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

ÉCRANS PARALLÈLESRÉTROSPECTIVE PEDRO COSTAEPand Danièle watches that things go exactly right, Vanda and her sister Zita seem to be doingnothing at all and yet their gestures all have the same necessity. The facetious remarksmade by Jean-Marie give freedom to the decision to cut; similarly it is truly the thickness ofthe world that Vanda flips through while scratching the pages of her directory, looking fora gram of drug pasted in between two addresses.When it was released, some people criticized Vanda for “making misery aesthetic”. Où Gîtbrought about, one year later, an indubitable denial. The proof that the former is exempt ofall voyeuristic aesthetic distance is that the latter shows how closely related the gesturesof idleness are to those of work: in both rooms they never cease to pass from one to theother. The rapport of work to the absence of it functions to the hilt. One can imagine thatthis was liberating for Costa; the encouragement to prolong the lesson with a film madewith the same “actors” as Vanda, but daring this time to use fiction in order to firmly assertthe dignity in the art of the poor of Fontainhas.On the other hand, however, the proximity of Vanda to Où Git seemed to resolve everything,all at once, too easily. What cinema should one invent for the future, once you haveestablished the equality of the editor to the drug dealer, of the patience of art and anexistence intent on self-destruction? Vanda and Où Git are two great films, but Costa neededto break the perfect harmony of these contradictions. He had to go elsewhere, to ColossalYouth. He obviously did so out of the obligation to find a new home, after the exile of theinhabitants of Fontainhas. But he did more than that: he added a personal touch, inreconnecting with certain elements of his first three feature films: Le Sang (Blood) (1989),Casa de Lava (1994) and Ossos (1997).What a surprise. We have not forgotten that the filmmaker often stated he had turned thepage on this period, saying notably how much the filming of Ossos had saturated him.Weariness regarding the weight of working with a team, disgust at the waste of timediscussing everything and nothing with technicians, but not about the film; following that, adecision to work alone or with a few people in mini-DV, and to take advantage of thepossibilities of digital equipment: to film on a daily basis, to accumulate low-cost rushes (thefigures for Colossal Youth were three hundred fifty hours for one and a half years of filming,six days a week), to become a man of habit, a working-class artist. Costa severely criticizeshis early work: “The cinema betrayed me”, he said, implying no doubt that with Le Sang,and then Casa de Lava, he was content with cinephile exercise, without allowing the slightestmovement of air.And yet, Colossal Youth retrieves something of that cinema: a plastic enthusiasm, a desireto imitate the Hollywood of the age of the classics (Tourneur, Ford), and the proximitybetween fiction and filiation, with which the films “from back then” happily played. [je remontela ligne] Just as Ventura’s progeny defies the census, the Cabo Verdian island of Casa deLava shelters an old man who claims to have thirty sons, of which Leao, the worker whofalls into a deep coma after a fall (other rhymes: a few passages from the letter, inspiredby Robert Desnos, that Ventura has Lento practice, and the cry, in the middle of a dance:129