TATE-PEDRO COSTA.pdf

TATE FILM
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
PEDRO COSTA
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
Direction and cinematography: Pedro Costa,
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