catalogue 2007 en .pdf - Festival international du documentaire de ...

MICHEL TREGANthe immensity of his work. Actually, art is never completely absent, and when it appearsit is always other than an extreme. The task at hand is therefore less a matter of solvingthe rapport of one work to its absence than to modulate the rapport of two works or twoabsences. It is the sketch of such a modulation which is offered in the museum, the rivalryof a mason’s surface and a painter’s. And it is what is suggested by the ambivalence, inthe new quarter, of that whiteness for which the character is expected to be grateful, butwhich he disdains because it is but an abyss, an aesthetic abstraction, the completeopposite of the wall whose wear and stains tell him the tale of a people: two turtles, achicken, a cop, a lion showing its teeth.The difficulty can be told differently. Colossal Youth is basically an edifice cut in half: thepretension of art must constantly compose along with it, something more down to earth,must find a home. To offer Ventura and his family a temporary box is not sufficient. Theymust also be given a roof under which they can feel at home, not separate fromthemselves, from their past and from their legends, like the man still is – or was, if wego along with the flash-backs – in the shack that, in 1972, welcomed him upon his arrivalin Cabo Verde.In spite of his fierce solitude, there is at least one aspect of the cinema that Costa shareswith his contemporaries: it is the concern of communicating the reasons for art and forhome, the goddesses of one, and the fairies of another. Alain Resnais like Zhang Ke Jia,Philippe Garrel like Gus Van Sant today make the wish to give their characters “a houseon the land” – like the last wish of Blake in Last Days –, and all of them set theirconstruction somewhere between a monument and a ruin. The singular difference ofColossal Youth is therefore that it measures the habitat of art and that of daily life, all thewhile refusing to confuse the two. Is it out of loyalty to the documentary that is the originof his fiction, i.e. the destruction of the Fontainhas quarter and the subsequent relocationof its inhabitants? It is certainly important to him. But to remind us of that is to bring thework back to itself, to remember that this origin was also or before anything else a film,to return to the decisive role held by In Vanda’s Room (2000) in the evolution of Costa’scinema.Vanda is two things; the first part of two diptychs, made out of Colossal Youth, of whichit is the “prequel”; the other, more surprisingly but no less tight, with Où Gît Votre SourireEnfoui? (translation: Where is your smile hiding?), Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub,cinéastes, made in 2001 for a series created by Janine Bazin and Andre S. Labarthe,“Cinéma, de Notre Temps”. The affinities are disconcerting, linking Vanda’s room andother settings in the documentary filmed just before Fontainhas was demolished, fromthe du Fresnoy “pad” where the Straubs work at editing a new version of Sicilia!: thesmallness of the location and the pale green of the walls, the rarity of openings towardthe outside, even as far as a certain physical resemblance of the two witches, Vanda andDanièle Huillet. Even their occupations seem similar. Nhurro is rubbing the table, whileJean-Marie is sweeping the edge of the doorway with his foot. While Jean-Marie chats128