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

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

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. as their destiny. If they discuss it at all, it is to misery of that world? wonder whether heaven, their own choice, or their the film to suggest that Ventura has a taste for Still, neither a social situation nor a visible display weakness is responsible for their lot. This is an accusation which confines the painting. The director has brutally transported of sympathy for the exploited and the neglected conversations in Vanda’s room and Ventura’s Ventura to this museum, which we suppose by the are enough to make art political. We usually What are we to think of the way Pedro Costa drifting to a simple dilemma: either an indiscreet echoing footsteps and the night light to be empty expect there to be a mode of representation places his camera in these spaces? It’s common aestheticism indifferent to the situation of the of visitors, closed off for the shooting of this scene. TATE FILM PEDRO COSTA

The relationship between the three paintings and no right to enjoy. But this simple lesson does not world, and also the workers who’ve come from the constructed around a double return: the return the filmic ‘still life’ that immediately precedes justify the museum being deserted, empty even islands of Cape Verde. That might be why Ventura’s to Ventura’s reading of the letter, and a flashback them, together with that between the decaying of those people who do benefit from the work gaze loses itself somewhere in the ceiling. We to the accident. We see Ventura, his head now in home and the museum, and perhaps even of the Venturas of this world. It does not justify might think he is envisioning the scaffolding he fell a bandage, returning to a wooden shack with a that between the love letter and the paintings the fact that the scenes shot inside the museum from. But we might also think of another lost gaze dilapidated roof. He sits hunched over at a table, on the walls, composes a very specific poetic should be so silent; or that the camera should fixed on an angle of another ceiling, the ceiling imperiously insists that Lento come play cards, displacement, a metaphor that speaks in the film linger on the concrete steps of the service stairs in the new apartment he is shown by a fellow and continues reading the love letter he wants to about the art of the filmmaker: of its relationship down which the guard escorts Ventura; or that from Cape Verde who in many ways resembles teach to Lento, who can’t read. This letter, which to the art in museums, and of the relationship the silence inside the museum should be followed the museum employee. He is, in any case, just as is recited many times, is like a refrain for the film. that one art and the other forges with the body of by a long panoramic shot, punctuated by bird convinced that Ventura is not in his element in this It talks about a separation and about working on its characters. A metaphor which speaks, in short, cries, of the surrounding trees; or that Ventura apartment, which Ventura had requested for his construction sites far from one’s beloved. It also about their politics. should tell his story, from the exact day of his fictive family, and also just as eager to wipe clean speaks about the soon-to-be reunion which will arrival in Portugal, on 29 August 1972; or that the traces of Ventura’s intrusion on this sterile grace two lives for twenty or thirty years, about The politics here might seem quite easy to grasp at the scene should brutally end with him indicating place. In answer to the spiel about the socio- the dream of offering the beloved a hundred first. A silent shot shows us a museum guard who the spot where he fell. Ventura here is something cultural advantages of the neighborhood, Ventura thousand cigarettes, clothes, a car, a little house is himself black walk up to Ventura and whisper completely different from the immigrant worker had majestically extended his arms towards the made of lava, and a three-penny bouquet; it talks something in his ear. As Ventura walks out of the who represents the condition of immigrant ceiling and uttered a lapidary sentence: ‘It’s full of about the effort to learn a new word every day— room, the guard pulls a handkerchief from his workers. The greenery of the scene, the way spider webs.’ The social-housing employee cannot words whose beauty is tailor-made to envelope pocket and wipes clean the traces of Ventura’s feet. Ventura towers over the guard, the solemn tone of verify the presence of these spider webs on the these two beings like a pajamas of fine silk. This We understand: Ventura is an intruder. The guard his voice as he seems to recite a text that inhabits ceiling anymore than we can. It could be Ventura letter is written for one person only, for Ventura tells him later: this museum, he says, is a refuge, him—all of this is very far from every narrative of who has, as the saying goes, ‘spider webs in the has no one to send it to. It is, strictly speaking, far from the din of poor neighborhoods and from misery. Ventura in this scene is a chronicler of his attic.’ And anyway, even if insects do crawl up and its own artistic performance, the performance the supermarkets whose merchandise he used own life, an actor who renders visible the singular down the walls of this housing project, they are Ventura wants to share [partager] with Lento, to have to protect from widespread shoplifting. grandeur of that life, the grandeur of a collective nothing when compared to the decaying walls of because it is the performance of an art of sharing Here, though, is an old and peaceful world that adventure for which the museum seems incapable his friend Lento’s or of Bete’s place, where ‘father’ [partage], of an art that does not split itself off from is disturbed only by the chance visit of someone of supplying an equivalent. The relationship of and ‘daughter’ amuse themselves seeing, as good life, from the experience of displaced people or from their world. Ventura himself had already Pedro Costa’s art to the art displayed on the walls disciples of Leonardo da Vinci, the formation of their means of mitigating absence and of coming manifested that, both with his attitude—he offered of the museum exceeds the simple demonstration all sorts of fantastic figures. The problem with the closer to their loved one. The letter, however, and no resistance to being escorted out of the gallery, of the exploitation of workers for the sake of the white walls that welcome the worker to the housing by the same token, belongs neither to the film nor and eventually out of the museum through the pleasures of the aesthete, much as Ventura’s figure project is the same as the problem of the dark to Ventura: it comes from elsewhere. Albeit more service stairs—and with his gaze, which scrutinized exceeds that of the worker robbed of the fruit of walls of the museum which reject him: they keep discreetly, it already scanned the ‘fictional’ film of some enigmatic point situated, it seemed, well his labor. If we hope to understand this scene, we at bay the chance figures in which the imagination which Colossal Youth is the echo and the reverse: above the paintings. The