oppositions 

between the wealth of colors and the misery of 

the individuals, between activity and passivity, 

between what is given and what is seized. Pedro 

Costa’s method explodes precisely this system 

of oppositions and this topography. It favors 

instead a more complex poetics of exchanges, 

correspondences, and displacements. To see it at 

work, it might be good to pause a second over 

an episode from Colossal Youth that can, in a few 

‘tableaux,’ sum up the aesthetics of Pedro Costa, 

and the politics of that aesthetics. 

The episode places us, first, in the ‘normal’ setting 

of Ventura’s existence: that of an immigrant worker 

who shares a run-down place with a fellow Cape 

Verdean. As it starts, we hear Ventura’s voice 

reciting a love letter while the camera-eye frames 

a grey corner of the wall which is pierced by the 

white rectangle of a window; the four glass bottles 

on the window sill compose another still life. Urged 

by the voice of his friend Lento, Ventura’s reading 

slowly fades out. The next shot introduces a quite 

brutal change of setting: the still life that served 

as the set for Ventura’s reading is succeeded by 

yet another colored rectangle taken from a still 

darker section of wall: a painting whose frame 

seems to pierce with its own light the surrounding 

darkness which threatens to encroach on its edges. 

Colors quite similar to the colors of the bottles 

outline arabesques in which we can recognize 

the Sacred Family fleeing to Egypt with a sizeable 

cohort of angels. The sound of footsteps announce 

the character who appears in the next shot: 

Ventura, who is leaning with his back against the 

wall, flanked by a portrait of Hélène Fourment by 

Rubens, the painter of the Flight to Egypt of the 

previous shot, and by Van Dyck’s Portrait of a Man. 

These three well-known works are specifically 

situated: we are seeing the walls of the Gulbenkian 

Foundation, a building that is obviously not in 

Ventura’s neighborhood. Nothing in the preceding 

shot announced this visit, and there is nothing in 

the film to suggest that Ventura has a taste for 

painting. The director has brutally transported 

Ventura to this museum, which we suppose by the 

echoing footsteps and the night light to be empty 

of visitors, closed off for the shooting of this scene.


The relationship between the three paintings and 

the filmic ‘still life’ that immediately precedes 

them, together with that between the decaying 

home and the museum, and perhaps even 

that between the love letter and the paintings 

on the walls, composes a very specific poetic 

displacement, a metaphor that speaks in the film 

about the art of the filmmaker: of its relationship 

to the art in museums, and of the relationship 

that one art and the other forges with the body of 

its characters. A metaphor which speaks, in short, 

about their politics. 

The politics here might seem quite easy to grasp at 

first. A silent shot shows us a museum guard who 

is himself black walk up to Ventura and whisper 

something in his ear. As Ventura walks out of the 

room, the guard pulls a handkerchief from his 

pocket and wipes clean the traces of Ventura’s feet. 

We understand: Ventura is an intruder. The guard 

tells him later: this museum, he says, is a refuge, 

far from the din of poor neighborhoods and from 

the supermarkets whose merchandise he used 

to have to protect from widespread shoplifting. 

Here, though, is an old and peaceful world that 

is disturbed only by the chance visit of someone 

from their world. Ventura himself had already 

manifested that, both with his attitude—he offered 

no resistance to being escorted out of the gallery, 

and eventually out of the museum through the 

service stairs—and with his gaze, which scrutinized 

some enigmatic point situated, it seemed, well 

above the paintings. The politics of the episode 

would be to remind us that the pleasures of art are 

not for the proletariat and, more precisely still, that 

museums are closed off to the workers who build 

them. This becomes explicit in the gardens of the 

Foundation, in the conversation between Ventura 

and the museum employee during which we learn 

why Ventura fits into this displaced setting. There 

used to be nothing here at all but a marsh, bushes 

and frogs. It was Ventura, together with other 

workers, who cleaned up the area, laid down the 

terrace, built the plumbing system, carried the 

construction materials, erected the statue of the 

place’s founder, and planted the grass at its feet. It 

was here, too, that he fell from the scaffolding. 

The episode, in sum, would be an illustration of the 

poem in which Brecht asks who built Thebes, with 

its seven gates and other architectural splendors. 

Ventura would represent all those people who 

have constructed buildings, at great danger to 

their health and lives, which they themselves have 

no right to enjoy. But this simple lesson does not 

justify the museum being deserted, empty even 

of those people who do benefit from the work 

of the Venturas of this world. It does not justify 

the fact that the scenes shot inside the museum 

should be so silent; or that the camera should 

linger on the concrete steps of the service stairs 

down which the guard escorts Ventura; or that 

the silence inside the museum should be followed 

by a long panoramic shot, punctuated by bird 

cries, of the surrounding trees; or that Ventura 

should tell his story, from the exact day of his 

arrival in Portugal, on 29 August 1972; or that 

the scene should brutally end with him indicating 

the spot where he fell. Ventura here is something 

completely different from the immigrant worker 

who represents the condition of immigrant 

workers. The greenery of the scene, the way 

Ventura towers over the guard, the solemn tone of 

his voice as he seems to recite a text that inhabits 

him—all of this is very far from every narrative of 

misery. Ventura in this scene is a chronicler of his 

own life, an actor who renders visible the singular 

grandeur of that life, the grandeur of a collective 

adventure for which the museum seems incapable 

of supplying an equivalent. The relationship of 

Pedro Costa’s art to the art displayed on the walls 

of the museum exceeds the simple demonstration 

of the exploitation of workers for the sake of the 

pleasures of the aesthete, much as Ventura’s figure 

exceeds that of the worker robbed of the fruit of 

his labor. If we hope to understand this scene, we 

have to tie the relationships of reciprocity and nonreciprocity 

into a much more complex knot. 

