Pedro Costa Casa de Lava 1994 Pedro Costa

Pedro Costa

Pedro Costa Casa de Lava 1994 Pedro Costa

Pedro Costa O Sangue 1989 Pedro Costa

Pedro Costa Casa de Lava 1994 Pedro Costa

Jean-Marie Straub and Danile Huillxet Itinraire de Jean Bricard 2008 The Artists

Pedro Costa Ne Change Rien 2009 Pedro Costa

Pedro Costa Tarrafal 2007 Pedro Costa

DW Griffith The Struggle 1931 Courtesy BFI Stills

Pedro Costa No Quarto da Vanda 2000 Pedro Costa

Pedro Costa Juventude em Marcha 2006 Pedro Costa

Pedro Costa O Gt Votre Sourire Enfoui? 2001 Pedro Costa

Pedro Costa Ossos 1997 Pedro Costa

Jean Eustache Le Cochon 1970 The Artist

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Pedro Costa
Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium
25 September 4 October 2009
Acclaimed Portugese filmmaker Pedro Costas work
is marked by extraordinary intimacy and trancelike
stillness. His films present the lives of Lisbons
disenfranchised migrants with unflinching honesty
and dignity. This first UK retrospective of Costas
risk-taking, beautiful work includes his new film, Ne
Change Rien, as well as four programmes of films
that have inspired him, including work by Jean
Eustache, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, JeanMarie Straub & Danile Huillet, and Andy Warhol.
With support from the Calouste Gulbenkian
Foundation, UK Branch, and Centre for Iberian and
Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS), Birkbeck,
University of London.
5 (4 concessions)
Season ticket 40 (30 concessions)
The Politics of Pedro Costa
Jacques Rancire
How are we to think the politics of Pedro Costas
films? The answer appears simple at first. His
films are about a situation seemingly at the
heart of the political issues of today: the fate of
the exploited, of people who have come from
afar, from former colonies in Africa, to work on
Portuguese construction sites; people who have
lost their families, their health, sometimes even
their lives, on those sites, and who yesterday were
dumped in suburban slums and subsequently
moved to new homesbetter lit, more modern,
not necessarily more livable. A number of other
sensitive themes are joined to this fundamental
situation. In Casa de Lava, for example, there is
the repression of the Salazar government, which
sends its opponents off to camps situated on
the very spot from where African immigrants
leave in search of work in the city. And, starting
with Ossos, there is the life of young people from
Lisbon who, due to drugs and deteriorating social
conditions, have found themselves in the same
slums and under the same living conditions.
Still, neither a social situation nor a visible display
of sympathy for the exploited and the neglected
are enough to make art political. We usually
expect there to be a mode of representation

PEDRO COSTA

which renders the situation of exploitation

intelligible as the effect of specific causes and,
further, which shows that situation to be the
source of the forms of consciousness and affects
that modify it. We want the formal operations to
be organized around the goal of shedding light on
the causes and the chain of effects. Here, though,
is where things become difficult. Pedro Costas
camera never once takes the usual path from
the places of misery to the places where those
in power produce or manage it. We dont see in
his films the economic power which exploits and
relegates, or the power of administrations and the
police, which represses or displaces populations.
We never hear any of his characters speaking
about the political stakes of the situation, or of
rebelling against it. Filmmakers before Pedro
Costa, like Francesco Rosi, show the machinery
that regulates and displaces the poor. Others, like
Jean-Marie Straub, take the opposite approach.
They distance their cameras from the misery
of the world in order to show, in an open-air
amphitheatre designed to evoke ancient grandeur
and modern struggles for liberation, the men and
women of the people who confront history and
proudly proclaim the project of a just world. We
dont see any of this in Pedro Costa. He does not
inscribe the slums into the landscape of capitalism
in mutation, nor does he design his sets to make
them commensurate with collective grandeur.
Some might say that this is not a deliberate choice,
but simply the reality of a social mutation: the
immigrants from Cape Verde, the poor whites,
and the marginalized youth of his films bear no
resemblance at all to the proletariat, exploited and
militant, which was Rosis horizon yesterday, and
remains Straubs today. Their mode of life is not
that of the exploited, but that of a marginalized
group left to fend for itself. The police is absent
from their universe, as are people fighting in
the name of social justice. The only people from
the city center who ever come to visit them are
nurses, who lose themselves in these outskirts
more from an intimate crack than from the
need to bring relief to suffering populations. The
inhabitants of Fontainhas live their lot in the way
that was so stigmatized during the time of Brecht:
as their destiny. If they discuss it at all, it is to
wonder whether heaven, their own choice, or their
weakness is responsible for their lot.
What are we to think of the way Pedro Costa
places his camera in these spaces? Its common

to warn people who have chosen to talk about

misery to remember that misery is not an object
for art. Pedro Costa, however, seems to do the
very opposite. He never misses an opportunity
to transform the living spaces of these miserable
people into objects of art. A plastic water bottle, a
knife, a glass, a few objects left on a deal table in a
squatted apartment: there you have, under a light
that strokes the set, the occasion for a beautiful
still life. As night descends on this space without
electricity, two small candles placed on the same
table lend to the miserable conversations or to the
needle sessions the allure of a chiaroscuro from
the Dutch Golden Age. The motion of excavators
is a chance to show, along with the crumbling
buildings, sculptural bases made of concrete and
large walls with contrasting colorsblue, pink,
yellow, or green. The room where Vanda coughs
so hard as to tear apart her chest delights us with
its aquarium green walls, against which we see the
flight of mosquitoes and gnats.
The accusation of aestheticism can be met by
saying that Pedro Costa has filmed the places just
as they are. The homes of the poor are on the
whole gaudier than the homes of the rich, their
raw colors more pleasant to the eye of the art
lover than the standardised aestheticism of petit
bourgeois home decorations. In Rilkes day already,
exiled poets saw gutted buildings simultaneously
as fantastic sets and as the stratigraphy of a way
of living. But the fact that Pedro Costa has filmed
these places as they are means something else,
something that touches on the politics of art. After
Ossos, he stopped designing sets to tell stories.
That is to say, he gave up exploiting misery as
an object of fiction. He placed himself in these
spaces to observe their inhabitants living their
lives, to hear what they say, capture their secret.
The virtuosity with which the camera plays with
colors and lights, and the machine which gives
the actions and words of the inhabitants the
time to be acted out, are one and the same. But
if this answer absolves the director of the sin
of aestheticism, it immediately raises another
suspicion, another accusation: what politics is this,
which makes it its task to record, for months and
months, the gestures and words which reflect the
misery of that world?
This is an accusation which confines the
conversations in Vandas room and Venturas
drifting to a simple dilemma: either an indiscreet
aestheticism indifferent to the situation of the