politics of the episode have to tie the relationships of reciprocity and non- of the worker who crossed the seas, chased frogs Casa de Lava, the story of a nurse who goes to would be to remind us that the pleasures of art are reciprocity into a much more complex knot. from the city center, and slipped and fell from Cape Verde in the company of Leão, a worker who, not for the proletariat and, more precisely still, that the scaffolding can be on a par with that of the like Ventura, has also injured his head, but on a museums are closed off to the workers who build To begin with, the museum is not the place of artist. The art on the walls of the museum is not different construction site. them. This becomes explicit in the gardens of the artistic wealth opposed to the penury of the simply a sign of the ingratitude towards the person Foundation, in the conversation between Ventura worker. The colored arabesques of the Flight to who built the museum. It is as stingy towards the The letter first appeared in the papers of Edith, an and the museum employee during which we learn Egypt show no straightforward superiority over sensible wealth of his experience as to the light that exile from the big city who went to Cape Verde why Ventura fits into this displaced setting. There the shot of the window with four bottles in the shines on even the most miserable homes. to be near her lover, sent by Salazar’s regime to used to be nothing here at all but a marsh, bushes poor lodgings of the two workers. The painting’s the Tarrafal concentration camp. She stayed there and frogs. It was Ventura, together with other golden frame strikes us as a stingier delimitation We’ve already heard this in Ventura’s narrative after his death and was adopted, in her confusion, workers, who cleaned up the area, laid down the of space than the window of the house, as a about his departure from Cape Verde on 29 August by the black community, which lived off of her terrace, built the plumbing system, carried the way of canceling out everything that surrounds it 1972, his arrival in Portugal, the transformation of pension, and thanked her with serenades. It had construction materials, erected the statue of the and of rendering uninteresting all that is outside a swamp into an art foundation, and the fall. By seemed, then, that the love letter had been written place’s founder, and planted the grass at its feet. It of it—the vibrations of light in the space, the placing Ventura in such a setting, Pedro Costa has by the sentenced man. But at the hospital, at Leão’s was here, too, that he fell from the scaffolding. contrasting colors of the walls, the sounds from given him a Straub-like tone, the epic tone of the bedside, Mariana gave the letter to Tina, Leão’s outside. The museum is a place where art is discoverers of a new world. The problem is not younger sister, to read, as it was written in Creole. The episode, in sum, would be an illustration of the locked up within this frame that yields neither really to open the museum to the workers who Tina appropriates the letter, which becomes for the poem in which Brecht asks who built Thebes, with transparency nor reciprocity. It is the space of a built it, but to make an art commensurate with viewer not a letter sent from the death camp by its seven gates and other architectural splendors. stingy art. If the museum excludes the worker the experience of these travelers, an art that has the deported man, but by Leão from a construction Ventura would represent all those people who who built it, it is because it excludes all that lives emerged from them, and which they themselves site in Portugal. But when Mariana asks Leão about have constructed buildings, at great danger to from displacements and exchanges: light, forms, can enjoy. That is what we learn from the episode it, as he finally emerges from his coma, his answer their health and lives, which they themselves have and colors in their movement, the sound of the which follows Ventura’s brutal fall. It is an episode is peremptory: how could he have written the love TATE FILM PEDRO COSTA letter, if he doesn’t know how to write? All of a different politics of art. This politics is a stranger to to get the audiences of neighborhood cinemas to to booze and Creole. The death of the militant in sudden, the letter seems not to have been written that politics which works by bringing to the screen enjoy the equal splendor of a mountain, a horse, the camp of the Salazar regime and the wound of by, or addressed to, anyone in particular. It now the state of the world to make viewers aware of or a rocking chair—equal because of the absence the immigrant who works on construction sites in seems like a letter written by a public scribe adept the structures of domination in place and inspire of any hierarchy of visual values between people, Portugal establish—at the heart of the circulation at putting into form the feelings of love, as well them to mobilize their energies. It finds its models landscape, or objects1. At the heart of a system of of bodies, medical care, words, and music—the as the administrative requests, of the illiterate. in the love letter by Ventura/Desnos and in the production entirely subservient to the profit of its dimension of that which cannot be exchanged, of Its message of love loses itself in the grand, music of Leão’s family, for their art is one in which studio heads, cinema showed itself to be an art of the irreparable. In Ossos, there is Tina’s silence, her impersonal transaction which links Edith to the the form is not split off from the construction of a equality. The problem, as we unfortunately know, loss as to what to do with the child in her arms dead militant, to the wounded black worker, to social relation or from the realization of a capacity is that capitalism is not what it used to be, and if other than take the child with her to their deaths. the kitchen of the erstwhile camp cook, and to the that belongs to everyone. We shouldn’t confuse this Hollywood is still thriving, neighborhood cinemas Colossal Youth is split between two logics, two music of Leão’s father and brother, whose bread with that old dream of the avant-garde in which are not, having been replaced by multiplexes that regimes of the exchange of words and experiences. and music Mariana has shared, but who would artistic forms would be dissolved in the relations give each sociologically-determined audience On one side, the camera is placed in Vanda’s new not go visit Leão at the hospital. They continued, of the new world. The politics here, rather, is about a type of art designed and formatted to suit it. room, which is sterile white and filled by a double- nevertheless, working on refurbishing his house, thinking the proximity between art and all those Pedro Costa’s films, like every work that eludes bed of the type one finds at discount stores. There, the house which he would not enter but on two other forms which can convey the affirmation of a this formatting process, are immediately labeled a mellower and plumper Vanda talks about her legs, all the while making arrangements so that sharing [partage] or shareable [partageable] capacity. as film-festival material, something reserved for new life, about her detox, the