To begin with, the museum is not the place of 

artistic wealth opposed to the penury of the 

worker. The colored arabesques of the Flight to 

Egypt show no straightforward superiority over 

the shot of the window with four bottles in the 

poor lodgings of the two workers. The painting’s 

golden frame strikes us as a stingier delimitation 

of space than the window of the house, as a 

way of canceling out everything that surrounds it 

and of rendering uninteresting all that is outside 

of it—the vibrations of light in the space, the 

contrasting colors of the walls, the sounds from 

outside. The museum is a place where art is 

locked up within this frame that yields neither 

transparency nor reciprocity. It is the space of a 

stingy art. If the museum excludes the worker 

who built it, it is because it excludes all that lives 

from displacements and exchanges: light, forms, 

and colors in their movement, the sound of the 

world, and also the workers who’ve come from the 

islands of Cape Verde. That might be why Ventura’s 

gaze loses itself somewhere in the ceiling. We 

might think he is envisioning the scaffolding he fell 

from. But we might also think of another lost gaze 

fixed on an angle of another ceiling, the ceiling 

in the new apartment he is shown by a fellow 

from Cape Verde who in many ways resembles 

the museum employee. He is, in any case, just as 

convinced that Ventura is not in his element in this 

apartment, which Ventura had requested for his 

fictive family, and also just as eager to wipe clean 

the traces of Ventura’s intrusion on this sterile 

place. In answer to the spiel about the sociocultural 

advantages of the neighborhood, Ventura 

had majestically extended his arms towards the 

ceiling and uttered a lapidary sentence: ‘It’s full of 

spider webs.’ The social-housing employee cannot 

verify the presence of these spider webs on the 

ceiling anymore than we can. It could be Ventura 

who has, as the saying goes, ‘spider webs in the 

attic.’ And anyway, even if insects do crawl up and 

down the walls of this housing project, they are 

nothing when compared to the decaying walls of 

his friend Lento’s or of Bete’s place, where ‘father’ 

and ‘daughter’ amuse themselves seeing, as good 

disciples of Leonardo da Vinci, the formation of 

all sorts of fantastic figures. The problem with the 

white walls that welcome the worker to the housing 

project is the same as the problem of the dark 

walls of the museum which reject him: they keep 

at bay the chance figures in which the imagination 

of the worker who crossed the seas, chased frogs 

from the city center, and slipped and fell from 

the scaffolding can be on a par with that of the 

artist. The art on the walls of the museum is not 

simply a sign of the ingratitude towards the person 

who built the museum. It is as stingy towards the 

sensible wealth of his experience as to the light that 

shines on even the most miserable homes. 

We’ve already heard this in Ventura’s narrative 

about his departure from Cape Verde on 29 August 

1972, his arrival in Portugal, the transformation of 

a swamp into an art foundation, and the fall. By 

placing Ventura in such a setting, Pedro Costa has 

given him a Straub-like tone, the epic tone of the 

discoverers of a new world. The problem is not 

really to open the museum to the workers who 

built it, but to make an art commensurate with 

the experience of these travelers, an art that has 

emerged from them, and which they themselves 

can enjoy. That is what we learn from the episode 

which follows Ventura’s brutal fall. It is an episode 

constructed around a double return: the return 

to Ventura’s reading of the letter, and a flashback 

to the accident. We see Ventura, his head now in 

a bandage, returning to a wooden shack with a 

dilapidated roof. He sits hunched over at a table, 

imperiously insists that Lento come play cards, 

and continues reading the love letter he wants to 

teach to Lento, who can’t read. This letter, which 

is recited many times, is like a refrain for the film. 

It talks about a separation and about working on 

construction sites far from one’s beloved. It also 

speaks about the soon-to-be reunion which will 

grace two lives for twenty or thirty years, about 

the dream of offering the beloved a hundred 

thousand cigarettes, clothes, a car, a little house 

made of lava, and a three-penny bouquet; it talks 

about the effort to learn a new word every day— 

words whose beauty is tailor-made to envelope 

these two beings like a pajamas of fine silk. This 

letter is written for one person only, for Ventura 

has no one to send it to. It is, strictly speaking, 

its own artistic performance, the performance 

Ventura wants to share [partager] with Lento, 

because it is the performance of an art of sharing 

[partage], of an art that does not split itself off from 

life, from the experience of displaced people or 

their means of mitigating absence and of coming 

closer to their loved one. The letter, however, and 

by the same token, belongs neither to the film nor 

to Ventura: it comes from elsewhere. Albeit more 

discreetly, it already scanned the ‘fictional’ film of 

which Colossal Youth is the echo and the reverse: 

Casa de Lava, the story of a nurse who goes to 

Cape Verde in the company of Leão, a worker who, 

like Ventura, has also injured his head, but on a 

different construction site. 

