Pedro Costa Research Articles

Vitalina’s (in)visibility: contemporary Portugal and the cinema of human mobility

ABSTRACT Critically acclaimed in film festivals around the world, Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela was a strong contender in the 2019 race for the Best International Feature Film Academy Award. At the time, many suggested the film was not only an exquisite work of art, but also relevant for debates about immigration and racism. This is a fruitful analytical angle, which I propose to examine in relation to the critical reception of Pedro Costa’s work, the current socio-political context in Portugal, and the notion of cinema of human mobility. This article puts forward a close textual reading of the film’s style grounded in historical, political and social matters. I suggest that the film tells Vitalina’s story, but only briefly; shows her decadent living conditions, but only partially; and hears her lament, but only faintly, and I argue Vitalina Varela is a particularly rich case study to illustrate important debates about the relationship between politics and aesthetics in contemporary transnational cinema.

Vitalina’s (in)visibility: contemporary Portugal and the cinema of human mobility

ABSTRACT Critically acclaimed in film festivals around the world, Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela was a strong contender in the 2019 race for the Best International Feature Film Academy Award. At the time, many suggested the film was not only an exquisite work of art, but also relevant for debates about immigration and racism. This is a fruitful analytical angle, which I propose to examine in relation to the critical reception of Pedro Costa’s work, the current socio-political context in Portugal, and the notion of cinema of human mobility. This article puts forward a close textual reading of the film’s style grounded in historical, political and social matters. I suggest that the film tells Vitalina’s story, but only briefly; shows her decadent living conditions, but only partially; and hears her lament, but only faintly, and I argue Vitalina Varela is a particularly rich case study to illustrate important debates about the relationship between politics and aesthetics in contemporary transnational cinema.

Memories from the Darkness in the Films of Pedro Costa and Affonso Uchôa

This essay analyses realist works from contemporary world cinema wherein the representation of space-time is directly affected by the color black, referring to both night and dark shadows. It investigates exactly how darkness participates in moments when the filmed subjects remember traumatic events and confront them through their courageous retellings. My hypothesis is that the color black converts the space—realistic and concerning the characters’ present time—into a place where different temporalities coexist. Through a comparative analysis of films made by the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa and the Brazilian filmmaker Affonso Uchôa in the past two decades, I show how this modulation in space-time produced through color has a political meaning, since the narrated memories are related to a social experience of class and race.

Pedro Costa: The man (the circumstances) and his work

Book review of "The Films of Pedro Costa: Producing and Consuming Contemporary Art Cinema", by Nuno Barradas Jorge.

Pedro Costa’s realism of the poor

Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa has over the years pictured the lives of immigrants from Cabo Verde in Lisbon, in In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto de Vanda, 2000), Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha, 2006), Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014), and more recently Vitalina Varela (2019). His portrayal of impoverished Black communities in Fontainhas, a slum in the outskirts of the capital, uses the style of art cinema to portray how his protagonists are excluded from Portuguese society. His work features non‐professional actors, mixing documentary techniques with a highly aestheticized approach. This has led several critics (Pantenburg, 2010; Guarneri & Costa, 2015; Fajgenbaum, 2019) to describe Costa’s films as realist, emphasizing links between formal and material aspects of his work and how they relate to a manner of political engagement. In this article, I trace the discourse on realism in Costa up to the present day, leading to an assessment of how his most recent film, Vitalina Varela, relates to his past practice. The concept of “cosmopolitanism of the poor,” coined by Silviano Santiago ([2008] 2017), is introduced in order to read Costa’s films as engaging in a form of realism that appropriates high art to tell stories of migration and poverty in a postcolonial context.

The elevator scene in ‘Horse Money’: the sound-image.

There are all kinds of coincidences and clashes between the past and the present in Horse Money (Pedro Costa’s last film) that emerge in a form of glossolalia with voices bringing back memories from everywhere. The scene at the elevator, with Ventura and a 25 April Revolution soldier, transformed into a golden statue, is the acmè of Pedro Costa’s construction.What’s going on there? We can recognize some signs. There’s a kind of struggle of voices, there. And the voices bring to the film not only what they’re saying but also what they’re doing as well as distinct periods of time (Pedro Costa said that he has spent two months mixing the sound of the scene). And all this within an everlasting present time created through the length of time and the scarcity of space (we don’t get out of the elevator for a prolonged period of time).It is our intention to describe the film taking consequences from the concept of “sound image” presented in L’image-temps by Gilles Deleuze. In Gilles Deleuze’s thought, modern film somehow throws, so to speak, the utterances (all kinds of sound, and words in particular) towards images, thus creating a “sound image”. In it, sound doesn’t tell or aim to tell the image, nor does the image illustrate or aim to illustrate, or ‘show’, the sound. There is a separation, a disjunction, or a stratigraphic overlapping — «the more complete examples of seeing-talking disjunction can be found in film».