child, the deserving they, too, could go and work on construction sites The stress on the greens of Vanda’s room cannot the exclusive enjoyment of a film-buff elite and husband, about her treatment and health issues. in Portugal. be separated from the attempts—by Vanda, tendentiously pushed to the province of museums On the other, the camera follows the often silent Zita, Pedro or Nurro—to examine their lives and and art lovers. For that, of course, Pedro Costa Ventura, who now and then utters an imperious The letter that Pedro Costa gives Ventura to read take control of it. The luminous still life composed blames the state of the world, meaning the naked command or lapidary sentence, and who belongs to this wide circulation: between here with a plastic bottle and a few found objects on domination of the power of money, which classes sometimes loses himself in his narrative or in the and elsewhere, committed city folk and exiled the white wooden table of a squat is in harmony as ‘films for film-buffs’ the work of directors who reciting of his letter. It portrays him as a strange workers, the literate and the illiterate, the wise with the stubbornness with which the redhead try to bring to everyone the wealth of sensorial animal, too large or too shy for the set, whose eyes and the confused. But in extending its addressees, uses his knife to clean, the protests of his friends experience found in the humblest of lives. The sometimes shine like those of a wild animal, and the letter doubles back to its origin and another notwithstanding, the stain from the table destined system makes a sad monk of the director who whose head is more often bent down than held up: circulation is grafted onto the trajectory of the for the teeth of the excavator. Pedro Costa does not wants to make his cinema shareable [partageable] the distracted gaze of a sick man. The point with immigrants. Pedro Costa wrote the letter by mixing film the ‘misery of the world.’ He films its wealth, like the music of the violin player from Cape Verde Ventura is not to gather the evidence of a hard life, two sources: a letter by an immigrant worker, and the wealth that anyone at all can become master and like the letter written jointly by the poet and even if it is in order to figure out who cinema can a letter written by a ‘true’ author, Robert Desnos, of: that of catching the splendor of a reflection of the illiterate worker. share [partager] this life with, and to whom it can who wrote his letter sixty years earlier from camp light, but also that of being able to speak in a way give it back as his or her life. The point is rather to Flöha in Saxony, a way-stop on the road to Terezin, that is commensurate with one’s fate. And, lastly, It is true that today, the domination by the wealthy confront what cannot be shared [l’impartageable], and death. This means that Leão’s fictional destiny the politics here is about being able to return what tends to constitute a world in which equality the cracks that have separated a person from and Ventura’s real one are brought together in a can be extracted of sensible wealth—the power of must disappear even from the organization of the himself. Ventura is not an ‘immigrant worker,’ a circuit which links the ordinary exile of workers to speech, or of vision—from the life and decorations sensible landscape. All the wealth in this landscape poor man entitled to be treated with dignity and the death camps. It also means that the art of the of these precarious existences back to them, about has to appear as separated, as attributed to, and to share in the pleasures afforded by the world he poor, of the public scribe, and of great poets are making it available to them, like a song they can privately enjoyed by, one category of owners. The has helped build. He is a sort of sublime drifter, a captured together in the same fabric: an art of life enjoy, like a love letter whose words and sentences system gives the humble the pocket change of character from tragedy, someone who interrupts and of sharing [partage], an art of travel and of they can borrow for their own love lives. its wealth, of its world, which it formats for them, communication and exchange on his own. communication made for those for whom to live is but which is separated from the sensorial wealth to travel—to sell their work force to build houses Isn’t that, after all, what we can expect from of their own experience. This is the television There seems to be a divorce between two regimes and museums for other people, in the process the cinema, the popular art of the twentieth in Vanda’s room. Still, this particular deal of the of expression in the passage from the dilapidated bring with them their experience, their music, their century, the art that allowed the greatest number cards is not the only reason behind the break walls, the colorful sets, and the loud colors of the way of living and loving, of reading on walls and of of people—people who would not walk into a in reciprocity and the separation between the slums to the new furniture and the white walls listening to the song of humans and birds. museum—to be thrilled by the splendor of the film and its world. The experience of the poor is which no longer echo the words of those in the effect of a ray of light shining on an ordinary not just that of displacements and exchanges, room. Even if Vanda is willing to play the role of one There is no aestheticizing formalism or populist setting, by the poetry of clinking glasses or of of borrowing, stealing, and giving back. It is also of Ventura’s ‘daughters,’ even if Ventura sits at her deference in the attention Pedro Costa pays to a conversation on the counter of any old diner? the experience of the crack which interrupts table and chats in her room, and occasionally even every beautiful form offered by the homes of the Confronted with people who align him with great the fairness of exchanges and the circulation of does some baby-sitting, the crack in Ventura casts poor, and the patience with which he listens to the ‘formalists’ like Bresson, Dreyer or Tarkovsky, Pedro experiences. In Casa de Lava, it is difficult to tell the shadow of this enormous and broken body, oftentimes trivial and repetitive words uttered in Costa sometimes claims a whole different lineage: if Leão’s silence as he lies on the hospital bed this enormous body which has been displaced Vanda’s room, and in the new apartment where we Walsh and Tourneur, as well as more modest and is the manifestation of a traumatic coma or the into the story of Vanda’s new life, on her narrative see Vanda after she has kicked her habit, put on anonymous directors of B films who crafted well- desire not to return to the common world. So, at the same time that it lends vanity to it. We can some weight, and become a mother. The attention formatted stories on a tight budget for the profit of too, with Edith’s ‘madness,’ her ‘forgetfulness’ of describe this intimate divorce using terms taken and the patience are inscribed, instead, in a Hollywood studios, and who didn’t for all that fail the Portuguese language and her confinement from on old quarrel, one summed up more than TATE FILM PEDRO COSTA two centuries ago by Jean-Jacques Rousseau O SANGUE / Blood heart of its status