individuals involved, or a populism that gets

trapped by that same situation. This, though,
is to inscribe the work of the director in a very
petty topography of high and low, near and
far, inside and outside. It is to situate his way of
working in an all too simple play of oppositions
between the wealth of colors and the misery of
the individuals, between activity and passivity,
between what is given and what is seized. Pedro
Costas method explodes precisely this system
of oppositions and this topography. It favors
instead a more complex poetics of exchanges,
correspondences, and displacements. To see it at
work, it might be good to pause a second over
an episode from Colossal Youth that can, in a few
tableaux, sum up the aesthetics of Pedro Costa,
and the politics of that aesthetics.
The episode places us, first, in the normal setting
of Venturas existence: that of an immigrant worker
who shares a run-down place with a fellow Cape
Verdean. As it starts, we hear Venturas voice
reciting a love letter while the camera-eye frames
a grey corner of the wall which is pierced by the
white rectangle of a window; the four glass bottles
on the window sill compose another still life. Urged
by the voice of his friend Lento, Venturas reading
slowly fades out. The next shot introduces a quite
brutal change of setting: the still life that served
as the set for Venturas reading is succeeded by
yet another colored rectangle taken from a still
darker section of wall: a painting whose frame
seems to pierce with its own light the surrounding
darkness which threatens to encroach on its edges.
Colors quite similar to the colors of the bottles
outline arabesques in which we can recognize
the Sacred Family fleeing to Egypt with a sizeable
cohort of angels. The sound of footsteps announce
the character who appears in the next shot:
Ventura, who is leaning with his back against the
wall, flanked by a portrait of Hlne Fourment by
Rubens, the painter of the Flight to Egypt of the
previous shot, and by Van Dycks Portrait of a Man.
These three well-known works are specifically
situated: we are seeing the walls of the Gulbenkian
Foundation, a building that is obviously not in
Venturas neighborhood. Nothing in the preceding
shot announced this visit, and there is nothing in
the film to suggest that Ventura has a taste for
painting. The director has brutally transported
Ventura to this museum, which we suppose by the
echoing footsteps and the night light to be empty
of visitors, closed off for the shooting of this scene.

TATE FILM

The relationship between the three paintings and

the filmic still life that immediately precedes
them, together with that between the decaying
home and the museum, and perhaps even
that between the love letter and the paintings
on the walls, composes a very specific poetic
displacement, a metaphor that speaks in the film
about the art of the filmmaker: of its relationship
to the art in museums, and of the relationship
that one art and the other forges with the body of
its characters. A metaphor which speaks, in short,
about their politics.
The politics here might seem quite easy to grasp at
first. A silent shot shows us a museum guard who
is himself black walk up to Ventura and whisper
something in his ear. As Ventura walks out of the
room, the guard pulls a handkerchief from his
pocket and wipes clean the traces of Venturas feet.
We understand: Ventura is an intruder. The guard
tells him later: this museum, he says, is a refuge,
far from the din of poor neighborhoods and from
the supermarkets whose merchandise he used
to have to protect from widespread shoplifting.
Here, though, is an old and peaceful world that
is disturbed only by the chance visit of someone
from their world. Ventura himself had already
manifested that, both with his attitudehe offered
no resistance to being escorted out of the gallery,
and eventually out of the museum through the
service stairsand with his gaze, which scrutinized
some enigmatic point situated, it seemed, well
above the paintings. The politics of the episode
would be to remind us that the pleasures of art are
not for the proletariat and, more precisely still, that
museums are closed off to the workers who build
them. This becomes explicit in the gardens of the
Foundation, in the conversation between Ventura
and the museum employee during which we learn
why Ventura fits into this displaced setting. There
used to be nothing here at all but a marsh, bushes
and frogs. It was Ventura, together with other
workers, who cleaned up the area, laid down the
terrace, built the plumbing system, carried the
construction materials, erected the statue of the
places founder, and planted the grass at its feet. It
was here, too, that he fell from the scaffolding.
The episode, in sum, would be an illustration of the
poem in which Brecht asks who built Thebes, with
its seven gates and other architectural splendors.
Ventura would represent all those people who
have constructed buildings, at great danger to
their health and lives, which they themselves have

PEDRO COSTA

no right to enjoy. But this simple lesson does not

justify the museum being deserted, empty even
of those people who do benefit from the work
of the Venturas of this world. It does not justify
the fact that the scenes shot inside the museum
should be so silent; or that the camera should
linger on the concrete steps of the service stairs
down which the guard escorts Ventura; or that
the silence inside the museum should be followed
by a long panoramic shot, punctuated by bird
cries, of the surrounding trees; or that Ventura
should tell his story, from the exact day of his
arrival in Portugal, on 29 August 1972; or that
the scene should brutally end with him indicating
the spot where he fell. Ventura here is something
completely different from the immigrant worker
who represents the condition of immigrant
workers. The greenery of the scene, the way
Ventura towers over the guard, the solemn tone of
his voice as he seems to recite a text that inhabits
himall of this is very far from every narrative of
misery. Ventura in this scene is a chronicler of his
own life, an actor who renders visible the singular
grandeur of that life, the grandeur of a collective
adventure for which the museum seems incapable
of supplying an equivalent. The relationship of
Pedro Costas art to the art displayed on the walls
of the museum exceeds the simple demonstration
of the exploitation of workers for the sake of the
pleasures of the aesthete, much as Venturas figure
exceeds that of the worker robbed of the fruit of
his labor. If we hope to understand this scene, we
have to tie the relationships of reciprocity and nonreciprocity into a much more complex knot.
To begin with, the museum is not the place of
artistic wealth opposed to the penury of the
worker. The colored arabesques of the Flight to
Egypt show no straightforward superiority over
the shot of the window with four bottles in the
poor lodgings of the two workers. The paintings
golden frame strikes us as a stingier delimitation
of space than the window of the house, as a
way of canceling out everything that surrounds it
and of rendering uninteresting all that is outside
of itthe vibrations of light in the space, the
contrasting colors of the walls, the sounds from
outside. The museum is a place where art is
locked up within this frame that yields neither
transparency nor reciprocity. It is the space of a
stingy art. If the museum excludes the worker
who built it, it is because it excludes all that lives
from displacements and exchanges: light, forms,
and colors in their movement, the sound of the