O escuro tem sua casa: O retorno à sala de exibição como resposta as novas tecnologias de imersão.

In the 1990s and 2000s, directors like Pedro Costa (“Cavalo Dinheiro”, 2014) and Philippe Grandrieux (“Sombre”, 1998) made films that challenged the classic notion of screen as we know it. Diluted images in the darkness that merge with the dark of the movie theater itself. It is possible to say that the projection is not only what is projected, but the 6 sides of a room (walls, floor and ceiling) that compose the immersive experience of contrasted and underexposed images. The compositions of the shots allow empty spaces, especially in the margins, so that a dilution between projection and reality occurs. Later, director Scott Barley (“Sleep Has Her House”, 2017) presented films that can “only” can be seen in dark rooms. Watching one of his movies out of the dark is watching an invisible work. One bias that seems to contrast with the new immersive technologies of virtual reality. An experience that does not need new cameras and equipment - Barley himself uses only one IPhone to make movies. These directors democratized the making of immersive films using just two basic and essential concepts of cinema: light and shadow. The immersion now can be really made with a cell phone and creativity. Exploring the trend of films that claim the return of the dark room is our proposal. A cinema that tends to the classical conditions of exhibition, but in which is very innovative and with capacity similar to those of the new technologies that try to expand seventh art.

De “Cavalo Dinheiro” a “Vitalina Varela”

Resumo: Há toda uma série de coincidências e choques entre o passado e o presente em Cavalo Dinheiro (Pedro Costa, 2014) que emergem na forma de glossolalia, com vozes que transportam memórias de todo o lado, de todo o tempo. Em Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019), aí é a voz de Vitalina (Vitalina é agora a pessoa e a ‘personagem’ do filme, uma cabo-verdiana que chega a Portugal dias depois do funeral do seu marido) que se imprime através do filme, e que lhe muda decisivamente o sentido quando conta uma história (uma longa história, como são sempre as histórias da experiência). Há uma diferença entre os seus sussurros em Cavalo Dinheiro e aqui, no filme que tem o seu nome. É nossa intenção descrever estes filmes tirando consequências do conceito de “imagem-sonora” apresentado em A Imagem-Tempo, de Gilles Deleuze. É um conceito que tem em vista uma separação, uma disjunção, ou uma sobreposição estratigráfica entre ver, ou ouvir, e falar — “os exemplos mais completos da disjunção ver-falar podem ser encontrados no cinema” — que julgamos estar no centro da política e da estética de Pedro Costa. Palavras-chave: Imagem-sonora. Forma humana. Forma política. Pedro Costa.

Spectres of Today: The Fractures of History in Horse Money (2014)

It took Pedro Costa four feature films to get to Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014). In Down to Earth (Casa de Lava, 1994), a Portuguese nurse accompanies an immigrant worker in coma from Lisbon to his homeland, the Cape Verdean island of Fogo. Bones (Ossos, 1997), In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda, 2000), and Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha, 2006) form a trilogy in which a group of Cape Verdean immigrants who lived in the Fontainhas slum becomes central. First travelling to Cape Verde, then getting to know and working with people from that Portuguese ex-colony on the outskirts of Lisbon, Costa’s films respond to the need for the voices of those who have been subordinated — the colonised, the discriminated, the exploited — to be articulated and valued. This article analyses the film style of Horse Money. It also pays attention to its thematic concerns and connections with other films directed by Costa, particularly those with Ventura, the central character in Horse Money. It argues that Horse Money tackles spectres haunting contemporary Portuguese society in a radical way, both politically and aesthetically. Its politics of representation are connected with the composition of a fractured history. These fractures emerge from the liberation of Cape Verde from Portuguese colonial domination as well as from the conflicting ruptures and continuities after the 1974 Carnation Revolution. In line with such an approach to these themes, the use of digital video, which has become common in Costa’s cinema since In Vanda’s Room, achieves hauntingly expressive qualities through mise-en-scène and image modulation.

