Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa
“Costa’s first three features evoke Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Yasujiro Ozu, Alain Resnais, Jacques Tourneur, Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks, Godard, Kenji Mizoguchi--and centuries of painting. . .
“Costa’s people are often disembodied zombies, never quite here. Jacques Tourneur, not Straub. Does Costa instruct his actors not to think, meditate, or be one in their body? Vermeer’s and the Straubs’ people dominate their space; Costa’s are visitors. They are shapes, figures in incredibly beautiful compositions.”
--Tag Gallagher, Senses of Cinema
From November 17 through December 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center presents a retrospective of the six feature films of critically acclaimed Portuguese avant-garde director Pedro Costa. Since his first feature THE BLOOD in 1989, Costa’s work has been championed by astute critics and savored by increasing numbers of cineastes around the world. The premiere of his masterful COLOSSAL YOUTH at the Cannes International Film Festival in May redoubled interest in his work almost everywhere. By contrast, as James Quandt details in the first of the evocative essays on the director’s work published in the retrospective program booklet (available free at all our Costa screenings), Costa’s films have barely received an introduction in North America.
Costa’s work demands the viewer’s rapt attention in order to appreciate his darkly Vermeer-like perception of people and places on the outer fringes of society. At the same time, his films are uniquely revealing and rewarding. The very souls of his actors, most of them non-professionals, are laid bare on the screen, and moments of beauty and pathos strike like lightning in a dark sky. Strange personal monologues and faces sculpted by light but etched by experience tell powerful stories of struggle and loss beyond what any screenwriter could devise, particularly in his renowned trilogy consisting of BONES, IN VANDA’S ROOM, and COLOSSAL YOUTH. Costa’s work has been labeled humanist, and it is, in the purest sense of the word.
Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa offers the opportunity to become acquainted with the work of a director considered by many to be on the edge of the cutting edge.
-- Barbara Scharres
THE BLOOD
(O SANGUE)
1989, Pedro Costa, Portugal, 95 min.
With Pedro Hestnes, Nuno Ferreira
“At once a fairy tale, film noir, love story, and murder mystery, O SANGUE announced a major new talent in European cinema.”--James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario program
Two sons of an unstable father each look to a young teacher for love and solace. The father disappears under mysterious circumstances and peril becomes the norm when a sinister and seemingly well-to-do uncle takes charge of their lives. Black-and-white photography rich in shadows underlines the intersections of innocence with danger and romanticism with portents of evil. In Portuguese with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)
Saturday, November 17, 5:00 pm
Monday, November 19, 6:00 pm
BONES
(OSSOS)
1997, Pedro Costa, Portugal/France/Denmark, 96 min.
With Vanda Duarte, Nuno Vaz
A numb young mother goes through the motions of suicide but the newborn is rescued from a gas-filled kitchen by his father, only to become a beggar’s prop on the street. The spare plot spirals downward with the attempted sale of the baby to a prostitute, and Costa’s powerful portraiture and timeless sense of place makes it impossible to look away. Set in the gritty Lisbon ghetto of Estrela d’Africa, OSSOS is the first in Costa’s critically acclaimed trilogy, which includes IN VANDA’S ROOM and COLOSSAL YOUTH. In Portuguese with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)
Saturday, November 17, 3:00 pm
Tuesday, November 20, 6:00 pm
COLOSSAL YOUTH
(JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA)
2006, Pedro Costa, Portugal/France/Switzerland, 154 min.
With Ventura, Vanda Duarte
“Unlike anything else I’ve seen--mysterious, exalted, demanding, leisurely paced, and very beautiful.”--Jonathan Rosenbaum, Reader
“Mysterious and wholly beguiling. . . gorgeously lighted as if a direct invocation of Vermeer.”--Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
A sensation in its Cannes festival premiere, COLOSSAL YOUTH represents a colossal contribution to the language of avant-garde filmmaking. Ventura, a gaunt retired laborer, traverses the housing project that has replaced a demolished slum to visit his “children,” other Cape Verdean immigrants. Costa brings all that is marginal to the center in a masterfully absorbing work of strange monologues, contemplative observations, and moments of unparalleled visual beauty. In Portuguese with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)
Saturday, December 1, 3:00 pm
Tuesday, December 4, 6:30 pm
DOWN TO EARTH
(CASA DE LAVA)
1994, Pedro Costa, Portugal/France/Germany, 110 min.
With Ines de Medeiros, Isaach De Bankole
A Portuguese nurse on an ambiguous mission of mercy escorts a comatose immigrant laborer back to his near-deserted colonial village in the Cape Verde Islands. No one admits to knowing the corpse-like man although everyone does, and nurse Marianna is soon sucked into her own dark night of the soul in the formidable volcanic landscape. Often likened to Rossellini’s STROMBOLI, DOWN TO EARTH pits the lone woman against a culture of strange ways and secrets where she will forever remain an outsider. Costa creates a haunting narrative made all the more mesmerizing by bewitching flashes of Creole music. In Portuguese and Creole with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)
Sunday, November 25, 5:00 pm
Tuesday, November 27, 6:00 pm
IN VANDA’S ROOM
(NO QUARTO DA VANDA)
2000, Pedro Costa, Portugal/Germany/Switzerland/Italy, 178 min.
“Provides a standard by which to judge humanist cinema, so beautiful and generous is its vision.”--James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario program
The life of Vanda Duarte, an actress in Costa’s BONES, unreels in a vast haunted-house of a Lisbon slum undergoing demolition wall by wall. Vanda’s room is a messy refuge where using drugs alone or with her sister Zita is the virtually nonstop activity of choice. This second film in his powerful trilogy seals Costa’s reputation as the Vermeer of the digital camera. His fixation on the play of light confers dignity even on the stray dogs and cats in this ramshackle world where random fires burn in the street and incongruous streaks of beauty--a shabby crate of fruit or a gaudy bouquet--punctuate the remarkable texture of tragedy. In Portuguese with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)
Saturday, November 24, 3:00 pm
Monday, November 26, 6:30 pm
WHERE LIES YOUR HIDDEN SMILE?
(OU GIT VOTRE SOURIRE ENFOUI?)
2001, Pedro Costa and Thierry Lounas, France/Portugal, 104 min.
“Quite simply a masterpiece, and probably the best documentary of any kind I have ever seen.”--Adrian Martin, Senses of Cinema
This intriguingly atypical documentary captures the legendary avant-garde filmmaking team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet in the process of editing their 1999 film SICILIA! The celluloid world is circumscribed by the editing room where the two appear as silhouettes against the larger images of their work in progress. Huillet, in editor’s gloves hunches, sighs deeply, and frequently snaps “Shut up,” while the garrulous Straub looms over her issuing directives, cracking lame jokes, and occasionally singing. It’s an incomparable lesson in cinema in the form of an extended lovers’ spat. In Italian and French with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)