world, and also the workers whove come from the

islands of Cape Verde. That might be why Venturas
gaze loses itself somewhere in the ceiling. We
might think he is envisioning the scaffolding he fell
from. But we might also think of another lost gaze
fixed on an angle of another ceiling, the ceiling
in the new apartment he is shown by a fellow
from Cape Verde who in many ways resembles
the museum employee. He is, in any case, just as
convinced that Ventura is not in his element in this
apartment, which Ventura had requested for his
fictive family, and also just as eager to wipe clean
the traces of Venturas intrusion on this sterile
place. In answer to the spiel about the sociocultural advantages of the neighborhood, Ventura
had majestically extended his arms towards the
ceiling and uttered a lapidary sentence: Its full of
spider webs. The social-housing employee cannot
verify the presence of these spider webs on the
ceiling anymore than we can. It could be Ventura
who has, as the saying goes, spider webs in the
attic. And anyway, even if insects do crawl up and
down the walls of this housing project, they are
nothing when compared to the decaying walls of
his friend Lentos or of Betes place, where father
and daughter amuse themselves seeing, as good
disciples of Leonardo da Vinci, the formation of
all sorts of fantastic figures. The problem with the
white walls that welcome the worker to the housing
project is the same as the problem of the dark
walls of the museum which reject him: they keep
at bay the chance figures in which the imagination
of the worker who crossed the seas, chased frogs
from the city center, and slipped and fell from
the scaffolding can be on a par with that of the
artist. The art on the walls of the museum is not
simply a sign of the ingratitude towards the person
who built the museum. It is as stingy towards the
sensible wealth of his experience as to the light that
shines on even the most miserable homes.
Weve already heard this in Venturas narrative
about his departure from Cape Verde on 29 August
1972, his arrival in Portugal, the transformation of
a swamp into an art foundation, and the fall. By
placing Ventura in such a setting, Pedro Costa has
given him a Straub-like tone, the epic tone of the
discoverers of a new world. The problem is not
really to open the museum to the workers who
built it, but to make an art commensurate with
the experience of these travelers, an art that has
emerged from them, and which they themselves
can enjoy. That is what we learn from the episode
which follows Venturas brutal fall. It is an episode

constructed around a double return: the return

to Venturas reading of the letter, and a flashback
to the accident. We see Ventura, his head now in
a bandage, returning to a wooden shack with a
dilapidated roof. He sits hunched over at a table,
imperiously insists that Lento come play cards,
and continues reading the love letter he wants to
teach to Lento, who cant read. This letter, which
is recited many times, is like a refrain for the film.
It talks about a separation and about working on
construction sites far from ones beloved. It also
speaks about the soon-to-be reunion which will
grace two lives for twenty or thirty years, about
the dream of offering the beloved a hundred
thousand cigarettes, clothes, a car, a little house
made of lava, and a three-penny bouquet; it talks
about the effort to learn a new word every day
words whose beauty is tailor-made to envelope
these two beings like a pajamas of fine silk. This
letter is written for one person only, for Ventura
has no one to send it to. It is, strictly speaking,
its own artistic performance, the performance
Ventura wants to share [partager] with Lento,
because it is the performance of an art of sharing
[partage], of an art that does not split itself off from
life, from the experience of displaced people or
their means of mitigating absence and of coming
closer to their loved one. The letter, however, and
by the same token, belongs neither to the film nor
to Ventura: it comes from elsewhere. Albeit more
discreetly, it already scanned the fictional film of
which Colossal Youth is the echo and the reverse:
Casa de Lava, the story of a nurse who goes to
Cape Verde in the company of Leo, a worker who,
like Ventura, has also injured his head, but on a
different construction site.
The letter first appeared in the papers of Edith, an
exile from the big city who went to Cape Verde
to be near her lover, sent by Salazars regime to
the Tarrafal concentration camp. She stayed there
after his death and was adopted, in her confusion,
by the black community, which lived off of her
pension, and thanked her with serenades. It had
seemed, then, that the love letter had been written
by the sentenced man. But at the hospital, at Leos
bedside, Mariana gave the letter to Tina, Leos
younger sister, to read, as it was written in Creole.
Tina appropriates the letter, which becomes for the
viewer not a letter sent from the death camp by
the deported man, but by Leo from a construction
site in Portugal. But when Mariana asks Leo about
it, as he finally emerges from his coma, his answer
is peremptory: how could he have written the love

TATE FILM

letter, if he doesnt know how to write? All of a

sudden, the letter seems not to have been written
by, or addressed to, anyone in particular. It now
seems like a letter written by a public scribe adept
at putting into form the feelings of love, as well
as the administrative requests, of the illiterate.
Its message of love loses itself in the grand,
impersonal transaction which links Edith to the
dead militant, to the wounded black worker, to
the kitchen of the erstwhile camp cook, and to the
music of Leos father and brother, whose bread
and music Mariana has shared, but who would
not go visit Leo at the hospital. They continued,
nevertheless, working on refurbishing his house,
the house which he would not enter but on two
legs, all the while making arrangements so that
they, too, could go and work on construction sites
in Portugal.
The letter that Pedro Costa gives Ventura to read
belongs to this wide circulation: between here
and elsewhere, committed city folk and exiled
workers, the literate and the illiterate, the wise
and the confused. But in extending its addressees,
the letter doubles back to its origin and another
circulation is grafted onto the trajectory of the
immigrants. Pedro Costa wrote the letter by mixing
two sources: a letter by an immigrant worker, and
a letter written by a true author, Robert Desnos,
who wrote his letter sixty years earlier from camp
Flha in Saxony, a way-stop on the road to Terezin,
and death. This means that Leos fictional destiny
and Venturas real one are brought together in a
circuit which links the ordinary exile of workers to
the death camps. It also means that the art of the
poor, of the public scribe, and of great poets are
captured together in the same fabric: an art of life
and of sharing [partage], an art of travel and of
communication made for those for whom to live is
to travelto sell their work force to build houses
and museums for other people, in the process
bring with them their experience, their music, their
way of living and loving, of reading on walls and of
listening to the song of humans and birds.
There is no aestheticizing formalism or populist
deference in the attention Pedro Costa pays to
every beautiful form offered by the homes of the
poor, and the patience with which he listens to the
oftentimes trivial and repetitive words uttered in
Vandas room, and in the new apartment where we
see Vanda after she has kicked her habit, put on
some weight, and become a mother. The attention
and the patience are inscribed, instead, in a