as a depiction of the real. change of scenery, volunteers to accompany in the Preface to The New Heloise. These family Portugal 1989, 35mm, 1:1,33, b/w, 95 min So ‘Blood’ begins sharply, after the sound (under him. When she arrives, nothing is like she letters, are they real or fictive, the objector asks the black screen) of a car stopping, a door expected. No one seems to be waiting the man of letters. If they are real, then they are Direction and screenplay: Pedro Costa, slamming, footsteps: a young man has his face for Leão or even to care for him. Mariana portraits, and we expect portraits to be faithful to Cinematography: Martin Schäfer, Sound: slapped. Cut (in a stark reverse-field, down an waits for someone to claim Leão and waits the model. This makes them not very interesting Pedro Caldas, Gérard Rousseau, Editing: endless road in the wilderness) to an older man, for him to wake up. She gets increasingly to people who are not members of the family. Manuela Viegas, Producer: Victor Gonçalves, the father. Then back to the young man: ‘Do involved with the mysterious Fogo ‘Imaginary paintings,’ on the other hand, Produced by Trópico Filmes what you want with me.’ The father picks up his volcano community; the adventure begins… interest the public, provided they resemble, not with: Pedro Hestnes, Nuno Ferreira, suitcase (insert shot) and begins to walk off … I have dreamed so much of you, a particular individual, but the human being. Inês Medeiros, Luis Miguel Cintra, Canto e The beginning of ‘Colossal Youth’ also announces, Pedro Costa says things differently: the patience Castro, Isabel de Castro, Ana Otero, Manuel in just this way, its immortal story: bags thrown Walked so often, talked so often with you, of the camera, which every day mechanically João Vieira, Miguel Fernandes, Henrique out a window, a perfect image (reminiscent, Loved your shadow so much. films the words, gestures, and footsteps of the Viana, Luís Santos, José Eduardo, Pedro Miguel on a Surrealist plane, of the suitcases Nothing is left me of you. characters—not in order to make films, but as thrown into rooms through absent windows, the Nothing is left of me but a shadow an exercise in approximating the secret of the Two brothers, 17 year-old Vicente and 10 sign of a ceaseless moving on and moving in, in among shadows, other—must bring a third character to life on the year-old Nino. A tiny village on the bank Ruiz’s ‘City of Pirates’) of dispossession, of beings screen. A character who is not the director, nor of the Tagus river. Between Christmas and restlessly on the move from the moment they A being a hundred timwes more Vanda, nor Ventura, a character who is, and is New Year’s Eve. The boys are united by begin to exist in the image. (…) Costa uses fiction, shadowy than a shadow, not, a stranger to our lives2. But the emergence a secret closely related to their father’s gives it a body, but simultaneously abstracts, A shadowy being who comes, and of this impersonal also gets caught up in the absence: he vanished because he got hollows out that body into something ghostly and comes again, in your sunlit life. disjunction in its turn: it is hard for this third sick or maybe because he was involved in incorporeal: it is a vibrant paradox, and a rare Robert Desnos, Last Poem (Terezina character to avoid becoming either Vanda’s some type of suspicious activity. This time combination in cinema. What this means is that Concentration Camp, May 1945) portrait, and as such enclosed in the family of he seems to have disappeared for good. Costa achieves ‘moments’ which are pure cinema, social identifications, or Ventura’s painting, the What has happened? The elder brother pure fiction, pure intrigue, while at the same time ‘Casa de Lava’ starts several times. The opening painting of the crack and the enigma which and a very young girl are the only ones conserving their mystery, their ‘secret side’ (‘don’t shots of a volcanic eruption – borrowed from renders family portraits and narratives futile. A to know the secret. go showing every side of a thing’, cautioned a film called A ‘Erupção do Vulcão da Ilha do native of the island says as much to Mariana, the Bresson, advice which Godard quotes). Fogo’, provided to Costa by the geographer well-intentioned nurse: your skull is not fractured. There were once two teenagers and a child. Adrian Martin, The Inner Life of a Film Orlando Ribeiro - impose a sense of the If we look back to the classical American The crack splits experience into those that can Pedro Costa’s BLOOD (O Sangue) pre-human, a pure inhospitability. The next cinema we find that same secret alliance that be shared [partageable], and those which cannot is available NOW on Second Run DVD sequence is a series of close shots of women existed among Nicholas Ray’s rebels. But these [impartageable]. The screen where the third www.secondrundvd.com standing in a rocky landscape. The women are character should appear is stretched between teenagers are not really rebels, and they looking at something; or, rather, since Costa these two experiences, between two risks: the don’t get mixed in that insolvable night in the never establishes that these women are in the risk of platitude, in the life narratives, and of graveyard, when they get hold of the unshared CASA DE LAVA same place facing in the same direction, let’s infinite flight, in the confrontation with the crack. secret of the child. Their division lies in that Portugal / France 1994, 35mm, 1:1,66, colour, say they are looking at various somethings: Cinema cannot be the equivalent of the love separation, in that journey that will isolate them, 110 min orientation without orientation. Some of letter or of the music of the poor. It can no longer without any roots, and that will make them as these women will be (and maybe are not yet) be the art which gives the poor the sensible lost in space as they were from their own time. Direction and screenplay: Pedro Costa, characters in the film – in the same way that wealth of their world. It must split itself off, it João Bénard da Costa, O preto é uma cor, ou Cinematography: Emmanuel Machuel, the people in ‘In Vanda’s Room’ and ‘Colossal must agree to be the surface upon which the o cinema de Pedro Costa Sound: Henri Maikoff, Editing: Dominique Youth’ are characters in those films: quasi-real, experience of people relegated to the margins Auvray, Producer: Paulo Branco, Produced by quasi-fictional, not firmly located on either side ‘Blood’ is a special first feature – the first of economic circulations and social trajectories Madragoa Filmes in co-production with Pandora of the nonexistent border. (…) The characters are features of not-yet auteurs themselves forming try to be ciphered in new figures. This new Film and Gemini Films all exiles; any position they take is provisional. a particular cinematic genre, especially in surface must be hospitable to the division which (‘Not even the dead are at peace here.’ retrospect. Perhaps it was from Huillet and with: Inês Medeiros, Isaach de Bankolé, Edith separates portrait and painting, chronicle and Chris Fujiwara, The Mystery of Origins Straub’s ‘Class Relations’ that Costa learnt the Scob, Pedro Hestnes, Sanda do Canto Brandão, tragedy, reciprocity and rift. An art