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Neste artigo, pretendo analisar a forma como os discursos dominantes sobre acontecimentos recentes da história portuguesa, concretamente o 25 de Abril de 1974 e o 11 de Março de 1975, são questionados em dois filmes de Pedro Costa: Juventude em marcha (2006) e Cavalo dinheiro (2014), respetivamente. Para além dos elementos discursivos, o ensaio propõe também uma análise dos procedimentos formais nos dois filmes de Costa através dos quais a narrativa consensual do 25 de Abril e do Processo Revolucionário em Curso (PREC), assim como os seus discursos emancipatórios, são questionados. Conclui-se que ambos os filmes sugerem que outras histórias estão ainda por atualizar, pondo em causa o consenso da narrativa histórica e, desta forma, gerando dissenso; impedindo, assim, a cristalização da narrativa emancipatória do acontecimento histórico e do subsequente período revolucionário.

Compondo uma espécie de nova trilogia que revê a anterior das “cartas das Fontaínhas”, Juventude em Marcha (2006), Cavalo Dinheiro (2014) e Vitalina Varela (2019) de Pedro Costa ampliam seu foco no bairro marginal da periferia de Lisboa para as experiências da diáspora cabo-verdiana residente em Portugal e para a sua existência fraturada no tempo e no espaço, marcada pela emigração forçada, pela discriminação e pelo abandono. Mas, em vez de trabalhar essas vidas negadas apenas como material narrativo, os filmes de Costa também as incorporam na forma composicional. A natureza não consecutiva dos planos, a utilização do claro-escuro e dos limiares que fazem do invisível parte constitutiva do enquadramento e a rarefação da fala (quase sempre sob a forma de monólogos) são apenas alguns dos modos como o cinema de Costa ecoa a experiência de vida de suas personagens na própria estrutura do filme. Neste artigo, proponho que essa matriz composicional também alude (embora de forma não referencial) à dimensão histórica e geopolítica do Atlântico luso como origem do Plantationoceno colonial-moderno e do seu correlato contemporâneo, o “devir-Negro do mundo” (Mbembe, 2014).

Recensão de Le reste est ombre - Pedro Costa, Rui Chafes, Paulo Nozolino, exposição comissariada por Philippe-Alain Michaud e Jonathan Puthier. Paris, Le Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 8 de Junho a 22 de Agosto de 2022.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 o influenciaram, 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.

Este ensaio apresenta uma análise do personagem Ventura, de Juventude em marcha, à luz das considerações de Bakhtin sobre a construção da personagem no romance polifônico de Dostoievski. O comentário se centrará, sobretudo, na carta de Ventura e em sua possível leitura analítica como uma porta de entrada para comentarmos a constituição dessa personagem como uma autoconsciência. A hipótese a ser testada pela análise é a de que essa autoconsciência age no filme por meio da preservação de uma certa opacidade da personagem em relação ao narrador do filme e ao espectador, opacidade por meio da qual a personagem mantém sua autonomia preservada.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of Nuno Barradas Jorge’s monograph The Films of Pedro Costa welcomes its detailed account of hitherto neglected dimensions of Costa’s work, such as funding, relations with producers, technological aspects of production and postproduction, and the promotional labour of Costa’s media interviews. But it argues that these undoubtedly useful insights come at the expense of sustained close attention to Costa’s striking imagery and use of sound. The most glaring absences in the book are those of racial and class politics, and hence the interface between the two. Jorge’s book is an important contextual study of Costa’s oeuvre, but the immense aesthetic and political power of this filmmaking (both texts and collaborative processes of production) still eludes his grasp.