The letter first appeared in the papers of Edith, an 

exile from the big city who went to Cape Verde 

to be near her lover, sent by Salazar’s regime to 

the Tarrafal concentration camp. She stayed there 

after his death and was adopted, in her confusion, 

by the black community, which lived off of her 

pension, and thanked her with serenades. It had 

seemed, then, that the love letter had been written 

by the sentenced man. But at the hospital, at Leão’s 

bedside, Mariana gave the letter to Tina, Leão’s 

younger sister, to read, as it was written in Creole. 

Tina appropriates the letter, which becomes for the 

viewer not a letter sent from the death camp by 

the deported man, but by Leão from a construction 

site in Portugal. But when Mariana asks Leão about 

it, as he finally emerges from his coma, his answer 

is peremptory: how could he have written the love


letter, if he doesn’t know how to write? All of a 

sudden, the letter seems not to have been written 

by, or addressed to, anyone in particular. It now 

seems like a letter written by a public scribe adept 

at putting into form the feelings of love, as well 

as the administrative requests, of the illiterate. 

Its message of love loses itself in the grand, 

impersonal transaction which links Edith to the 

dead militant, to the wounded black worker, to 

the kitchen of the erstwhile camp cook, and to the 

music of Leão’s father and brother, whose bread 

and music Mariana has shared, but who would 

not go visit Leão at the hospital. They continued, 

nevertheless, working on refurbishing his house, 

the house which he would not enter but on two 

legs, all the while making arrangements so that 

they, too, could go and work on construction sites 

in Portugal. 

The letter that Pedro Costa gives Ventura to read 

belongs to this wide circulation: between here 

and elsewhere, committed city folk and exiled 

workers, the literate and the illiterate, the wise 

and the confused. But in extending its addressees, 

the letter doubles back to its origin and another 

circulation is grafted onto the trajectory of the 

immigrants. Pedro Costa wrote the letter by mixing 

two sources: a letter by an immigrant worker, and 

a letter written by a ‘true’ author, Robert Desnos, 

who wrote his letter sixty years earlier from camp 

Flöha in Saxony, a way-stop on the road to Terezin, 

and death. This means that Leão’s fictional destiny 

and Ventura’s real one are brought together in a 

circuit which links the ordinary exile of workers to 

the death camps. It also means that the art of the 

poor, of the public scribe, and of great poets are 

captured together in the same fabric: an art of life 

and of sharing [partage], an art of travel and of 

communication made for those for whom to live is 

to travel—to sell their work force to build houses 

and museums for other people, in the process 

bring with them their experience, their music, their 

way of living and loving, of reading on walls and of 

listening to the song of humans and birds. 

There is no aestheticizing formalism or populist 

deference in the attention Pedro Costa pays to 

every beautiful form offered by the homes of the 

poor, and the patience with which he listens to the 

oftentimes trivial and repetitive words uttered in 

Vanda’s room, and in the new apartment where we 

see Vanda after she has kicked her habit, put on 

some weight, and become a mother. The attention 

and the patience are inscribed, instead, in a 

different politics of art. This politics is a stranger to 

that politics which works by bringing to the screen 

the state of the world to make viewers aware of 

the structures of domination in place and inspire 

them to mobilize their energies. It finds its models 

in the love letter by Ventura/Desnos and in the 

music of Leão’s family, for their art is one in which 

the form is not split off from the construction of a 

social relation or from the realization of a capacity 

that belongs to everyone. We shouldn’t confuse this 

with that old dream of the avant-garde in which 

artistic forms would be dissolved in the relations 

of the new world. The politics here, rather, is about 

thinking the proximity between art and all those 

other forms which can convey the affirmation of a 

sharing [partage] or shareable [partageable] capacity. 

The stress on the greens of Vanda’s room cannot 

be separated from the attempts—by Vanda, 

Zita, Pedro or Nurro—to examine their lives and 

take control of it. The luminous still life composed 

with a plastic bottle and a few found objects on 

the white wooden table of a squat is in harmony 

with the stubbornness with which the redhead 

uses his knife to clean, the protests of his friends 

notwithstanding, the stain from the table destined 

for the teeth of the excavator. Pedro Costa does not 

film the ‘misery of the world.’ He films its wealth, 

the wealth that anyone at all can become master 

of: that of catching the splendor of a reflection of 

light, but also that of being able to speak in a way 

that is commensurate with one’s fate. And, lastly, 

the politics here is about being able to return what 

can be extracted of sensible wealth—the power of 

speech, or of vision—from the life and decorations 

of these precarious existences back to them, about 

making it available to them, like a song they can 

enjoy, like a love letter whose words and sentences 

they can borrow for their own love lives. 

