ReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa 6214_Barradas Jorge.indd i 21/11/19 4:30 PM ReFocus: The International Directors Series Series Editors: Robert Singer, Stefanie Van de Peer and Gary D. Rhodes ReFocus is a series of contemporary methodological and theoretical approaches to the interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of international film directors, from the celebrated to the ignored, in direct relationship to their respective culture—its myths, values, and historical precepts—and the broader parameters of international film history and theory. The series provides a forum for introducing a broad spectrum of directors, working in and establishing movements, trends, cycles and genres including those historical, currently popular, or emergent, and in need of critical assessment or reassessment. It ignores no director who created a historical space—either in or outside of the studio system—beginning with the origins of cinema and up to the present. ReFocus brings these film directors to a new audience of scholars and general readers of Film Studies. Titles in the series include: ReFocus: The Films of Susanne Bier Edited by Missy Molloy, Mimi Nielsen, and Meryl Shriver-Rice ReFocus: The Films of Corneliu Porumboiu Monica Filimon ReFocus: The Films of Francis Veber Keith Corson ReFocus: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky Sergei Toymentsev ReFocus: The Films of Jia Zhangke Maureen Turim and Ying Xiao ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan Edited by Andrée Lafontaine ReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa: Producing and Consuming Contemporary Art Cinema Nuno Barradas Jorge edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/refocint 6214_Barradas Jorge.indd ii 21/11/19 4:30 PM ReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa Producing and Consuming Contemporary Art Cinema Nuno Barradas Jorge 6214_Barradas Jorge.indd iii 21/11/19 4:30 PM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Nuno Barradas Jorge, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun—Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Ehrhardt MT by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4453 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4455 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4456 9 (epub) The right of Nuno Barradas Jorge to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 6214_Barradas Jorge.indd iv 21/11/19 4:30 PM Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1 Cinema’s ‘Primitive Beauty’: Pedro Costa’s Artistic Formation and the Making of Blood (1989) 12 2 Negotiating Filmmaking: Adaptation, Location and Docufiction 32 3 Digital Filmmaking at the Interstices 53 4 Critical Reception and the International Film Festival 69 5 Between the Black Box and the White Cube 90 6 Renegotiating Circulation: Retrospectives and DVD Releases 110 7 A ‘Document of Documents’: Authorship, Intertextuality and Politics in Horse Money (2014) 128 Conclusion 148 Filmography 152 Bibliography 154 Index 165 6214_Barradas Jorge.indd v 21/11/19 4:30 PM Figures 1.1–1.3 Stylistic correlations with classical cinema in Blood (1989): the evocation of the work of Nicholas Ray, Jacques Tourneur and of Night of the Hunter (1955) 15 1.4 Still of Blood (1989), featuring Pedro Hestnes and Inês de Medeiros. This was one of the images used to promote the film during its domestic commercial release in 1990 29 2.1 and 2.2 Stills of the initial scenes of Casa de Lava (1994), featuring footage of the Fogo Island volcano eruption shot by Orlando Ribeiro in 1951 33 2.3 Resolving spatial restrictions through mise en scène: still of Bones (1997) featuring Vanda Duarte, Isabel Ruth and Mariya Lipkina 51 4.1 ‘Family photo’: Jean-Marie Straub, Pedro Costa and Danièle Huillet in 2001 77 5.1 and 5.2 Pedro Costa’s two-screen video installation Daughters of Fire (2013), displayed at the São Roque Church 91 5.3 Double-screen narrative compositions of Little Boy Male, Little Girl Female (2005) 99 5.4 An exception in Costa’s coherent filmic universe: still from The End of a Love Affair (2003), featuring Gustavo Sumpta 101 5.5 Still from Tarrafal (2007): Zé Alberto’s deportation notice as a ‘cursed document’ similar to the ones used in Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957) 102 6214_Barradas Jorge.indd vi 21/11/19 4:30 PM FIGURES vii 7.1 Still from Horse Money (2014): the appearance of the iconic Chaimite armoured vehicle serves as a narrative device both for a historical setting and for Ventura’s achronological subjective condition 136 7.2 and 7.3 The epistolary device as narrative juxtaposition between films: Mariana (Inês de Medeiros) reads the letter destined for Edite (Edith Scob) in Casa de Lava (1994); Vitalina (Vitalina Varela) reads the letter penned by Ventura in Horse Money (2014) 138 7.4 Still from Horse Money (2014): Vitalina Varela’s off-screen personal documents and objects are used as filmic props to reinstate her identity on screen 140 6214_Barradas Jorge.indd vii 21/11/19 4:30 PM Acknowledgements his book initially took shape as a PhD dissertation started in 2011, a Tresearch project reworked and extensively rewritten over the following years. My debts, therefore, go back a long way. I would like first to express my sincere gratitude to my former supervisors at the University of Nottingham, Mark Gallagher and Julian Stringer, who not only guided me through the entire doctoral process but also generously provided me with motivation, advice and inspiration during the writing of this volume. Thanks also to Lúcia Nagib, who pointed out to me the potential of my initial study and encouraged me to carry it further. I am also particularly grateful to Catherine Attwood for the lively conversations, patience and meticulous copy-editing. I am also pleased to acknowledge the support and advice offered by the staff and postgraduate community at Nottingham. I am truly grateful to my col- leagues at the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies, particularly to Roberta Pearson who has been, over the years, truly supportive of the long- term endeavour of which this book is now the result. Special thanks also go to James Mansell, Ian Brookes and Andrew Goffey. I also thank my former PhD colleagues Daniel King, Juyeon Bae, Sriparna Ray, Aaron Calbreath-Frasieur, Melissa Shani Brown, Mag Yung-Wen and Yu-Peng Lin. My gratitude also extends to Iain Robert Smith, Caroline Edwards, Emma Crawford, Pedro Sobral Pombo, Alec Millward and Filipe Francisco. Their support at different stages of this project provided me with confidence and emotional backing. I wish to express my gratitude to Pedro Costa, for the information provided during two interviews in 2012 and 2013 and during several email exchanges over the years. I am also thankful to Francisco Villa-Lobos for providing me with information about the production of In Vanda’s Room, Colossal Youth and Change Nothing. Likewise, this book also benefited greatly from information 6214_Barradas Jorge.indd viii 21/11/19 4:30 PM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix provided by many film professionals whom I met or conversed with via email over the years. I wish to thank Abel Ribeiro Chaves (OPTEC Filmes), Patrícia Saramago, Cláudia Tomaz, Jörg Schneider (Das Kleine Fernsehspiel, ZDF), Daniel del-Negro, Cláudia Rita Oliveira, Chris Barwick (Second Run), Craig Keller (Masters of Cinema), Pedro Borges (Midas Filmes), Ji-Hoon Jo (JIFF), Yano Kazuyuki (Cinematrix) and Teresa Villaverde. Many thanks also to Valérie Massadian and Richard Dumas for their generosity in allowing me to reproduce their photographs on the cover of the book and in Chapter 4, respec- tively. I am also grateful for the information and resources offered by Teresa Barreto Borges (Cinemateca Portuguesa), Mariana Pimentel (Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual), Isabel de Carvalho (RTP), Francisco Ferreira, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the library staff at the Glasgow School of Art. Thanks are also due to the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Graduate School at Nottingham, whose research travel grants in 2012 and 2013, respectively, allowed me to carry out research in Lisbon during the initial stages of this project. Special thanks also go to everyone at Edinburgh University Press, espe- cially to Gillian Leslie, Richard Strachan and the ReFocus: The International Directors Series team, Robert Singer, Stefanie Van de Peer and Gary D. Rhodes. Thank you for your patience, generous guidance and constant encouragement. My gratitude is extended to the anonymous EUP readers for their comments and suggestions regarding the book’s initial proposal. Portions of this book have been previously published as an article and as book chapters. A section of Chapter 2 appeared in a different form as ‘Pedro Costa on the Island of the Dead: Distant Referencing and the Making of Casa de Lava’ in Adaptation, vol. 7, issue 3 (2014). I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers from Oxford University Press for their invaluable comments. Two sections of Chapter 5 appeared initially in a chapter included in Slow Cinema (2016, Edinburgh University Press), edited by Tiago de Luca and myself, and in a chapter included in Portugal’s Global Cinema, edited by Mariana Liz (2018, I. B. Tauris, used with the permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc). I am extremely grateful to Tiago and Mariana for their pro- ductive comments.