Pedro Costa Pedro Costa Casa De Lava © Pedro 1994 Costa Pedro Costa No Quarto Da Vanda 2000 © Pedro Costa Jean Eustache Le Cochon 1970 © the Artist
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Pedro Costa Casa de Lava 1994 © Pedro Costa Pedro Costa Pedro Costa No Quarto da Vanda 2000 © Pedro Costa Jean Eustache Le Cochon 1970 © The Artist Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillxet Itinéraire de Jean Bricard 2008 © The Artists Pedro Costa Ossos 1997 © Pedro Costa Pedro Costa Casa de Lava 1994 © Pedro Costa DW Griffith The Struggle 1931 Courtesy BFI Stills Pedro Costa O Sangue 1989 © Pedro Costa Pedro Costa Tarrafal 2007 © Pedro Costa Pedro Costa Où Gît Votre Sourire Enfoui? 2001 © Pedro Costa Pedro Costa Ne Change Rien 2009 © Pedro Costa Pedro Costa Casa de Lava 1994 © Pedro Costa Pedro Costa Juventude em Marcha 2006 © Pedro Costa TATE FILM PEDRO COSTA Pedro Costa which renders the situation of exploitation to warn people who have chosen to talk about individuals involved, or a populism that gets Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium intelligible as the effect of specific causes and, misery to remember that misery is not an object trapped by that same situation. This, though, 25 September – 4 October 2009 further, which shows that situation to be the for art. Pedro Costa, however, seems to do the is to inscribe the work of the director in a very source of the forms of consciousness and affects very opposite. He never misses an opportunity petty topography of high and low, near and Acclaimed Portugese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s work that modify it. We want the formal operations to to transform the living spaces of these miserable far, inside and outside. It is to situate his way of is marked by extraordinary intimacy and trancelike be organized around the goal of shedding light on people into objects of art. A plastic water bottle, a working in an all too simple play of oppositions stillness. His films present the lives of Lisbon’s the causes and the chain of effects. Here, though, knife, a glass, a few objects left on a deal table in a between the wealth of colors and the misery of disenfranchised migrants with unflinching honesty is where things become difficult. Pedro Costa’s squatted apartment: there you have, under a light the individuals, between activity and passivity, and dignity. This first UK retrospective of Costa’s camera never once takes the usual path from that strokes the set, the occasion for a beautiful between what is given and what is seized. Pedro risk-taking, beautiful work includes his new film, Ne the places of misery to the places where those still life. As night descends on this space without Costa’s method explodes precisely this system Change Rien, as well as four programmes of films in power produce or manage it. We don’t see in electricity, two small candles placed on the same of oppositions and this topography. It favors that have inspired him, including work by Jean his films the economic power which exploits and table lend to the miserable conversations or to the instead a more complex poetics of exchanges, Eustache, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Jean- relegates, or the power of administrations and the needle sessions the allure of a chiaroscuro from correspondences, and displacements. To see it at Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, and Andy Warhol. police, which represses or displaces populations. the Dutch Golden Age. The motion of excavators work, it might be good to pause a second over We never hear any of his characters speaking is a chance to show, along with the crumbling an episode from Colossal Youth that can, in a few With support from the Calouste Gulbenkian about the political stakes of the situation, or of buildings, sculptural bases made of concrete and ‘tableaux,’ sum up the aesthetics of Pedro Costa, Foundation, UK Branch, and Centre for Iberian and rebelling against it. Filmmakers before Pedro large walls with contrasting colors—blue, pink, and the politics of that aesthetics. Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS), Birkbeck, Costa, like Francesco Rosi, show the machinery yellow, or green. The room where Vanda coughs University of London. that regulates and displaces the poor. Others, like so hard as to tear apart her chest delights us with The episode places us, first, in the ‘normal’ setting of Ventura’s existence: that of an immigrant worker £5 (£4 concessions) Jean-Marie Straub, take the opposite approach. its aquarium green walls, against which we see the They distance their cameras from ‘the misery flight of mosquitoes and gnats. who shares a run-down place with a fellow Cape Season ticket £40 (£30 concessions) of the world’ in order to show, in an open-air Verdean. As it starts, we hear Ventura’s voice amphitheatre