Isn’t that, after all, what we can expect from 

the cinema, the popular art of the twentieth 

century, the art that allowed the greatest number 

of people—people who would not walk into a 

museum—to be thrilled by the splendor of the 

effect of a ray of light shining on an ordinary 

setting, by the poetry of clinking glasses or of 

a conversation on the counter of any old diner? 

Confronted with people who align him with great 

‘formalists’ like Bresson, Dreyer or Tarkovsky, Pedro 

Costa sometimes claims a whole different lineage: 

Walsh and Tourneur, as well as more modest and 

anonymous directors of B films who crafted wellformatted 

stories on a tight budget for the profit of 

Hollywood studios, and who didn’t for all that fail 

to get the audiences of neighborhood cinemas to 

enjoy the equal splendor of a mountain, a horse, 

or a rocking chair—equal because of the absence 

of any hierarchy of visual values between people, 

landscape, or objects 1 . At the heart of a system of 

production entirely subservient to the profit of its 

studio heads, cinema showed itself to be an art of 

equality. The problem, as we unfortunately know, 

is that capitalism is not what it used to be, and if 

Hollywood is still thriving, neighborhood cinemas 

are not, having been replaced by multiplexes that 

give each sociologically-determined audience 

a type of art designed and formatted to suit it. 

Pedro Costa’s films, like every work that eludes 

this formatting process, are immediately labeled 

as film-festival material, something reserved for 

the exclusive enjoyment of a film-buff elite and 

tendentiously pushed to the province of museums 

and art lovers. For that, of course, Pedro Costa 

blames the state of the world, meaning the naked 

domination of the power of money, which classes 

as ‘films for film-buffs’ the work of directors who 

try to bring to everyone the wealth of sensorial 

experience found in the humblest of lives. The 

system makes a sad monk of the director who 

wants to make his cinema shareable [partageable] 

like the music of the violin player from Cape Verde 

and like the letter written jointly by the poet and 

the illiterate worker. 

It is true that today, the domination by the wealthy 

tends to constitute a world in which equality 

must disappear even from the organization of the 

sensible landscape. All the wealth in this landscape 

has to appear as separated, as attributed to, and 

privately enjoyed by, one category of owners. The 

system gives the humble the pocket change of 

its wealth, of its world, which it formats for them, 

but which is separated from the sensorial wealth 

of their own experience. This is the television 

in Vanda’s room. Still, this particular deal of the 

cards is not the only reason behind the break 

in reciprocity and the separation between the 

film and its world. The experience of the poor is 

not just that of displacements and exchanges, 

of borrowing, stealing, and giving back. It is also 

the experience of the crack which interrupts 

the fairness of exchanges and the circulation of 

experiences. In Casa de Lava, it is difficult to tell 

if Leão’s silence as he lies on the hospital bed 

is the manifestation of a traumatic coma or the 

desire not to return to the common world. So, 

too, with Edith’s ‘madness,’ her ‘forgetfulness’ of 

the Portuguese language and her confinement 

to booze and Creole. The death of the militant in 

the camp of the Salazar regime and the wound of 

the immigrant who works on construction sites in 

Portugal establish—at the heart of the circulation 

of bodies, medical care, words, and music—the 

dimension of that which cannot be exchanged, of 

the irreparable. In Ossos, there is Tina’s silence, her 

loss as to what to do with the child in her arms 

other than take the child with her to their deaths. 

Colossal Youth is split between two logics, two 

regimes of the exchange of words and experiences. 

On one side, the camera is placed in Vanda’s new 

room, which is sterile white and filled by a doublebed 

of the type one finds at discount stores. There, 

a mellower and plumper Vanda talks about her 

new life, about her detox, the child, the deserving 

husband, about her treatment and health issues. 

On the other, the camera follows the often silent 

Ventura, who now and then utters an imperious 

command or lapidary sentence, and who 

sometimes loses himself in his narrative or in the 

reciting of his letter. It portrays him as a strange 

animal, too large or too shy for the set, whose eyes 

sometimes shine like those of a wild animal, and 

whose head is more often bent down than held up: 

the distracted gaze of a sick man. The point with 

Ventura is not to gather the evidence of a hard life, 

even if it is in order to figure out who cinema can 

share [partager] this life with, and to whom it can 

give it back as his or her life. The point is rather to 

confront what cannot be shared [l’impartageable], 

the cracks that have separated a person from 

himself. Ventura is not an ‘immigrant worker,’ a 

poor man entitled to be treated with dignity and 

to share in the pleasures afforded by the world he 

has helped build. He is a sort of sublime drifter, a 

character from tragedy, someone who interrupts 

communication and exchange on his own. 