must be made priceless lesson of screen fiction, worthy of Sam Cristiano Andrade Alves, Raul Andrade, João in the place of another. Pedro Costa’s greatness Costa’s people are often disembodied, zombies, Fuller: start the piece instantly, with a gaze, a Medina, António Andrade, Manuel Andrade is that he simultaneously accepts and rejects this never quite here. Jacques Tourneur, not Straub. gesture, a movement, some ‘displacement’ of Does Costa instruct his actors not to think, alteration, that his cinema is simultaneously a Leão, a Cape Verdean immigrant and a air and energy, something dropped like a meditate, or be one in their body? Vermeer’s cinema of the possible and of the impossible. bricklayer in Lisbon, falls off the scaffolding heavy stone to shatter the calm of pre-fiction and the Straubs’ people dominate their space; and enters a deep coma. Arrangements are 1 See Pedro Costa and Rui Chaves, Fora! Out! (Porto: Fundação de Serralves, 2007) 119. equilibrium. To set the motor of the intrigue Costa’s are visitors. They are shapes, figures 2 Fora! Out!, p.115. made for him to return to his homeland, in going – even if that intrigue will be so shadowy, in incredibly beautiful compositions. ‘Casa de Cape Verde. A nurse, Mariana, eager for a © Jacques Rancière so shrouded in questions that go to the very Lava’ is a suite of wonderful plays on depth- TATE FILM PEDRO COSTA

of-field and foreground, with a flirtation ballet Costa accords his abject characters verge on Pandora Film, Ventura Film, ZDF Das Kleine which they seem even more defenseless, by lovers with their backs turned – figures, the beatific—the soft, long-haired father with Fernsehspiel, RTSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera moments that recall the most mysterious even when there are faces. his faraway gaze evokes one of Bellini’s musing Italiana and Radiotelevisão Portuguesa (RTP) encounters in the greatest fiction films. For Tag Gallagher, Straub Anti-Straub Madonnas—and the exquisite lighting turns example (a privileged example in my memory), two symmetrical shots of a photograph, some with: Vanda Duarte, Zita Duarte, Lena Duarte, in one of the film’s plainest, brightest sequence keys, and crumpled cigarette packs lying on António Semedo Moreno, Paulo Nunes, shot, Vanda and her friend Pedro sit on the OSSOS / Bones a red dresser into colorist still lives. Costa is Pedro Lanban, Geny, Paulo Jorge Gonçalves, edge of her bed talking about the death of Portugal / France / Germany 1997, 35mm, also not beyond bravura: He takes obvious Evangelina Nelas, Miquelina Barros, Fernando their friend Geni. She gives him some medicine, 1:1,66, colour, 94 min pleasure in a long, tricky tracking shot of the Paixão, Julião, Mosca, Manuel Gomes Miranda, he gives her some flowers. There is solidarity, Diogo Pires Miranda Direction and screenplay: Pedro father striding down the street, and twice uses even love that is palpable. Presumably Costa extreme shallow focus to flaunty effect. His Costa, Cinematography: Emmanuel In 1997, Pedro Costa directed the feature could only have recorded these moments raw verism sometimes lapses into strain- Machuel, Editing: Jackie Bastide, Sound: film Ossos about the fate of one family. with unassuming, lightweight cameras. But, of making coincidence to establish connections Henri Maikoff, Gérard Rousseau, Producer: Paulo Later he returned to the film’s location, an course, the intimacy of the movie is not simply between characters, and he has not yet totally Branco, Produced by Madragoa Filmes in co- immigrant district of Lisbon, to make this a matter of technique. There must have been a surrendered the use of professional actors production with Zentopa and Gemini Films sequel-of-sorts. He follows Vanda Duarte close mutual respect and friendship between (Inês Medeiros as the prostitute, for instance). over the course of one year. We see a tiny Costa and the people he filmed. In ‘Ossos’, then, Costa still holds close his with: Vanda Duarte, Nuno Vaz, Maria Lipkina, room measuring only three metres in all Thom Andersen, ‘Ghost Stories’ passport for what Godard called ‘this beautiful Isabel Ruth, Inês Medeiros, Miguel Sermão, directions, the events that occur and recur Berta Susana Teixeira, Clotilde Montrond, Zita land of narrative. daily, visits from friends and relatives, and OÙ GÎT VOTRE SOURIRE ENFOUI? / Duarte, Beatriz Lopes, Luísa Carvalho James Quandt, Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa the days passed in the thrall of drugs, and sit Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? Ossos is Costa’s first film encounter with ‘Ossos’ comes from very familiar things, things transfixed by the bleakness of Vanda’s one- Portugal / France 2001, 35mm, 1:1,33, colour, the migrant Cape Verdean community you can easily recall. It comes from Chaplin, bed apartment, and the gradual destruction 104 min of Lisbon, living in Estrela D’África, a from the melodramas of the beginning of the surrounding buildings. of the cinema, a boy with a baby in the Direction and cinematography: Pedro Costa, shantytown in the outskirts of the city. It Life despises me. I have lived in ghost streets, speeding dangerous cars, a loaf of Assistant: Thierry Lounas, Sound: Matthieu is a film of portraits and a film of place, houses that others left behind. Houses bread, a prostitute, two or three kitchens. And a Imbert, Editing: Dominique Auvray, Patrícia a study of characters and their gestures, where a sorceress wouldn’t want to live. But strong desire to be close to reality, to Saramago, Producer: Francisco Villa-Lobos, deeply involved with their lives and the occasionally, I have found a house that was documentary, to be close to these people who Produced by: Contracosta Produções in co- spaces they inhabit and where they worth the while. All my houses, all the houses are not actors, people that are very similar production of Amip Paris, ARTE France and the move. At the heart of the film, a newborn were illegal houses. They have been deserted. to the ones they’re depicting. The boy was a Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) baby, his young parents, the people they If we had been better… they wouldn’t have poor junky in real life and the housekeeper is cross in their actions, when moving out of been demolished. And that, house after house. with: Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub a housekeeper. But even if there’s a desire to despair, out of love, for nothing at all. As I have paid more for something I didn’t do make a sort of documentary, it’s nevertheless in his first film, Blood, this is a stark, severe than for the things I’ve done’ Pedro Costa shot this great portrait of fiction that carries the film on, saving it. Fiction look at the city and the way it shapes and Pango, from No Quatro Da Vanda Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at differentiates the lives of those living in is always a door that we want to open or close. work while they were re-editing the third its margins. It develops the filmmaker’s A door that keeps us guessing. ‘No Quarto da Vanda’ is also an intimate version of Sicilia! at the Studio National penchant for elliptical narrative structures, Pedro Costa work, a chamber drama, as the title des Arts Contemporains in Le Fresnoy. A his careful attention to time and detail, his announces. I took it as documentary, but a work of friendship and dedication and a work with closed and cloistered spaces documentary of unprecedented candor, the lesson of cinema. NO QUARTO DA VANDA / In Vanda’s Room and his intimate form of portraiture, which kind of movie Kieslowski claimed is impossible Portugal / Germany / Switzerland 2000, 35mm, would be essential in the films to come. because ‘there are spheres of human intimacy The problem with a shot like this, if you want 1:1,33, 178 min in which one cannot enter with a camera.’ to know, is getting it done. Most of us begin Costa’s blocky compositions and elliptic editing, with a cliché – not always, but most of the Direction and cinematography: Pedro Costa, Costa had found his way into these spheres, which sometimes leaves one scrambling across time – and that’s fine, but you have to look at Sound: Phillipe Morel, Matthieu Imbert, among poor immigrants who can find only chasms of excised incident and ambiguous it from all sides and clarify it. So you start with Editing: Dominique Auvray, Producer: Francisco casual, irregular work and must struggle to relationships, suggest severity, as does the idea of discovery… Showing a mountain Villa-Lobos, Produced by: Contracosta create a space of their own in a neighborhood his partiality for Bressonian effects—tight without the window, without anything. A torn Produções in co-production with Pandora Film, (Fontainhas in Lisbon) that we can see being shots of hands, locks, and doorways, the curtain. Then you ask yourself, but why? It Ventura Film, ZDF Das Kleine Fernsehspiel, torn down around them. They belong to what camera sometimes holding for a beat or will inhibit the viewer’s imagination instead RTSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera Italiana and some privileged technocrats and their dupes two after a figure has departed the frame, of opening it up and you say to yourself: ‘yes, Radiotelevisão Portuguesa (RTP) in the U.S. call ‘the underclass.’ So we see offscreen sound indicating contiguous space. Vanda Duarte and her friends smoking smack, after having filmed Mount Etna, Mount Saint- But ‘Ossos’ is more sensual than ascetic, more Producer: Francisco Villa-Lobos, Produced by: shooting up, and talking trash. But there are Victoire, why add another one?’ And so you doleful than denying. The soulful close-ups Contracosta Produções in co-production with also moments of astonishing tenderness in renounce, slowly. Then one fine day… One TATE FILM PEDRO COSTA

fine day you realize that it’s better to see persuasive advocate for them, on the other I’ll wait. / Every day, every minute. / Every day Estrela Garden, worried about their future. It as little as possible. You have a sort of… hand that very brevity itself requires an I learn some new and beautiful words, just is precisely because I film these things in this reduction, only it’s not a reduction – it’s a advocate. Consider what moderation is for the two of us. / Tailor-made, like a fine manner that I don’t believe in democracy. concentration and it actually says more. But required to express oneself so briefly. You can silk pajama. Would you like that? / I can only No one in Fontainhas believes in democracy. you don’t do that immediately from one day to stretch every glance out into a poem, every sigh send you with one letter per month. / But still People like Ventura built the banks, museums, the next. You need time and patience. A sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single nothing from your hand. / Maybe next time. / theatres, schools and condominiums of the can become a novel. gesture, a joy in breath – such concentration Sometimes I’m frightened about building this bourgeoisie. And it’s precisely what they helped Jean-Marie Straub can only be present in proportion to the wall / Me, with a pick-axe and cement / You, build that defeated them. You have the cruelest absence of self-pity.’ with your silence / Such a deep valley that it proof of this failure in the other rooms, the This is a film haunted by the power of the Arnold Schoenberg on Anton Webern’s ‘6 pushes you towards oblivion. / It hurts me agony of Paulo, Vanda, Zita, the permanent silhouette, and the faces presented and that Bagatelles’ inside to see these bad things I don’t want to collapse of those rooms. we are allowed to glance at always tend to see. / Your beautiful hair falls from my hands Pedro Costa gravitate toward that state: an abstracted like blades of dry grass. / Sometimes I lose two-dimensionality that makes both Danièle JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA / Colossal Youth my energy and imagine that I’m going to Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub exist at the Portugal / France / Switzerland 2006, 35mm, forget about myself. TARRAFAL periphery of their own work in some patient 1:1,33, colour, 154 min Ventura’s Letter Portugal 2007, 35mm, 1:1,33, colour, 16 min acknowledgement, pondering and shaping of its physical properties. There is a rigor in Direction: Pedro Costa, Cinematography: Pedro Ventura and Desnos were destined to meet. Direction and cinematography: Pedro this abstracting of the human form, in this Costa, Leonardo Simões, Sound: Olivier Blanc, It took place in this film. It’s History. It’s Costa, Sound: Vasco Pedroso, Olivier Blanc, willingness to be in such close proximity to Jean-Pierre Laforce, Editing: Pedro Marques, Cinema. One line from Desnos, ‘I’d like to Editing: Patrícia Saramago, Produced by Luís a figure and yet to never openly play the Producer: Francisco Villa-Lobos, Produced by: offer you 100,000 cigarettes.’ One line from Correia, LX Filmes game of tracking the revelatory explicitness Contracosta Produções and co-produced by Les Ventura, ‘the house of lava that you so longed with: José Alberto Silva, Lucinda Tavares, of an expression. The rhetoric of Costa’s Films de l’Étranger, Unlimited, Ventura Film, for.’ Both are condemned, destroyed men, Ventura, Alfredo Mendes portrait goes against all the conventions of Radiotelevisão Portuguesa and Radiotelevisione ghosts of other men that despite torture, svizzera film portraiture. We are not invited to witness madness and exploitation still managed Tarrafal is part of ‘The State of the World’ film, the blossoming of a memorized anecdote on with: Ventura, Vanda Duarte, Beatriz Duarte, to resist. This love letter had to become a commissioned by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian a face; we are not invited to decipher even Gustavo Sumpta, Cila Cardoso, Alberto Barros, moral and political testament, a declaration the force of conviction in the articulation of José Alberto, 30 years old, receives a letter of António Semedo, Paulo Nunes, José Maria Pina, of war. This letter attempts to appease their an expression: we are just seeing bodies or extradition. The inequities of the past and the André Semedo, Alexandre Silva, Paula Barrulas suffering while announcing far worse horrors. parts of bodies silhouetted by the tenuous (...) Ventura arrived in Portugal in 1972, he injustice of the present situation of migrant yet potent light that comes from the film Ventura, a Cape Verdean labourer living found a well-paid