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

RÉTROSPECTIVE PEDRO COSTAVanda is between 25 and 30 years old. A bandage covers almost all of hercheek. Since Ossos, she has lost weight. She observes us, makes commentariesthat Costa only partially translates, about our faces, our looks andwhat she thinks about us. She apologises for not interrupting her activitiesin our presence. In fact, ten minutes does not go by without her takingcocaine or heroine. All her time is taken up preparing pipes, knotting andunknotting elastic, checking that the lighters work, scratching the pages oftelephone books which serve to ensure that not a single crumb of cocaineremains stuck there – it is a continuous job in which she employs a sortof unconscious genius that allows her to speak while doing other things. Fora long time, Vanda has been beyond any trip, spectacle or pathos of thedrug addict. Her room is average size, half filled with a big bed. Costa’s roomfor manoeuvre is very limited : either he sits on the bed or he stands on theother side, where we are seated. He has a few lamps for lighting, includingthe bedside one, as well as a mirror that he changes the position ofaccording to the shot. In this green room a film is born.(...) For almost a year, he continuously returned to this room. What was heseeking there? What the cinema almost never offers: a situation that isboth absolutely closed and absolutely open. It is a unique place, without anyparticular charm, devoted to a single activity: drug-taking. The outside airdoes not penetrate here, in this nether world only the vapours of ammoniacirculate. It is a place without any possible history and no future on thehorizon. This place and its occupant ask nothing of the cinema but offerthemselves entirely to it, with a desperate manner without fine phrases andof a generous insensibility so that we understand that the director has foundan inexhaustible source of material.(...) Costa likes filming alone. He has a taste for this habit of getting up everymorning at the same time to go to the same place and fullfil his function of“man who films” (some people in the neighbourhood always refer to him inthis way). It is a dream, that of the functionary-film director, who hascaressed the Light, to which Godard often makes reference when he speaksof the great Hollywood studios, that Costa now takes up. Digital does notintroduce it, but makes lighter the possibility of a cinema exercised on a dailybasis, like a job undertaken day after day, a continuous flow. It is now possibleto film alone, and as long as you wish, without having to be financiallyruined or renounce the quality of the image of the traditional cinema.EPEmmanuel Burdeau, “Seul le cinéma”, Cahiers du cinéma, n° 536135