There seems to be a divorce between two regimes 

of expression in the passage from the dilapidated 

walls, the colorful sets, and the loud colors of the 

slums to the new furniture and the white walls 

which no longer echo the words of those in the 

room. Even if Vanda is willing to play the role of one 

of Ventura’s ‘daughters,’ even if Ventura sits at her 

table and chats in her room, and occasionally even 

does some baby-sitting, the crack in Ventura casts 

the shadow of this enormous and broken body, 

this enormous body which has been displaced 

into the story of Vanda’s new life, on her narrative 

at the same time that it lends vanity to it. We can 

describe this intimate divorce using terms taken 

from on old quarrel, one summed up more than

TATE FILM 

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 

PEDRO COSTA 

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-


of-field and foreground, with a flirtation ballet 

by lovers with their backs turned – figures, 

even when there are faces. 

Tag Gallagher, Straub Anti-Straub 

OSSOS / Bones 

Portugal / France / Germany 1997, 35mm, 

1:1,66, colour, 94 min 

Direction and screenplay: Pedro 

Costa, Cinematography: Emmanuel 

Machuel, Editing: Jackie Bastide, Sound: 

Henri Maikoff, Gérard Rousseau, Producer: Paulo 

Branco, Produced by Madragoa Filmes in coproduction 

with Zentopa and Gemini Films 

with: Vanda Duarte, Nuno Vaz, Maria Lipkina, 

Isabel Ruth, Inês Medeiros, Miguel Sermão, 

Berta Susana Teixeira, Clotilde Montrond, Zita 

Duarte, Beatriz Lopes, Luísa Carvalho 

Ossos is Costa’s first film encounter with 

the migrant Cape Verdean community 

of Lisbon, living in Estrela D’África, a 

shantytown in the outskirts of the city. It 

is a film of portraits and a film of place, 

a study of characters and their gestures, 

deeply involved with their lives and the 

spaces they inhabit and where they 

move. At the heart of the film, a newborn 

baby, his young parents, the people they 

cross in their actions, when moving out of 

despair, out of love, for nothing at all. As 

in his first film, Blood, this is a stark, severe 

look at the city and the way it shapes and 

differentiates the lives of those living in 

its margins. It develops the filmmaker’s 

penchant for elliptical narrative structures, 

his careful attention to time and detail, his 

work with closed and cloistered spaces 

and his intimate form of portraiture, which 

would be essential in the films to come. 

Costa’s blocky compositions and elliptic editing, 

which sometimes leaves one scrambling across 

chasms of excised incident and ambiguous 

relationships, suggest severity, as does 

his partiality for Bressonian effects—tight 

shots of hands, locks, and doorways, the 

camera sometimes holding for a beat or 

two after a figure has departed the frame, 

offscreen sound indicating contiguous space. 

But ‘Ossos’ is more sensual than ascetic, more 

doleful than denying. The soulful close-ups 

Costa accords his abject characters verge on 

the beatific—the soft, long-haired father with 

his faraway gaze evokes one of Bellini’s musing 

Madonnas—and the exquisite lighting turns 

two symmetrical shots of a photograph, some 

keys, and crumpled cigarette packs lying on 

a red dresser into colorist still lives. Costa is 

also not beyond bravura: He takes obvious 

pleasure in a long, tricky tracking shot of the 

father striding down the street, and twice uses 

extreme shallow focus to flaunty effect. His 

raw verism sometimes lapses into strainmaking 

coincidence to establish connections 

between characters, and he has not yet totally 

surrendered the use of professional actors 

(Inês Medeiros as the prostitute, for instance). 

In ‘Ossos’, then, Costa still holds close his 

passport for what Godard called ‘this beautiful 

land of narrative. 

James Quandt, Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa 

‘Ossos’ comes from very familiar things, things 

you can easily recall. It comes from Chaplin, 

from the melodramas of the beginning 

of the cinema, a boy with a baby in the 

streets, speeding dangerous cars, a loaf of 

bread, a prostitute, two or three kitchens. And a 

strong desire to be close to reality, to 

documentary, to be close to these people who 

are not actors, people that are very similar 

to the ones they’re depicting. The boy was a 

poor junky in real life and the housekeeper is 

a housekeeper. But even if there’s a desire to 

make a sort of documentary, it’s nevertheless 

fiction that carries the film on, saving it. Fiction 

is always a door that we want to open or close. 

A door that keeps us guessing. 

Pedro Costa 

NO QUARTO DA VANDA / In Vanda’s Room 

Portugal / Germany / Switzerland 2000, 35mm, 

1:1,33, 178 min 

Direction and cinematography: Pedro Costa, 

Sound: Phillipe Morel, Matthieu Imbert, 

Editing: Dominique Auvray, Producer: Francisco 

Villa-Lobos, Produced by: Contracosta 

Produções in co-production with Pandora Film, 

Ventura Film, ZDF Das Kleine Fernsehspiel, 

RTSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera Italiana and 

Radiotelevisão Portuguesa (RTP) 

Producer: Francisco Villa-Lobos, Produced by: 

Contracosta Produções in co-production with 


Pandora Film, Ventura Film, ZDF Das Kleine 

Fernsehspiel, RTSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera 

Italiana and Radiotelevisão Portuguesa (RTP) 

with: Vanda Duarte, Zita Duarte, Lena Duarte, 

António Semedo Moreno, Paulo Nunes, 

Pedro Lanban, Geny, Paulo Jorge Gonçalves, 

Evangelina Nelas, Miquelina Barros, Fernando 

Paixão, Julião, Mosca, Manuel Gomes Miranda, 

Diogo Pires Miranda 

In 1997, Pedro Costa directed the feature 

film Ossos about the fate of one family. 