PEDRO COSTA

different politics of art. This politics is a stranger to

that politics which works by bringing to the screen
the state of the world to make viewers aware of
the structures of domination in place and inspire
them to mobilize their energies. It finds its models
in the love letter by Ventura/Desnos and in the
music of Leos family, for their art is one in which
the form is not split off from the construction of a
social relation or from the realization of a capacity
that belongs to everyone. We shouldnt confuse this
with that old dream of the avant-garde in which
artistic forms would be dissolved in the relations
of the new world. The politics here, rather, is about
thinking the proximity between art and all those
other forms which can convey the affirmation of a
sharing [partage] or shareable [partageable] capacity.
The stress on the greens of Vandas room cannot
be separated from the attemptsby Vanda,
Zita, Pedro or Nurroto examine their lives and
take control of it. The luminous still life composed
with a plastic bottle and a few found objects on
the white wooden table of a squat is in harmony
with the stubbornness with which the redhead
uses his knife to clean, the protests of his friends
notwithstanding, the stain from the table destined
for the teeth of the excavator. Pedro Costa does not
film the misery of the world. He films its wealth,
the wealth that anyone at all can become master
of: that of catching the splendor of a reflection of
light, but also that of being able to speak in a way
that is commensurate with ones fate. And, lastly,
the politics here is about being able to return what
can be extracted of sensible wealththe power of
speech, or of visionfrom the life and decorations
of these precarious existences back to them, about
making it available to them, like a song they can
enjoy, like a love letter whose words and sentences
they can borrow for their own love lives.
Isnt that, after all, what we can expect from
the cinema, the popular art of the twentieth
century, the art that allowed the greatest number
of peoplepeople who would not walk into a
museumto be thrilled by the splendor of the
effect of a ray of light shining on an ordinary
setting, by the poetry of clinking glasses or of
a conversation on the counter of any old diner?
Confronted with people who align him with great
formalists like Bresson, Dreyer or Tarkovsky, Pedro
Costa sometimes claims a whole different lineage:
Walsh and Tourneur, as well as more modest and
anonymous directors of B films who crafted wellformatted stories on a tight budget for the profit of
Hollywood studios, and who didnt for all that fail

to get the audiences of neighborhood cinemas to

enjoy the equal splendor of a mountain, a horse,
or a rocking chairequal because of the absence
of any hierarchy of visual values between people,
landscape, or objects1. At the heart of a system of
production entirely subservient to the profit of its
studio heads, cinema showed itself to be an art of
equality. The problem, as we unfortunately know,
is that capitalism is not what it used to be, and if
Hollywood is still thriving, neighborhood cinemas
are not, having been replaced by multiplexes that
give each sociologically-determined audience
a type of art designed and formatted to suit it.
Pedro Costas films, like every work that eludes
this formatting process, are immediately labeled
as film-festival material, something reserved for
the exclusive enjoyment of a film-buff elite and
tendentiously pushed to the province of museums
and art lovers. For that, of course, Pedro Costa
blames the state of the world, meaning the naked
domination of the power of money, which classes
as films for film-buffs the work of directors who
try to bring to everyone the wealth of sensorial
experience found in the humblest of lives. The
system makes a sad monk of the director who
wants to make his cinema shareable [partageable]
like the music of the violin player from Cape Verde
and like the letter written jointly by the poet and
the illiterate worker.
It is true that today, the domination by the wealthy
tends to constitute a world in which equality
must disappear even from the organization of the
sensible landscape. All the wealth in this landscape
has to appear as separated, as attributed to, and
privately enjoyed by, one category of owners. The
system gives the humble the pocket change of
its wealth, of its world, which it formats for them,
but which is separated from the sensorial wealth
of their own experience. This is the television
in Vandas room. Still, this particular deal of the
cards is not the only reason behind the break
in reciprocity and the separation between the
film and its world. The experience of the poor is
not just that of displacements and exchanges,
of borrowing, stealing, and giving back. It is also
the experience of the crack which interrupts
the fairness of exchanges and the circulation of
experiences. In Casa de Lava, it is difficult to tell
if Leos silence as he lies on the hospital bed
is the manifestation of a traumatic coma or the
desire not to return to the common world. So,
too, with Ediths madness, her forgetfulness of
the Portuguese language and her confinement