mason, job and he believed labourers forced to leave Portugal, meet in a material they relentlessly try to shape. in the outskirts of Lisbon, is suddenly that he would succeed, that he would be plea for memory and resilience. Silhouettes by the glow of their work. abandoned by his wife Clotilde. Ventura feels able to save up enough money to bring his Tarrafal, sixteen minutes, fifteen shots, stories Jean-Pierre Gorin, Nine Notes on ‘Où gît votre lost between the dilapidated old quarter wife from Cape Verde. Then the revolution and dialogues stretching over in the stillness of sourire enfoui’ ? where he spent the last thirty-four years of took place and he told me the secret story of the night and of the the countryside. The place his life, and the new lodgings in a recently African immigrants in Lisbon after April 25th is before anything else one of these ‘filmmaker’s built low-cost housing complex. All the 1974. They feared they would be deported or 6 BAGATELAS room’ (Jacques Rancière), where voices emerge young poor souls he meets seem to become imprisoned. For Ventura this was a moment Portugal / France 2003, Beta SP, 1:1,33, colour, from the darkness and dwell on endlessly. The his own children. of condemnation: chaos, delirium, sickness. disinherited speak to master their own lives, their 18 min He was simultaneously a prisoner and guard own survival: here a woman and her grown up Nha cretcheu, my love / Our encounter will in his wooden shanty house in Fontainhas. Direction and cinematography: Pedro boy with dreadlocks, in his thirties. Nothing is make our life more beautiful, at least for He survived by repeating and memorizing ‘ad Costa, Assistant: Thierry Lounas, more common, more concrete than the situations another thirty years. / For my part, I become eternum’ his love letter. I realized that the April Sound: Matthieu Imbert, Editing: Patrícia and the informations that we’re offered. The first younger and return full of energy. / I’d like 25th Revolution, that for me was a moment of Saramago, Produced by: Contracosta Produções word is ‘mum’, the family ties are omnipresent, it’s to offer you a hundred thousand cigarettes, lyrical exaltation and enthusiasm, constituted a about returning to Cape Vert, about where to live, with: Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub / A dozen snazzy dresses, A car, / The house nightmare for Ventura. I was a kid at the time. how to build a house, what to eat. The places are of lava that you so longed for, / A four penny I went out to the streets, demonstrating, and, named and listed: Mourão, Montinho, Achada, Pedro Costa takes six unused scenes of Où bunch of flowers. / But before anything else probably, already dreaming about cinema. Ungueira, Raçatcho, Montinho de Cima, Montinho Gît Votre Sourire Enfoui? and edits them into / Drink a fine bottle of wine, / Think about A while ago, I looked for some photographs de Baixo, Milho Branco, Santana near Assomada. a new context. These fragments are not only me. / Here work is non-stop. / Now there are of the May 1st crowds with thousands of The mother shivers, she coughs, her hands ‘bagatelles,’ but a special look at Danièle more than a hundred of us. / The day before people celebrating. It’s incredible - you don’t under her arms, she warms herself just thinking Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. yesterday, my birthday / Was the time for a see a single black face. Where were they? about her homeland and feels like putting her deep thought about you. / Did the letter they Ventura told me that they were all huddled ‘Though the brevity of these pieces is a bones to rest. Then it’s all about bewitchment brought arrive safely? / I receive no reply. / together, absolutely terrified, hidden in the TATE FILM PEDRO COSTA

and death as in every other film by Pedro Costa. while she’s just hanging out and trying to find Sicilia! seducing (seduced by?) Gino Piserchio, while On the same tone, the mom tells a tale from the beat. Still lives with music, almost. But what’s Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Italy/ a Doberman Pinscher named Horse uses his her land, about a vampire that hands its victims different in Ne change rien, probably because France 1999, 66 min slack leash to appear and disappear from a parchment without them noticing, and kills it’s a documentary (though about as much a doc the frame. Off-screen, Edie’s ex-lover Chuck them when he returns to collect it. as Costa’s other recent films, which also show Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet have created Wein taunts and betrays. This is performing, Bernard Eisenschitz everyday life as staged by the people who live a bold and beautiful adaptation of Elio Vittorini’s acting, and being as a trial – and everyone it), is the expressiveness of the actors, grinning masterwork Conversations in Sicily. Published (audience, performers, director) is culpable. when they find the mainline, hands flicking up in 1939 and a best seller until banned in 1942, NE CHANGE RIEN and down on their knees. Costa lights bodies like the novel narrates the return of an intellectual to Portugal / France 2009, 35mm / 1:1,33, b/w, 98 min solar flare lines and faces like half-moons, slight his native Sicily after a long absence. The film is Le Cochon (The Pig) whites against pitch black backgrounds, so that structured as a series of dialogue encounters— Jean Eustache, France 1970, 50 min Direction and cinematography: Pedro Costa, with strangers in a port, fellow passengers on a Sound: Philippe Morel, Olivier Blanc, Vasco a slight turn of the neck can reconfigure a face’s Like candy in a store, like a Sunday walk in composition, bring new parts out from shadow; train, the protagonist’s mother—each of which Pedroso, Sound editing: Miguel Cabral, conceals more than it reveals, emphasizing the the country, like a good mystery novel, two Olivier Blanc, Sound Mix: Jean-Pierre Laforce, the look is almost charcoal. The result’s that wonderful gifts from Eustache and Gorin to players are only seen minimally—in silhouette distance between what can be seen and felt Editing: Patrícia Saramago, Producer: Abel and what can be expressed. Moving beyond the enjoy and be thankful. Ribeiro Chaves, Prod uced by: Sociedade Óptica with a hand waving back and forth, or just an eye Pedro Costa and right curl of the mouth—so that the smallest original’s immediate context—the increasing Técnica in co-production with Red Star Cinéma oppression of pre-war Italy—Straub/Huillet offer gestures express maximally. The opening shot, Considered by many to be Eustache’s a moving look at the state of permanent exile with: Jeanne Balibar, Rodolphe Burger, Hervé Loos, the simplest shot from a stage right wing as the most beautiful film, the bluntly named Le common to all of those who can’t go home again. Arnaud Dieterlen, Joël Theux musicians come out and start, makes stage lights Cochon is, on the surface, an ethnographic New York Film Festival look like stars, the act a constellation. The movie’s documentary that captures a dying tradition: Ne Change Rien was born as a result of the just people jamming, superficially his Poor Little the slaughter and processing of a pig on friendship between Jeanne Balibar, sound Rich Girl, but Costa, as