Later he returned to the film’s location, an 

immigrant district of Lisbon, to make this 

sequel-of-sorts. He follows Vanda Duarte 

over the course of one year. We see a tiny 

room measuring only three metres in all 

directions, the events that occur and recur 

daily, visits from friends and relatives, and 

the days passed in the thrall of drugs, and sit 

transfixed by the bleakness of Vanda’s onebed 

apartment, and the gradual destruction 

of the surrounding buildings. 

Life despises me. I have lived in ghost 

houses that others left behind. Houses 

where a sorceress wouldn’t want to live. But 

occasionally, I have found a house that was 

worth the while. All my houses, all the houses 

were illegal houses. They have been deserted. 

If we had been better… they wouldn’t have 

been demolished. And that, house after house. 

I have paid more for something I didn’t do 

than for the things I’ve done’ 

Pango, from No Quatro Da Vanda 

‘No Quarto da Vanda’ is also an intimate 

work, a chamber drama, as the title 

announces. I took it as documentary, but a 

documentary of unprecedented candor, the 

kind of movie Kieslowski claimed is impossible 

because ‘there are spheres of human intimacy 

in which one cannot enter with a camera.’ 

Costa had found his way into these spheres, 

among poor immigrants who can find only 

casual, irregular work and must struggle to 

create a space of their own in a neighborhood 

(Fontainhas in Lisbon) that we can see being 

torn down around them. They belong to what 

some privileged technocrats and their dupes 

in the U.S. call ‘the underclass.’ So we see 

Vanda Duarte and her friends smoking smack, 

shooting up, and talking trash. But there are 

also moments of astonishing tenderness in 

which they seem even more defenseless, 

moments that recall the most mysterious 

encounters in the greatest fiction films. For 

example (a privileged example in my memory), 

in one of the film’s plainest, brightest sequence 

shot, Vanda and her friend Pedro sit on the 

edge of her bed talking about the death of 

their friend Geni. She gives him some medicine, 

he gives her some flowers. There is solidarity, 

even love that is palpable. Presumably Costa 

could only have recorded these moments 

with unassuming, lightweight cameras. But, of 

course, the intimacy of the movie is not simply 

a matter of technique. There must have been a 

close mutual respect and friendship between 

Costa and the people he filmed. 

Thom Andersen, ‘Ghost Stories’ 

OÙ GÎT VOTRE SOURIRE ENFOUI? / 

Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? 

Portugal / France 2001, 35mm, 1:1,33, colour, 

104 min 


Assistant: Thierry Lounas, Sound: Matthieu 

Imbert, Editing: Dominique Auvray, Patrícia 

Saramago, Producer: Francisco Villa-Lobos, 

Produced by: Contracosta Produções in coproduction 

of Amip Paris, ARTE France and the 

Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) 

with: Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub 

Pedro Costa shot this great portrait of 

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at 

work while they were re-editing the third 

version of Sicilia! at the Studio National 

des Arts Contemporains in Le Fresnoy. A 

work of friendship and dedication and a 

lesson of cinema. 

The problem with a shot like this, if you want 

to know, is getting it done. Most of us begin 

with a cliché – not always, but most of the 

time – and that’s fine, but you have to look at 

it from all sides and clarify it. So you start with 

the idea of discovery… Showing a mountain 

without the window, without anything. A torn 

curtain. Then you ask yourself, but why? It 

will inhibit the viewer’s imagination instead 

of opening it up and you say to yourself: ‘yes, 

after having filmed Mount Etna, Mount Saint- 

Victoire, why add another one?’ And so you 

renounce, slowly. Then one fine day… One


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


and death as in every other film by Pedro Costa. 

On the same tone, the mom tells a tale from 

her land, about a vampire that hands its victims 

a parchment without them noticing, and kills 

them when he returns to collect it. 

Bernard Eisenschitz 

NE CHANGE RIEN 

Portugal / France 2009, 35mm / 1:1,33, b/w, 98 min 


Sound: Philippe Morel, Olivier Blanc, Vasco 

Pedroso, Sound editing: Miguel Cabral, 

Olivier Blanc, Sound Mix: Jean-Pierre Laforce, 

Editing: Patrícia Saramago, Producer: Abel 

Ribeiro Chaves, Prod uced by: Sociedade Óptica 

Técnica in co-production with Red Star Cinéma 

with: Jeanne Balibar, Rodolphe Burger, Hervé Loos, 

Arnaud Dieterlen, Joël Theux 

Ne Change Rien was born as a result of the 

friendship between Jeanne Balibar, sound 

engineer Philippe Morel, and Pedro Costa. 

The film follows Jeanne Balibar, the singer, 

from rehearsals to recording sessions, from 

rock concerts to classical singing lessons, 

from an attic in the Black Forest to the stage 

of a Tokyo café, from ‘Johnny Guitar’ to 

Offenbach’s ‘La Périchole’. 