O corpo que resta: Energia negativa no cinema de Pedro Costa

O cinema de Pedro Costa é atravessado pelas figuras humanas, como Vanda Duarte e Ventura, que emergem em uma tensão entre corpo, olhar e imagem. Neste ensaio, reconhecemos a aparição dessas corporeidades, sempre sob um permanente status nascendi a destituir a implantação de um estatuto que as identifique como personagens ou sujeitos. Para isso, discutimos a carnalidade como aquilo que é tramado por energias negativas a instituírem uma forma de subjetividade sem sujeitos. Buscando homologias entre imagem cinematográfica e filosofia – em conexão com o pensamento do filósofo brasileiro Vladimir Safatle – reconhecemos o negativo como categoria estética central, com que se produz uma imagem proletária, altamente magnetizada por um poder de revolta.

A comunidade na expropriação: modos de alteridade no cinema de Pedro Costa

O artigo discute os modos de alteridade evidenciados pelos elementos estruturais de Ossos (1997), No quarto da Vanda (2000) e Juventude em marcha (2006), de Pedro Costa. Ao descrever e analisar as formas fílmicas escolhidas para construir vias de acesso entre os corpos em cena, valorizando a constante exposição ao outro, busca-se apresentar como o cinema do realizador português constitui uma comunidade intrínseca à expropriação. O artigo opta por um viés comparatista entre os filmes de Costa e os de cineastas que oinfluenciaram, como John Ford e Yasujiro Ozu; para além da breve consulta a obras de Van Gogh e Gustave Courbet, artistas que compartilham motivos visuais e, acreditamos, uma sensibilidade social comum com o diretor.

Figuras do corpo e espaços do outro no cinema

O artigo discute a representação do corpo em filmes de Philippe Grandrieux, João Pedro Rodrigues e Pedro Costa realizados na passagem da década de 1990 para os anos 2000. A partir da análise das dinâmicas visuais e da performance gestual, demonstra-se a existência de um programa comum baseado no primado das práticas sociais/afetivas sobre a natureza individual. A figura humana é condicionada a um princípio relacional: a mediação entre o eu e o outro determina os aspectos plásticos e a sensorialidade corporais, ao mesmo tempo que implica na produção de espaços capazes de acolher modos de convívio orientados pelo desejo e por regimes de partilha.

The Camera Devoured

Pedro Costa’s Casa De Lava (1994) draws on the cannibalistic potential of cinema in order to excavate the history of colonialism in Cape Verde. Cannibalism operates in a two-fold manner in Casa. Firstly, it refers to Costa’s practice of employing cinematic references in order to draw out otherwise concealed elements of earlier films. Secondly, it denotes an aesthetic practice in which the film is cannibalised by the people and geography of Cape Verde. By operating in a zone between documentary and fiction, Casa undermines the commodifying and exoticising tendencies of cinema. Instead, by drawing on the stories of the people of Cape Verde, the film illustrates the way in which the legacy of colonialism continues to haunt the island. Cannibal cinema in Casa is a method for making these otherwise concealed histories speak, and in doing so, create new forms of cinematic invention.

Adaptation, Allegory and the Archive: Contextualising Epistolary Narratives in Contemporary Portuguese Cinema

Epistolarity in cinema is commonly understood as a narrative device either fitting the so-called essay film, or resulting from filmic adaptation of literary works. A more nuanced understanding of the workings of this device is observed in films of disparate contemporary Portuguese filmmakers which adapt, rephrase and remediate letters. This article centres its attention on possible tendencies concerning epistolarity in this context, examining films that make use of the personal archive and epistolary voice, or that adapt letters to screen. It also examines filmic works that use the epistolary device to negotiate between emotional expression and historical materiality. Among others, this article discusses films such as Yama No Anata (Aya Koretzy, 2011), Correspondences (Rita Azevedo Gomes, 2016), Letters from War (Ivo M. Ferreira, 2016) and works directed by Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes.