Pedro Costa’s last film, Cavalo Dinheiro [Horse Money, 2014], continues the work with Ventura in a way that could be seen to overtake Vanda’s role in his series of films since Ossos [Bones, 1997]. In Juventude em Marcha [Colossal Youth, 2006], by means of «the power of the false» (Deleuze), Ventura is a stratigraphic character, the result of a confrontation between fictional and documentary powers which permanently shifts, in Ventura himself, the actually existing Ventura from the invented Ventura. This builds a portrait that, with the ritornello of the film — Ventura's insistent recitation of a love letter —, moves across centuries of Portugal and world’s history. But in Horse Money, both concentration and fragmentation increase. There are all kind of coincidences and clashes between the past and the present time, which are presented in a glossolalia, voices that spread memory everywhere, as in the final sequence in the elevator, when we have Ventura and a soldier of the 25 April Revolution completely mummified, transformed into a golden statue. I want to highlight the everlasting present 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). This is not a time that corresponds to confusion or delirium; this is the time built by the film, and I will particularly focus my paper on this coincident mental and historical landscape that, by entailing the body and the life of a person transformed into a character, allows to the filmmaker to ride through history with Ventura’s horse-money (‘money’ is the name of Ventura’s horse left in Cap Vert). We have no predefined thoughts and Pedro Costa does not provide us with any exits, but “the nerve-wave that gives rise to thought” (Artaud, via Deleuze) mixes with the noise of the tremor of the elevator that continues without stopping.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present essay examines how contemporary Portuguese cinema critically dialogues with the historical representations upon which mythical images of Portugal have been founded. Analyzing films by Manoel de Oliveira, Pedro Costa, and Miguel Gomes, the essay highlights how these filmmakers problematize, within a postcolonial perspective, the political sense of understanding modernity as a crisis of identity.

The article addresses the issue of the refugee crisis through the perspective of the film opus of Portuguese director Pedro Costa and especially French documentarist Sylvain George in the light of Rancière's analyses of their works. It focuses on the radical actions of depersonalization by which refugees revolt against the intolerable regulations of the migrant and asylum policy of the European Community. It draws from the analysis of the dialogue between Rancière and George to point out aspects of political film that strive to let individuals who are excluded from economic and social trajectories take charge of their own destinies: to reclaim the possibility of their own voice and a common space. This process of transcending the intolerable is established in the relationship between politics and aesthetics, which is simultaneously the relationship between the forms of (self-) articulation of the underprivileged and the form of art utilized by the filmmaker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present essay examines how contemporary Portuguese cinema critically dialogues with the historical representations upon which mythical images of Portugal have been founded. Analyzing films by Manoel de Oliveira, Pedro Costa, and Miguel Gomes, the essay highlights how these filmmakers problematize, within a postcolonial perspective, the political sense of understanding modernity as a crisis of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pedro Costa’s second feature film, Casa de Lava (1995) presents a cinephile referencing experience and is constantly compared with Jacques Tourneur’s eerie black-and-white classic I Walked with a Zombie (1943). An analysis of Casa de Lava reveals that this link to Tourneur’s film is not just a tangential referential experience. As this article argues, I Walked with a Zombie was a central source in the working process of Casa de Lava, serving as a reference that was adapted constantly from the early stages of production, obeying to several production constraints and changes, which, although occasionally restrictive, also enriched the creative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wang Bing's Jiabiangou/The Ditch premiered as a competition entry at the Venice Film Festival 2010 after a six-year-long production process. It is Wang Bing's first full-length feature film after he established his reputation as a leading documentary film-maker on the international film scene thanks to the worldwide acclaimed Tiexi qu/West of the Tracks (2002) and He Fengming (2007). This article provides a reading of The Ditch (2010), based on a contextual investigation of the interplay of documentary and fiction, an high-end film aesthetics, and Wang Bing's concern with the role of the film-maker vis-à-vis a sensitive historical subject, here the Anti-rightist movement (1957-1960). Comolli's discussion of historical films and Pasolini's approach to cinema as a way to engage with the present provide relevant theoretical basis for this study. Parallels are drawn with Pedro Costa's work which also moves away from cinematic realism to challenge the boundaries of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the films of Abbas Kiarostami and Pedro Costa propose new forms of political subjectivity which hover between the real and the fictional, the present and the future. What distinguishes their films is a focus on marginalised groups that resists representing them either in a predetermined ‘documentary’ manner or in a ‘fictional’ form in which identities are granted psychological ‘interiority’. In their films ‘real’ characters play themselves rather than simply ‘be’ themselves. This is cinema that insists on what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘the power of the false’, which allows a character not to be ‘represented’ but to become-another. The films are thus emblematic of recent theoretical efforts to articulate a political form of subjectivity that will not be subsumed under a unified form of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]