‘Like a cork along the water stream’, said, if I 

remember well, Orson Welles to Jeanne Moreau 

about something else. It might sound funny, 

but I always thought that being a movie actress 

felt like returning to life as a newborn: changed, 

dressed up, made up, scrutinized; and that 

being a stage actress brought you back to the 

enchantment of your first words. Maybe being a 

singer constantly brings back the thrill of my first 

steps – before words, before my first stroke – 

after the age of reason.’ 

Jeanne Balibar 

It also turns out Costa’s been making something 

like concert films for years—Costa, similar to 

Straub, displacing the emotions of his statuecharacters 

to the soundtrack, usually diffused 

bird songs and children’s yelps. Balibar’s ongoing 

concert’s not any different: a woman in a closed 

room, standing at a mike, looking as straight and 

still as Costa’s camera (as usual, left in place for 

minutes), while her voice and the music, piped 

in and out around her, do the emoting for her 

while she’s just hanging out and trying to find 

the beat. Still lives with music, almost. But what’s 

different in Ne change rien, probably because 

it’s a documentary (though about as much a doc 

as Costa’s other recent films, which also show 

everyday life as staged by the people who live 

it), is the expressiveness of the actors, grinning 

when they find the mainline, hands flicking up 

and down on their knees. Costa lights bodies like 

solar flare lines and faces like half-moons, slight 

whites against pitch black backgrounds, so that 

a slight turn of the neck can reconfigure a face’s 

composition, bring new parts out from shadow; 

the look is almost charcoal. The result’s that 

players are only seen minimally—in silhouette 

with a hand waving back and forth, or just an eye 

and right curl of the mouth—so that the smallest 

gestures express maximally. The opening shot, 

the simplest shot from a stage right wing as the 

musicians come out and start, makes stage lights 

look like stars, the act a constellation. The movie’s 

just people jamming, superficially his Poor Little 

Rich Girl, but Costa, as usual, gives the most 

banal acts metaphysical weight: as in a dream— 

my dreams, anyway, half-awake—starting with 

a half-formed image and a montage of sounds 

and voices, building, that gradually find their 

bodies (and what’s maybe most dream-like is the 

tangential realism: an off-screen voice correcting 

Balibar’s ‘v’s and saying ‘I like consonants too’ 

David Phelps, Cannes 2009: There Outta be a 

Moonlight Saving Time, theautheurs.com, 15 

May 2009 

CARTE BLANCHE 

Itinéraire de Jean Bricard 

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, France 

2008, 40 min 

What can one say about Danièle and Jean- 

Marie’s films? They make us feel that cinema is 

still worth something. 

Pedro Costa 

Based on the book by Jean-Yves Petiteau, 

who narrates the film, Itinéraire de Jean 

Bricard tells the rich history of the Loire 

region, from commercial fishing and farming 

in the 1930s, through the Occupation, the 

Resistance and its brutal suppression. A 

reflection on the livelihood of the past, 

about loss and resistance. 


Sicilia! 

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Italy/ 

France 1999, 66 min 

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet have created 

a bold and beautiful adaptation of Elio Vittorini’s 

masterwork Conversations in Sicily. Published 

in 1939 and a best seller until banned in 1942, 

the novel narrates the return of an intellectual to 

his native Sicily after a long absence. The film is 

structured as a series of dialogue encounters— 

with strangers in a port, fellow passengers on a 

train, the protagonist’s mother—each of which 

conceals more than it reveals, emphasizing the 

distance between what can be seen and felt 

and what can be expressed. Moving beyond the 

original’s immediate context—the increasing 

oppression of pre-war Italy—Straub/Huillet offer 

a moving look at the state of permanent exile 

common to all of those who can’t go home again. 

New York Film Festival 

The Struggle 

DW Griffith, USA 1931, 84 min 

In these hard times, it should be an obligation: 90 

minutes more of DW Griffith in a film theatre equals 

90 minutes less of abstract crap on the screen. 

Pedro Costa 

Griffith’s brutally intense and underrated final 

feature, decried by critics at the time as too 

‘Soviet’, is a straight-up tale of alcoholism 

and a startling portrait of urban America 

during the Depression. 

Puissance de la Parole (The Power of Words) 

Jean-Luc Godard, France 1988, 25 min 

I remember Langlois saying that Godard and 

Warhol had taught us how not to make films. 

These two shine a light, absolutely. 

Pedro Costa 

Puissance de la parole is Godard’s elegy about 

the power of words, and a dialogue on the 

origin of creation. 

Beauty #2 

Andy Warhol, USA 1965, 66 min 

Beauty #2 is one of Warhol’s rarest films 

and a next of kin to Costa’s In Vanda’s Room. 

The film plants Edie Sedgwick on a bed 

seducing (seduced by?) Gino Piserchio, while 

a Doberman Pinscher named Horse uses his 

slack leash to appear and disappear from 

the frame. Off-screen, Edie’s ex-lover Chuck 

Wein taunts and betrays. This is performing, 

acting, and being as a trial – and everyone 

(audience, performers, director) is culpable. 