to booze and Creole. The death of the militant in

the camp of the Salazar regime and the wound of
the immigrant who works on construction sites in
Portugal establishat the heart of the circulation
of bodies, medical care, words, and musicthe
dimension of that which cannot be exchanged, of
the irreparable. In Ossos, there is Tinas silence, her
loss as to what to do with the child in her arms
other than take the child with her to their deaths.
Colossal Youth is split between two logics, two
regimes of the exchange of words and experiences.
On one side, the camera is placed in Vandas new
room, which is sterile white and filled by a doublebed of the type one finds at discount stores. There,
a mellower and plumper Vanda talks about her
new life, about her detox, the child, the deserving
husband, about her treatment and health issues.
On the other, the camera follows the often silent
Ventura, who now and then utters an imperious
command or lapidary sentence, and who
sometimes loses himself in his narrative or in the
reciting of his letter. It portrays him as a strange
animal, too large or too shy for the set, whose eyes
sometimes shine like those of a wild animal, and
whose head is more often bent down than held up:
the distracted gaze of a sick man. The point with
Ventura is not to gather the evidence of a hard life,
even if it is in order to figure out who cinema can
share [partager] this life with, and to whom it can
give it back as his or her life. The point is rather to
confront what cannot be shared [limpartageable],
the cracks that have separated a person from
himself. Ventura is not an immigrant worker, a
poor man entitled to be treated with dignity and
to share in the pleasures afforded by the world he
has helped build. He is a sort of sublime drifter, a
character from tragedy, someone who interrupts
communication and exchange on his own.
There seems to be a divorce between two regimes
of expression in the passage from the dilapidated
walls, the colorful sets, and the loud colors of the
slums to the new furniture and the white walls
which no longer echo the words of those in the
room. Even if Vanda is willing to play the role of one
of Venturas daughters, even if Ventura sits at her
table and chats in her room, and occasionally even
does some baby-sitting, the crack in Ventura casts
the shadow of this enormous and broken body,
this enormous body which has been displaced
into the story of Vandas new life, on her narrative
at the same time that it lends vanity to it. We can
describe this intimate divorce using terms taken
from on old quarrel, one summed up more than

TATE FILM

two centuries ago by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

in the Preface to The New Heloise. These family
letters, are they real or fictive, the objector asks
the man of letters. If they are real, then they are
portraits, and we expect portraits to be faithful to
the model. This makes them not very interesting
to people who are not members of the family.
Imaginary paintings, on the other hand,
interest the public, provided they resemble, not
a particular individual, but the human being.
Pedro Costa says things differently: the patience
of the camera, which every day mechanically
films the words, gestures, and footsteps of the
charactersnot in order to make films, but as
an exercise in approximating the secret of the
othermust bring a third character to life on the
screen. A character who is not the director, nor
Vanda, nor Ventura, a character who is, and is
not, a stranger to our lives2. But the emergence
of this impersonal also gets caught up in the
disjunction in its turn: it is hard for this third
character to avoid becoming either Vandas
portrait, and as such enclosed in the family of
social identifications, or Venturas painting, the
painting of the crack and the enigma which
renders family portraits and narratives futile. A
native of the island says as much to Mariana, the
well-intentioned nurse: your skull is not fractured.
The crack splits experience into those that can
be shared [partageable], and those which cannot
[impartageable]. The screen where the third
character should appear is stretched between
these two experiences, between two risks: the
risk of platitude, in the life narratives, and of
infinite flight, in the confrontation with the crack.
Cinema cannot be the equivalent of the love
letter or of the music of the poor. It can no longer
be the art which gives the poor the sensible
wealth of their world. It must split itself off, it
must agree to be the surface upon which the
experience of people relegated to the margins
of economic circulations and social trajectories
try to be ciphered in new figures. This new
surface must be hospitable to the division which
separates portrait and painting, chronicle and
tragedy, reciprocity and rift. An art must be made
in the place of another. Pedro Costas greatness
is that he simultaneously accepts and rejects this
alteration, that his cinema is simultaneously a
cinema of the possible and of the impossible.
1 See Pedro Costa and Rui Chaves, Fora! Out! (Porto: Fundao de Serralves, 2007) 119.
2 Fora! Out!, p.115.

Jacques Rancire

PEDRO COSTA

O SANGUE / Blood
Portugal 1989, 35mm, 1:1,33, b/w, 95 min
Direction and screenplay: Pedro Costa,
Cinematography: Martin Schfer, Sound:
Pedro Caldas, Grard Rousseau, Editing:
Manuela Viegas, Producer: Victor Gonalves,
Produced by Trpico Filmes
with: Pedro Hestnes, Nuno Ferreira,
Ins Medeiros, Luis Miguel Cintra, Canto e
Castro, Isabel de Castro, Ana Otero, Manuel
Joo Vieira, Miguel Fernandes, Henrique
Viana, Lus Santos, Jos Eduardo, Pedro Miguel
Two brothers, 17 year-old Vicente and 10
year-old Nino. A tiny village on the bank
of the Tagus river. Between Christmas and
New Years Eve. The boys are united by
a secret closely related to their fathers
absence: he vanished because he got
sick or maybe because he was involved in
some type of suspicious activity. This time
he seems to have disappeared for good.
What has happened? The elder brother
and a very young girl are the only ones
to know the secret.
There were once two teenagers and a child.
If we look back to the classical American
cinema we find that same secret alliance that
existed among Nicholas Rays rebels. But these
teenagers are not really rebels, and they
dont get mixed in that insolvable night in the
graveyard, when they get hold of the unshared
secret of the child. Their division lies in that
separation, in that journey that will isolate them,
without any roots, and that will make them as
lost in space as they were from their own time.
Joo Bnard da Costa, O preto uma cor, ou
o cinema de Pedro Costa
Blood is a special first feature the first
features of not-yet auteurs themselves forming
a particular cinematic genre, especially in
retrospect. Perhaps it was from Huillet and
Straubs Class Relations that Costa learnt the
priceless lesson of screen fiction, worthy of Sam
Fuller: start the piece instantly, with a gaze, a
gesture, a movement, some displacement of
air and energy, something dropped like a
heavy stone to shatter the calm of pre-fiction
equilibrium. To set the motor of the intrigue
going even if that intrigue will be so shadowy,
so shrouded in questions that go to the very

heart of its status as a depiction of the real.

