Pedro Costa Research Articles

Tela em branco: cinema da origem,origem do cinema

Por meio da tela em branco que aparece em três filmes (Zen for film, de Nam June Paik, Scénario du film Passion, de Jean-Luc Godard, e Onde jaz o teu sorriso?, de Pedro Costa) e em um projeto fotográfico (Theatres, de Hiroshi Sugimoto), abordamos o conceito de origem na perspectiva de Walter Benjamin. Em sua abertura e inacabamento, a origem só pode se restituir no futuro, por um trabalho da memória, que se define como recriação a partir de vestígios da história. Aqui se busca um cinema da origem (diferente de um cinema das origens), em cujo saber se abriga sempre um não-saber originário. Nós o encontraremos na tela em branco, nos modos diversos como ela surge em cada uma destas obras.

Films of the Year, 2007

Abstract Prefaced by remarks about methodology, this article presents a survey of films (and one television show) released in the U.S. in 2007 which James Naremore evaluates to be the best of the year. The top three are: Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth, Pere Portabella's Cuadecuc-Vampir, and Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako.

No future—The Luso-African generation in Portuguese Cinema

Portugal is best known as a country of emigrants whose experiences have been reflected in a large number of feature films. Immigration only became relevant following the 1974 Revolution, which ended dictatorship and colonialism, and Portugal's entrance in the European Community in 1986, which made it economically more attractive. Although immigrants and their integration is today an important issue in Portuguese society, so far only two feature films have dealt with the second-generation from African descent, the so called Luso-Africans. Pedro Costa, currently one of Portugal's internationally most recognised auteurs, focuses in the critically acclaimed Ossos/Bones (1997) on the difficulties of the Cape Verdian community. The newcomer Leonel Vieira, on the other hand, looks in Zona J/J Zone (1998), a blockbuster, at the experiences of the young generation from Angola. This article compares the quite different approaches in terms of gender, race and aesthetics, but encounters similar perspectives on integration. It argues, moreover, that the art film makes the contradictory situation of its characters apparent, while the box-office hit simply condemns its protagonist to engage more deeply with the discrimination and exclusion experienced by second- generation of immigrants from Africa.

The Subject and Power

The ideas which I would like to discuss here represent neither a theory nor a methodology. I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. My work has dealt with three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects. The first is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire generale, philology, and linguistics. Or again, in this first mode, the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labors, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or, a third example, the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology. In the second part of my work, I have studied the objectivizing of the subject in what I shall call "dividing practices." The subject is either