designed to evoke ancient grandeur The accusation of aestheticism can be met by reciting a love letter while the camera-eye frames and modern struggles for liberation, the men and saying that Pedro Costa has filmed the places just a grey corner of the wall which is pierced by the The Politics of Pedro Costa women of the people who confront history and as they are. The homes of the poor are on the white rectangle of a window; the four glass bottles Jacques Rancière proudly proclaim the project of a just world. We whole gaudier than the homes of the rich, their on the window sill compose another still life. Urged don’t see any of this in Pedro Costa. He does not raw colors more pleasant to the eye of the art by the voice of his friend Lento, Ventura’s reading How are we to think the politics of Pedro Costa’s inscribe the slums into the landscape of capitalism lover than the standardised aestheticism of petit slowly fades out. The next shot introduces a quite films? The answer appears simple at first. His in mutation, nor does he design his sets to make bourgeois home decorations. In Rilke’s day already, brutal change of setting: the still life that served films are about a situation seemingly at the them commensurate with collective grandeur. exiled poets saw gutted buildings simultaneously as the set for Ventura’s reading is succeeded by heart of the political issues of today: the fate of as fantastic sets and as the stratigraphy of a way yet another colored rectangle taken from a still the exploited, of people who have come from Some might say that this is not a deliberate choice, of living. But the fact that Pedro Costa has filmed darker section of wall: a painting whose frame afar, from former colonies in Africa, to work on but simply the reality of a social mutation: the these places ‘as they are’ means something else, seems to pierce with its own light the surrounding Portuguese construction sites; people who have immigrants from Cape Verde, the poor whites, something that touches on the politics of art. After darkness which threatens to encroach on its edges. lost their families, their health, sometimes even and the marginalized youth of his films bear no Ossos, he stopped designing sets to tell stories. Colors quite similar to the colors of the bottles their lives, on those sites, and who yesterday were resemblance at all to the proletariat, exploited and That is to say, he gave up exploiting misery as outline arabesques in which we can recognize dumped in suburban slums and subsequently militant, which was Rosi’s horizon yesterday, and an object of fiction. He placed himself in these the Sacred Family fleeing to Egypt with a sizeable moved to new homes—better lit, more modern, remains Straub’s today. Their mode of life is not spaces to observe their inhabitants living their cohort of angels. The sound of footsteps announce not necessarily more livable. A number of other that of the exploited, but that of a marginalized lives, to hear what they say, capture their secret. the character who appears in the next shot: sensitive themes are joined to this fundamental group left to fend for itself. The police is absent The virtuosity with which the camera plays with Ventura, who is leaning with his back against the situation. In Casa de Lava, for example, there is from their universe, as are people fighting in colors and lights, and the machine which gives wall, flanked by a portrait of Hélène Fourment by the repression of the Salazar government, which the name of social justice. The only people from the actions and words of the inhabitants the Rubens, the painter of the Flight to Egypt of the sends its opponents off to camps situated on the city center who ever come to visit them are time to be acted out, are one and the same. But previous shot, and by Van Dyck’s Portrait of a Man. nurses, who lose themselves in these outskirts if this answer absolves the director of the sin the very spot from where African immigrants These three well-known works are specifically leave in search of work in the city. And, starting more from an intimate crack than from the of aestheticism, it immediately raises another need to bring relief to suffering populations. The suspicion, another accusation: what politics is this, situated: we are seeing the walls of the Gulbenkian with Ossos, there is the life of young people from Foundation, a building that is obviously not in Lisbon who, due to drugs and deteriorating social inhabitants of Fontainhas live their lot in the way which makes it its task to record, for months and that was so stigmatized during the time of Brecht: months, the gestures and words which reflect the Ventura’s neighborhood. Nothing in the preceding conditions, have found themselves in the same shot announced this visit, and there is nothing in slums and under the same living conditions.