So Blood begins sharply, after the sound (under
the black screen) of a car stopping, a door
slamming, footsteps: a young man has his face
slapped. Cut (in a stark reverse-field, down an
endless road in the wilderness) to an older man,
the father. Then back to the young man: Do
what you want with me. The father picks up his
suitcase (insert shot) and begins to walk off
The beginning of Colossal Youth also announces,
in just this way, its immortal story: bags thrown
out a window, a perfect image (reminiscent,
on a Surrealist plane, of the suitcases
thrown into rooms through absent windows, the
sign of a ceaseless moving on and moving in, in
Ruizs City of Pirates) of dispossession, of beings
restlessly on the move from the moment they
begin to exist in the image. () Costa uses fiction,
gives it a body, but simultaneously abstracts,
hollows out that body into something ghostly and
incorporeal: it is a vibrant paradox, and a rare
combination in cinema. What this means is that
Costa achieves moments which are pure cinema,
pure fiction, pure intrigue, while at the same time
conserving their mystery, their secret side (dont
go showing every side of a thing, cautioned
Bresson, advice which Godard quotes).
Adrian Martin, The Inner Life of a Film
Pedro Costas BLOOD (O Sangue)
is available NOW on Second Run DVD
www.secondrundvd.com
CASA DE LAVA
Portugal / France 1994, 35mm, 1:1,66, colour,
110 min
Direction and screenplay: Pedro Costa,
Cinematography: Emmanuel Machuel,
Sound: Henri Maikoff, Editing: Dominique
Auvray, Producer: Paulo Branco, Produced by
Madragoa Filmes in co-production with Pandora
Film and Gemini Films
with: Ins Medeiros, Isaach de Bankol, Edith
Scob, Pedro Hestnes, Sanda do Canto Brando,
Cristiano Andrade Alves, Raul Andrade, Joo
Medina, Antnio Andrade, Manuel Andrade
Leo, a Cape Verdean immigrant and a
bricklayer in Lisbon, falls off the scaffolding
and enters a deep coma. Arrangements are
made for him to return to his homeland, in
Cape Verde. A nurse, Mariana, eager for a

change of scenery, volunteers to accompany

him. When she arrives, nothing is like she
expected. No one seems to be waiting
for Leo or even to care for him. Mariana
waits for someone to claim Leo and waits
for him to wake up. She gets increasingly
involved with the mysterious Fogo
volcano community; the adventure begins
I have dreamed so much of you,
Walked so often, talked so often with you,
Loved your shadow so much.
Nothing is left me of you.
Nothing is left of me but a shadow
among shadows,
A being a hundred timwes more
shadowy than a shadow,
A shadowy being who comes, and
comes again, in your sunlit life.
Robert Desnos, Last Poem (Terezina
Concentration Camp, May 1945)
Casa de Lava starts several times. The opening
shots of a volcanic eruption borrowed from
a film called A Erupo do Vulco da Ilha do
Fogo, provided to Costa by the geographer
Orlando Ribeiro - impose a sense of the
pre-human, a pure inhospitability. The next
sequence is a series of close shots of women
standing in a rocky landscape. The women are
looking at something; or, rather, since Costa
never establishes that these women are in the
same place facing in the same direction, lets
say they are looking at various somethings:
orientation without orientation. Some of
these women will be (and maybe are not yet)
characters in the film in the same way that
the people in In Vandas Room and Colossal
Youth are characters in those films: quasi-real,
quasi-fictional, not firmly located on either side
of the nonexistent border. () The characters are
all exiles; any position they take is provisional.
(Not even the dead are at peace here.
Chris Fujiwara, The Mystery of Origins
Costas people are often disembodied, zombies,
never quite here. Jacques Tourneur, not Straub.
Does Costa instruct his actors not to think,
meditate, or be one in their body? Vermeers
and the Straubs people dominate their space;
Costas are visitors. They are shapes, figures
in incredibly beautiful compositions. Casa de
Lava is a suite of wonderful plays on depth-

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, Grard Rousseau, Producer: Paulo
Branco, Produced by Madragoa Filmes in coproduction with Zentopa and Gemini Films
with: Vanda Duarte, Nuno Vaz, Maria Lipkina,
Isabel Ruth, Ins Medeiros, Miguel Sermo,
Berta Susana Teixeira, Clotilde Montrond, Zita
Duarte, Beatriz Lopes, Lusa Carvalho
Ossos is Costas first film encounter with
the migrant Cape Verdean community
of Lisbon, living in Estrela Dfrica, 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 filmmakers
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.
Costas 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 effectstight
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

PEDRO COSTA

Costa accords his abject characters verge on

the beatificthe soft, long-haired father with
his faraway gaze evokes one of Bellinis musing
Madonnasand 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
(Ins 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 theyre depicting. The boy was a
poor junky in real life and the housekeeper is
a housekeeper. But even if theres a desire to
make a sort of documentary, its 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 Vandas 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
Produes in co-production with Pandora Film,
Ventura Film, ZDF Das Kleine Fernsehspiel,
RTSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera Italiana and
Radioteleviso Portuguesa (RTP)
Producer: Francisco Villa-Lobos, Produced by:
Contracosta Produes in co-production with

Pandora Film, Ventura Film, ZDF Das Kleine

Fernsehspiel, RTSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera
Italiana and Radioteleviso Portuguesa (RTP)
with: Vanda Duarte, Zita Duarte, Lena Duarte,
Antnio Semedo Moreno, Paulo Nunes,
Pedro Lanban, Geny, Paulo Jorge Gonalves,
Evangelina Nelas, Miquelina Barros, Fernando
Paixo, Julio, 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 films 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 Vandas 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 wouldnt 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 wouldnt have
been demolished. And that, house after house.
I have paid more for something I didnt do
than for the things Ive 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 films 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
O GT 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, Patrcia
Saramago, Producer: Francisco Villa-Lobos,
Produced by: Contracosta Produes in coproduction of Amip Paris, ARTE France and the
Institut National de lAudiovisuel (INA)
with: Danile Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub
Pedro Costa shot this great portrait of
Jean-Marie Straub and Danile 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 clich not always, but most of the
time and thats 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 viewers imagination instead
of opening it up and you say to yourself: yes,
after having filmed Mount Etna, Mount SaintVictoire, why add another one? And so you
renounce, slowly. Then one fine day One