Existential problematics in the films of Pedro Costa

Films of the Portuguese director Pedro Costa seldom steal the limelight of cinema scholarship. The specific marginality of his works, the complex semi-documentary structure of his films and, at first glance, the social nature of his subjects complicate the analysis of his films. This essay undertakes a detailed investigation of his films' structures and problematics in the context of intellectual development in 21st-century European cinema. Four films by Costa Bones (Ossos, 1997), In Vandas Room (No Quarto da Vanda, 2000), Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha, 2006) and Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014) are regarded as elements of a single artistic system that transforms, becomes more complex and absorbs more and more cultural codes.
 The essay defines the motifs representative of the four films, visual metaphors that refer to sacred texts and the gradual transformation of the directors aesthetics. It is motivated by the necessity to carry out a complex research of all components of Costas films from the existential perspective: in the authors opinion, such perspective gives the opportunity to define specific features of the directors aesthetics. The systemic interdisciplinary approach is determined by the necessity to expose the aesthetic and anthropological problems explored in Costa's films and to define their philosophical basis, using a combined historical, cultural, semiotic, anthropological and hermeneutical approach. The essay concludes that the core of Pedro Costas art relates to existential philosophy and anthropology and that his main concern is spirituality, a theme realized most adequately via cinema.

“Talvez fosse uma loucura, talvez começasse a escavar outro filme nesse filme…”. Entrevista com Pedro Costa sobre o restauro de Os Verdes Anos e Mudar de Vida, de Paulo Rocha

Entrevista ao realizador Pedro Costa a propósito do seu envolvimento no restauro de Os Verdes Anos e Mudar de Vida de Paulo Rocha. Assim como sobre a relação dos dois cineastas e as possibilidades do restauro digital como ferramenta de re-escrita de uma obra.

Cape Verdean immigration in Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas trilogy: Narratives of deterritorialization

This article will focus on the narratives of space and deterritorialization in Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas trilogy. This trilogy is made up of Ossos (‘Bones’) (1997), No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room) (2000) and Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth) (2006), which explore the lives and narratives of Cape Verdean immigrants and their descendants living in the famed shantytown outside Lisbon’s limits. The analysis of Pedro Costa’s trilogy will focus on Fontainhas inhabitants’ inability to possess their territory as the result of an existence shaped by a movement of perpetual deterritorialization. As I will argue, this process reflects Portugal’s failure to fulfil the promises of the Carnation Revolution, remaining inhospitable for immigrants.

O lado bricoleur de Pedro Costa

Neste artigo, analisa-se a evolução do método de filmagem do cineasta português Pedro Costa. Grande admirador do movimento punk dos anos 1970, Costa não esconde a influência que o movimento exerce no seu modo de fazer cinema. A partir da ideia do DIY – do it yourself – o diretor torna-se um bricoleur ao se utilizar da técnica da colagem na realização de seus filmes, principalmente na pré-produção. Trata-se aqui da bricolagem enquanto técnica. Desde O Sangue (1989), primeiro longa-metragem de Costa, até Cavalo Dinheiro (2014), o processo de produção do diretor tem progredido em direção a uma maneira de filmar própria e que cada vez mais se aproxima da Antropologia. O termo bricolagem surge consagrado na Antropologia por Lévi-Strauss, ao se referir ao pensamento mítico, contrapondo-o ao científico. No cinema, a figura do bricoleur é representada, especialmente, por Jean-Luc Godard. Procura-se ainda analisar as etapas em que consiste o processo de Costa, seu modus operandi, a partir do material extrafílmico que permeia sua obra, como suas entrevistas, escritas e o curso ministrado pelo diretor.

Textured Cuts: The Demolition Cinema of Pedro Costa and José Luis Guerín

This article reexamines the aesthetics of the cut through cinema that challenges the possibility of totality. Looking back at films of demolitions in two Iberian cities, the author considers how cuts – both architectural and cinematic – reveal fissures created by urban renewal projects that preceded global crisis. En construcción ( Work in Progress, 2001) by the Catalan filmmaker José Luis Guerín follows the reconstruction of Barcelona’s neighborhood ‘El Raval’, while Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s No Quarto da Vanda ( In Vanda’s Room, 2000) films residents in a slum area of Lisbon as their houses are slowly demolished. By attending to neighborhoods that were ‘cut out of’ the urban landscape, these films contest the representation of unified cityscapes, exposing the fractures underlying economic development. The films also provide new ways to understand the ambivalent aesthetics of the cut, which both violently wounds the surface and exposes what lies behind. I will argue that ultimately thresholds produced by the cut speak to the ethical ambiguities of filmmaking, in which the camera inevitably alters whatever it views, thus exposing the textured incompleteness of the image.

Digital Slow Cinema: The Cases of Pedro Costa and Jia Zhangke

Digital Slow Cinema: The Cases of Pedro Costa and Jia Zhangke