Le Cochon (The Pig) 

Jean Eustache, France 1970, 50 min 

Like candy in a store, like a Sunday walk in 

the country, like a good mystery novel, two 

wonderful gifts from Eustache and Gorin to 

enjoy and be thankful. 

Pedro Costa 

Considered by many to be Eustache’s 

most beautiful film, the bluntly named Le 

Cochon is, on the surface, an ethnographic 

documentary that captures a dying tradition: 

the slaughter and processing of a pig on 

a farm in the southern Massif Central. The 

view is detached but sympathetic: ‘With 

scrupulous respect for popular traditions, the 

film features an amazing soundtrack in which 

the source and originality of natural voices 

remains captivating, even though the thick 

patois and onomatopoeic accents make the 

actual spoken words incomprehensible.’ (Luc 

Moullet, Film Comment); for that reason, the 

film has never been subtitled. Critics have 

discerned in the film a critique of technology, 

and even religious or mythic meaning (the 

pig as sacrifice), its cinematic lineage pointing 

both back to Dreyer (La Passion de Jeanne 

d’Arc) and forward to Olmi’s The Tree of the 

Wooden Clwogs. 

Routine Pleasures 

Jean-Pierre Gorin, USA/UK/France 1986, 81 min 

When I saw ‘Routine Pleasures’ (on TV) I really 

identified with those grey routine guys whose 

occupation is a mini-clone of what Marx K. would 

call their exploitation. And what I really (note 

those three l’s) liked about the film was that 

its rhythm espouses theirs with a sympathetic 

camaraderie and little or no cross-cutting 

between painting and 3-d ‘realism’ which the 

first and alas last thing my Eisenstein might have 

thought of- or flashy bright cheery Allen Jones 

cuts, locos/fingertips- do you know that Charles


& Ray Eames ‘Toccata For Toy Trains’ which is the 

antithesis of your film (even down to celebrating 

toys-which-aren’t-models whereas your guy’s 

mind is deadpan reality-replication, even down 

to timetabling, models-that-only-happen-tobe-toys)? 

There’s a CAHIERS-style piece here on 

your film being about films as well as trains, both 

being illusionisms, and why bourgeois realism 

knows the model-reality difference perfectly well 

but loves pretending that it doesn’t- in the case 

of trains because confronting reality with a real 

train always has something heroic about it, steam 

against the sky,, steel lunging through space, 

whereas the model has no heroism at all, it’s the 

apotheosis of infantile –obsessional control, not 

to say consummate anality about…motions.’ 

Raymond Durgnat, December 1988 

Routine Pleasures is film essay that grew 

from the close friendship between Manny 

Farber and Jean-Pierre Gorin, and deals with 

method and work, American culture and 

landscape, and artistic imagination. 

SCHEDULE 

Programme One 

Friday, 25 September 19.00 

No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room) 

Screening introduced by Pedro Costa 

Programme Two 

Saturday, 26 September 19.00 

Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth) 

Programme Three 

Sunday, 27 September 12.00 

Billie Holiday Sings ‘Fine and Mellow’ 

O Sangue (Blood) 

Programme Four 


Casa de Lava 

Tarrafal 

Programme Five 


Ossos (Bones) 

Programme Six 

Friday, 2 October 19.00 

Ne Change Rien 

Screening introduced by Pedro Costa 

Programme Seven 

Saturday, 3 October 15.00 

Itinéraire de Jean Bricard, Jean-Marie Straub 

and Danièle Huillet 

Sicilia!, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet 

Programme Eight 

Saturday, 3 October 19.00 

Où Gît Votre Sourire Enfoui? (Where Does 

Your Hidden Smile Lie?) 

6 Bagatelas 

Followed by a conversation between Pedro 

Costa and Jean-Pierre Gorin. 

Programme Nine 

Sunday, 4 October 12.00 

The Struggle, DW Griffith 

Programme Ten 


Puissance de la parole (The Power of Words), 

Jean-Luc Godard 

Beauty #2, Andy Warhol 

Programme Eleven 


Le Cochon (The Pig), Jean Eustache 

Routine Pleasures, Jean-Pierre Gorin 

Followed by a conversation between Pedro 

Costa and Jean-Pierre Gorin. 

Curator: Stuart Comer 

Assistant Curator: Marie Canet 

With special thanks to Ricardo Matos Cabo. 

Pedro Costa Ossos 1997 © Pedro Costa 

Pedro Costa No Quarto da Vanda 2000 © Pedro Costa 

Pedro Costa Tarrafal 2007 © Pedro Costa 

Pedro Costa Où Gît Votre Sourire Enfoui? 2001 © Pedro Costa 

Pedro Costa O Sangue 1989 © Pedro Costa Pedro Costa Juventude em Marcha 2006 © Pedro Costa

Visit www.tate.org.uk/modern/film 

Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG 

Nearest Southwark / Bankside Pier 

Pedro Costa O Sangue 1989 © Pedro Costa

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