TATE FILM

fine day you realize that its better to see

as little as possible. You have a sort of
reduction, only its not a reduction its a
concentration and it actually says more. But
you dont do that immediately from one day to
the next. You need time and patience. A sigh
can become a novel.
Jean-Marie Straub
This is a film haunted by the power of the
silhouette, and the faces presented and that
we are allowed to glance at always tend to
gravitate toward that state: an abstracted
two-dimensionality that makes both Danile
Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub exist at the
periphery of their own work in some patient
acknowledgement, pondering and shaping
of its physical properties. There is a rigor in
this abstracting of the human form, in this
willingness to be in such close proximity to
a figure and yet to never openly play the
game of tracking the revelatory explicitness
of an expression. The rhetoric of Costas
portrait goes against all the conventions of
film portraiture. We are not invited to witness
the blossoming of a memorized anecdote on
a face; we are not invited to decipher even
the force of conviction in the articulation of
an expression: we are just seeing bodies or
parts of bodies silhouetted by the tenuous
yet potent light that comes from the film
material they relentlessly try to shape.
Silhouettes by the glow of their work.
Jean-Pierre Gorin, Nine Notes on O gt votre
sourire enfoui ?
6 BAGATELAS
Portugal / France 2003, Beta SP, 1:1,33, colour,
18 min
Direction and cinematography: Pedro
Costa, Assistant: Thierry Lounas,
Sound: Matthieu Imbert, Editing: Patrcia
Saramago, Produced by: Contracosta Produes
with: Danile Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub
Pedro Costa takes six unused scenes of O
Gt Votre Sourire Enfoui? and edits them into
a new context. These fragments are not only
bagatelles, but a special look at Danile
Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.
Though the brevity of these pieces is a

PEDRO COSTA

persuasive advocate for them, on the other

hand that very brevity itself requires an
advocate. Consider what moderation is
required to express oneself so briefly. You can
stretch every glance out into a poem, every sigh
into a novel. But to express a novel in a single
gesture, a joy in breath such concentration
can only be present in proportion to the
absence of self-pity.
Arnold Schoenberg on Anton Weberns 6
Bagatelles
JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA / Colossal Youth
Portugal / France / Switzerland 2006, 35mm,
1:1,33, colour, 154 min
Direction: Pedro Costa, Cinematography: Pedro
Costa, Leonardo Simes, Sound: Olivier Blanc,
Jean-Pierre Laforce, Editing: Pedro Marques,
Producer: Francisco Villa-Lobos, Produced by:
Contracosta Produes and co-produced by Les
Films de ltranger, Unlimited, Ventura Film,
Radioteleviso Portuguesa and Radiotelevisione
svizzera
with: Ventura, Vanda Duarte, Beatriz Duarte,
Gustavo Sumpta, Cila Cardoso, Alberto Barros,
Antnio Semedo, Paulo Nunes, Jos Maria Pina,
Andr Semedo, Alexandre Silva, Paula Barrulas
Ventura, a Cape Verdean labourer living
in the outskirts of Lisbon, is suddenly
abandoned by his wife Clotilde. Ventura feels
lost between the dilapidated old quarter
where he spent the last thirty-four years of
his life, and the new lodgings in a recently
built low-cost housing complex. All the
young poor souls he meets seem to become
his own children.
Nha cretcheu, my love / Our encounter will
make our life more beautiful, at least for
another thirty years. / For my part, I become
younger and return full of energy. / Id like
to offer you a hundred thousand cigarettes,
/ A dozen snazzy dresses, A car, / The house
of lava that you so longed for, / A four penny
bunch of flowers. / But before anything else
/ Drink a fine bottle of wine, / Think about
me. / Here work is non-stop. / Now there are
more than a hundred of us. / The day before
yesterday, my birthday / Was the time for a
deep thought about you. / Did the letter they
brought arrive safely? / I receive no reply. /

Ill wait. / Every day, every minute. / Every day

I learn some new and beautiful words, just
for the two of us. / Tailor-made, like a fine
silk pajama. Would you like that? / I can only
send you with one letter per month. / But still
nothing from your hand. / Maybe next time. /
Sometimes Im frightened about building this
wall / Me, with a pick-axe and cement / You,
with your silence / Such a deep valley that it
pushes you towards oblivion. / It hurts me
inside to see these bad things I dont want to
see. / Your beautiful hair falls from my hands
like blades of dry grass. / Sometimes I lose
my energy and imagine that Im going to
forget about myself.
Venturas Letter
Ventura and Desnos were destined to meet.
It took place in this film. Its History. Its
Cinema. One line from Desnos, Id like to
offer you 100,000 cigarettes. One line from
Ventura, the house of lava that you so longed
for. Both are condemned, destroyed men,
ghosts of other men that despite torture,
madness and exploitation still managed
to resist. This love letter had to become a
moral and political testament, a declaration
of war. This letter attempts to appease their
suffering while announcing far worse horrors.
(...) Ventura arrived in Portugal in 1972, he
found a well-paid mason, job and he believed
that he would succeed, that he would be
able to save up enough money to bring his
wife from Cape Verde. Then the revolution
took place and he told me the secret story of
African immigrants in Lisbon after April 25th
1974. They feared they would be deported or
imprisoned. For Ventura this was a moment
of condemnation: chaos, delirium, sickness.
He was simultaneously a prisoner and guard
in his wooden shanty house in Fontainhas.
He survived by repeating and memorizing ad
eternum his love letter. I realized that the April
25th Revolution, that for me was a moment of
lyrical exaltation and enthusiasm, constituted a
nightmare for Ventura. I was a kid at the time.
I went out to the streets, demonstrating, and,
probably, already dreaming about cinema.
A while ago, I looked for some photographs
of the May 1st crowds with thousands of
people celebrating. Its incredible - you dont
see a single black face. Where were they?
Ventura told me that they were all huddled
together, absolutely terrified, hidden in the

Estrela Garden, worried about their future. It

is precisely because I film these things in this
manner that I dont believe in democracy.
No one in Fontainhas believes in democracy.
People like Ventura built the banks, museums,
theatres, schools and condominiums of the
bourgeoisie. And its precisely what they helped
build that defeated them. You have the cruelest
proof of this failure in the other rooms, the
agony of Paulo, Vanda, Zita, the permanent
collapse of those rooms.
Pedro Costa
TARRAFAL
Portugal 2007, 35mm, 1:1,33, colour, 16 min
Direction and cinematography: Pedro
Costa, Sound: Vasco Pedroso, Olivier Blanc,
Editing: Patrcia Saramago, Produced by Lus
Correia, LX Filmes
with: Jos Alberto Silva, Lucinda Tavares,
Ventura, Alfredo Mendes
Tarrafal is part of The State of the World film,
commissioned by the Fundao Calouste Gulbenkian
Jos Alberto, 30 years old, receives a letter of
extradition. The inequities of the past and the
injustice of the present situation of migrant
labourers forced to leave Portugal, meet in a
plea for memory and resilience.
Tarrafal, sixteen minutes, fifteen shots, stories
and dialogues stretching over in the stillness of
the night and of the the countryside. The place
is before anything else one of these filmmakers
room (Jacques Rancire), where voices emerge
from the darkness and dwell on endlessly. The
disinherited speak to master their own lives, their
own survival: here a woman and her grown up
boy with dreadlocks, in his thirties. Nothing is
more common, more concrete than the situations
and the informations that were offered. The first
word is mum, the family ties are omnipresent, its
about returning to Cape Vert, about where to live,
how to build a house, what to eat. The places are
named and listed: Mouro, Montinho, Achada,
Ungueira, Raatcho, Montinho de Cima, Montinho
de Baixo, Milho Branco, Santana near Assomada.
The mother shivers, she coughs, her hands
under her arms, she warms herself just thinking
about her homeland and feels like putting her
bones to rest. Then its all about bewitchment