usual, gives the most The Struggle a farm in the southern Massif Central. The engineer Philippe Morel, and Pedro Costa. banal acts metaphysical weight: as in a dream— DW Griffith, USA 1931, 84 min view is detached but sympathetic: ‘With The film follows Jeanne Balibar, the singer, my dreams, anyway, half-awake—starting with scrupulous respect for popular traditions, the from rehearsals to recording sessions, from a half-formed image and a montage of sounds In these hard times, it should be an obligation: 90 film features an amazing soundtrack in which rock concerts to classical singing lessons, and voices, building, that gradually find their minutes more of DW Griffith in a film theatre equals the source and originality of natural voices from an attic in the Black Forest to the stage bodies (and what’s maybe most dream-like is the 90 minutes less of abstract crap on the screen. remains captivating, even though the thick of a Tokyo café, from ‘Johnny Guitar’ to tangential realism: an off-screen voice correcting Pedro Costa patois and onomatopoeic accents make the Offenbach’s ‘La Périchole’. Balibar’s ‘v’s and saying ‘I like consonants too’ actual spoken words incomprehensible.’ (Luc David Phelps, Cannes 2009: There Outta be a Griffith’s brutally intense and underrated final ‘Like a cork along the water stream’, said, if I Moullet, Film Comment); for that reason, the Moonlight Saving Time, theautheurs.com, 15 feature, decried by critics at the time as too remember well, Orson Welles to Jeanne Moreau film has never been subtitled. Critics have May 2009 ‘Soviet’, is a straight-up tale of alcoholism discerned in the film a critique of technology, about something else. It might sound funny, and a startling portrait of urban America but I always thought that being a movie actress and even religious or mythic meaning (the during the Depression. pig as sacrifice), its cinematic lineage pointing felt like returning to life as a newborn: changed, CARTE BLANCHE dressed up, made up, scrutinized; and that both back to Dreyer (La Passion de Jeanne being a stage actress brought you back to the Puissance de la Parole (The Power of Words) d’Arc) and forward to Olmi’s The Tree of the enchantment of your first words. Maybe being a Itinéraire de Jean Bricard Jean-Luc Godard, France 1988, 25 min Wooden Clwogs. singer constantly brings back the thrill of my first Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, France steps – before words, before my first stroke – 2008, 40 min I remember Langlois saying that Godard and Routine Pleasures after the age of reason.’ Warhol had taught us how not to make films. Jean-Pierre Gorin, USA/UK/France 1986, 81 min What can one say about Danièle and Jean- Jeanne Balibar These two shine a light, absolutely. Marie’s films? They make us feel that cinema is Pedro Costa When I saw ‘Routine Pleasures’ (on TV) I really It also turns out Costa’s been making something still worth something. identified with those grey routine guys whose like concert films for years—Costa, similar to Pedro Costa Puissance de la parole is Godard’s elegy about occupation is a mini-clone of what Marx K. would Straub, displacing the emotions of his statue- the power of words, and a dialogue on the call their exploitation. And what I really (note Based on the book by Jean-Yves Petiteau, characters to the soundtrack, usually diffused origin of creation. those three l’s) liked about the film was that who narrates the film, Itinéraire de Jean bird songs and children’s yelps. Balibar’s ongoing its rhythm espouses theirs with a sympathetic Bricard tells the rich history of the Loire concert’s not any different: a woman in a closed Beauty #2 camaraderie and little or no cross-cutting region, from commercial fishing and farming room, standing at a mike, looking as straight and Andy Warhol, USA 1965, 66 min between painting and 3-d ‘realism’ which the in the 1930s, through the Occupation, the still as Costa’s camera (as usual, left in place for first and alas last thing my Eisenstein might have Resistance and its brutal suppression. A minutes), while her voice and the music, piped Beauty #2 is one of Warhol’s rarest films thought of- or flashy bright cheery Allen Jones reflection on the livelihood of the past, in and out around her, do the emoting for her and a next of kin to Costa’s In Vanda’s Room. cuts, locos/fingertips- do you know that Charles about loss and resistance. The film plants Edie Sedgwick on a bed TATE FILM

& Ray Eames ‘Toccata For Toy Trains’ which is the Programme Six antithesis of your film (even down to celebrating Friday, 2 October 19.00 toys-which-aren’t-models whereas your guy’s Ne Change Rien mind is deadpan reality-replication, even down Screening introduced by Pedro Costa to timetabling, models-that-only-happen-to- be-toys)? There’s a CAHIERS-style piece here on your film being about films as well as trains, both Programme Seven being illusionisms, and why bourgeois realism Saturday, 3 October 15.00 knows the model-reality difference perfectly well but loves pretending that it doesn’t- in the case Itinéraire de Jean Bricard, Jean-Marie Straub of trains because confronting reality with a real and Danièle Huillet train always has something heroic about it, steam Sicilia!, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet Pedro Costa Juventude em Marcha 2006 © Pedro Costa against the sky,, steel lunging through space, whereas the model has no heroism at all, it’s the apotheosis of infantile –obsessional control, not Programme Eight to say consummate anality about…motions.’ Saturday, 3 October 19.00 Raymond Durgnat, December 1988 Où Gît Votre Sourire Enfoui? (Where Does Routine Pleasures is film essay that grew Your Hidden Smile Lie?) from the close friendship between Manny 6 Bagatelas Farber and Jean-Pierre Gorin, and deals with Followed by a conversation between Pedro © Pedro 1997 Costa method and work, American culture and Costa and Jean-Pierre Gorin. landscape, and artistic imagination.

Programme Nine Pedro Costa Ossos SCHEDULE Sunday, 4 October 12.00 Pedro Costa O Sangue © Pedro 1989 Costa The Struggle, DW Griffith Programme One Friday, 25 September 19.00 No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room) Programme Ten Screening introduced by Pedro Costa Sunday, 4 October 14.00 Puissance de la parole (The Power of Words), Programme Two Jean-Luc Godard Beauty #2, Andy Warhol Saturday, 26 September 19.00 2007 © Pedro Costa Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth) Programme Eleven Sunday, 4 October 17.00

Programme Three Pedro Costa Tarrafal Sunday, 27 September 12.00 Le Cochon (The Pig), Jean Eustache Billie Holiday Sings ‘Fine and Mellow’ Routine Pleasures, Jean-Pierre Gorin O Sangue (Blood) Followed by a conversation between Pedro Costa and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Pedro Costa Programme Four © Sunday, 27 September 15.00 © Pedro Costa

Casa de Lava Tarrafal

Programme Five Curator: Stuart Comer Sunday, 27 September 18.30 Assistant Curator: Marie Canet Pedro Costa No Quarto da Vanda 2000 Ossos (Bones) With special thanks to Ricardo Matos Cabo. Pedro Costa Où Gît Votre Sourire Enfoui? 2001 Visit www.tate.org.uk/modern/film

Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG Nearest Southwark / Bankside Pier Pedro Costa