TATE-PEDRO COSTA.pdf

TATE FILM
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
Direction and cinematography: Pedro Costa,
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.
PEDRO COSTA
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