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: Patrcia Saramago, Producer: Abel
Ribeiro Chaves, Prod uced by: Sociedade ptica
Tcnica in co-production with Red Star Cinma
with: Jeanne Balibar, Rodolphe Burger, Herv Loos,
Arnaud Dieterlen, Jol 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 caf, from Johnny Guitar to
Offenbachs La Prichole.
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 Costas been making something
like concert films for yearsCosta, similar to
Straub, displacing the emotions of his statuecharacters to the soundtrack, usually diffused
bird songs and childrens yelps. Balibars ongoing
concerts not any different: a woman in a closed
room, standing at a mike, looking as straight and
still as Costas 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

PEDRO COSTA

while shes just hanging out and trying to find

the beat. Still lives with music, almost. But whats
different in Ne change rien, probably because
its a documentary (though about as much a doc
as Costas 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 faces
composition, bring new parts out from shadow;
the look is almost charcoal. The results that
players are only seen minimallyin silhouette
with a hand waving back and forth, or just an eye
and right curl of the mouthso 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 movies
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-awakestarting with
a half-formed image and a montage of sounds
and voices, building, that gradually find their
bodies (and whats maybe most dream-like is the
tangential realism: an off-screen voice correcting
Balibars vs and saying I like consonants too
David Phelps, Cannes 2009: There Outta be a
Moonlight Saving Time, theautheurs.com, 15
May 2009
CARTE BLANCHE
Itinraire de Jean Bricard
Jean-Marie Straub and Danile Huillet, France
2008, 40 min
What can one say about Danile and JeanMaries 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, Itinraire 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.

Sicilia!
Jean-Marie Straub and Danile Huillet, Italy/
France 1999, 66 min
Jean-Marie Straub and Danile Huillet have created
a bold and beautiful adaptation of Elio Vittorinis
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 protagonists mothereach 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
originals immediate contextthe increasing
oppression of pre-war ItalyStraub/Huillet offer
a moving look at the state of permanent exile
common to all of those who cant 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
Griffiths 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 Godards 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 Warhols rarest films
and a next of kin to Costas In Vandas 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, Edies 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 Eustaches
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
dArc) and forward to Olmis 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 ls) 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

TATE FILM

Programme One
Friday, 25 September 19.00
No Quarto da Vanda (In Vandas Room)
Screening introduced by Pedro Costa
Programme Two
Saturday, 26 September 19.00

Pedro Costa Juventude em Marcha 2006 Pedro Costa

Programme Seven
Saturday, 3 October 15.00
Itinraire de Jean Bricard, Jean-Marie Straub
and Danile Huillet
Sicilia!, Jean-Marie Straub and Danile Huillet
Programme Eight
Saturday, 3 October 19.00

6 Bagatelas
Followed by a conversation between Pedro
Costa and Jean-Pierre Gorin.
Programme Nine
Sunday, 4 October 12.00
The Struggle, DW Griffith
Programme Ten
Sunday, 4 October 14.00
Puissance de la parole (The Power of Words),
Jean-Luc Godard
Beauty #2, Andy Warhol

Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth)

Billie Holiday Sings Fine and Mellow

O Sangue (Blood)

Programme Eleven
Sunday, 4 October 17.00
Le Cochon (The Pig), Jean Eustache
Routine Pleasures, Jean-Pierre Gorin
Followed by a conversation between Pedro
Costa and Jean-Pierre Gorin.

Programme Four
Sunday, 27 September 15.00
Casa de Lava
Tarrafal
Programme Five
Sunday, 27 September 18.30
Ossos (Bones)

Curator: Stuart Comer

Assistant Curator: Marie Canet
With special thanks to Ricardo Matos Cabo.

Pedro Costa No Quarto da Vanda 2000 Pedro Costa

Programme Three
Sunday, 27 September 12.00

Pedro Costa O Sangue 1989 Pedro Costa

O Gt Votre Sourire Enfoui? (Where Does

Your Hidden Smile Lie?)

Pedro Costa O Gt Votre Sourire Enfoui? 2001 Pedro Costa

SCHEDULE

Ne Change Rien
Screening introduced by Pedro Costa

Pedro Costa Tarrafal 2007 Pedro Costa

Routine Pleasures is film essay that grew

from the close friendship between Manny
Farber and Jean-Pierre Gorin, and deals with
method and work, American culture and
landscape, and artistic imagination.

Programme Six
Friday, 2 October 19.00

Pedro Costa Ossos 1997 Pedro Costa

& Ray Eames Toccata For Toy Trains which is the

antithesis of your film (even down to celebrating
toys-which-arent-models whereas your guys
mind is deadpan reality-replication, even down
to timetabling, models-that-only-happen-tobe-toys)? Theres a CAHIERS-style piece here on
your film being about films as well as trains, both
being illusionisms, and why bourgeois realism
knows the model-reality difference perfectly well
but loves pretending that it doesnt- in the case
of trains because confronting reality with a real
train always has something heroic about it, steam
against the sky,, steel lunging through space,
whereas the model has no heroism at all, its the
apotheosis of infantile obsessional control, not
to say consummate anality aboutmotions.
Raymond Durgnat, December 1988

Visit www.tate.org.uk/modern/film

Pedro Costa O Sangue 1989 Pedro Costa

Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG

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