Pedro Costa?

He should make a film in Iowa, or Wisconsin

Not seen a film by him but he sounds like he'd be up my street (although if he's like Von trier count me out, but it doesn't look like it).

The interviews quote excerpts here are fine. I've seen worse by other filmmakers I like. Comes across a someone who is intense, knows a lot about cinema, happy to bullshit away. But not an attention seeker like Von Trier.

I don't think any of his films have ever been screened at the BFI but at the Tate? Anyone confirm?

He is not like Von Trier whatsoever. And if you'll allow me to namedrop, I have met him a few times and he is totally sincere, just very serious. I like his films a lot. The documentary about his process included in the recent DVD set is very illuminating.

Oops sorry I was just skimming the article above which talked a lot about VT, but looking again the analysis is in terms of career trajectory..

Excellent, I read an interview on n+1. 'serious' is how he came across and I totally don't mind that...look fwd to Colossal Youth.

hey xyzzzz, second run dvd have been promising casa de lava for some time now (you probably know that they they have already issued blood) but looking at their website it still seems tbc, and yeah, looking also forward to the MOC colossal youth set

'looking also forward' to going to sleep, gnight

Morning -- yeah, know about Blood, just keep not getting round to it.

Just struck me: isn't the reason Warhol might be a deal for Costa isn't so much static-ness as a way of working w/others? From what I've read he worked in commune like conditions in Colossal Youth and Vanda's room.

Isn't that analogous to the Factory? Except the former isn't going for an idea of Hollywood glamour. I've not seen any Warhol either, only excerpts.

http://filmcomment.com/entry/interview-pedro-costa

new flick was gonna be co-written w ... gil scott heron

I've written a bit on Horse Money: http://centrifugue.blogspot.com/2014/11/cphdox-day-9-lack-horse-money.html

Watching this on Friday (Q&A with Costa and Laura Mulvey). Love the song on the trailer, going all Ghost Town organ.

so Horse Money then...its not just the way he uses light and the effects he achieves with digital (his stuff really looks so much better than a lot of much digital work I've seen) but also how impressive he achieves an unity of tech + politics, i.e. the context and something I realised whilst watching but confirmed during the Q&A after as an intention, which is to capture light as the thing these people -- exhausted and brutalised as they are by where they have been placed and how they've been treated -- have left. And that is literally ALL they have left.

Costa is very serious (as Adam said above), pessimistic, and ambivalent about what he has achieved. Laura Mulvey (who chaired the Q&A, and someone else in the audience) was trying to talk up his films as an act of resistance, that something so beautiful could emerge from the chaos but...he wasn't buying it. The thing I got from it is he has spent so long trying to get into Ventura and Fontainhas' other inhabitants -- like their heads and psyche -- that he just can't help and carry the weight of their world on his shoulders. It was sorta chilling how he described that he has had to "become a bit like them".

Yet there he was at the ICA, presenting this film to us. So you do wonder the way by which he carries himself is his own way of dealing with certain questions that he is well aware of, that of being from the other of the fence. I attended a talk by Valerie Wilmer (jazz writer and photographer etc.) a few weeks ago and she was describing how she got a grant from the Arts Council to go to Mississippi and do a project with the locals there and she gave up in the end as she felt it was tourism, basically. Not suggesting its so much like that with Costa, the circumstances in which he got there were different and allowed him to stay for a while. But you can tell it rankles, like he used Fontainhas to get out of more commercial film and saving himself in the process BUT IS HE? Has he not found his perfect zombies instead for that Tourneu remake he hated? Costa is emphasized the 'concrete' of the doc aspect ("film is for the bed, you don't dream in the cinema") but you can't forget the pacing of some of the scenes, disjointedness of plot, the look. All these things that are taken to such an extent that make him tough to screen at even yer local arthouse cinema.

("film is for the bed, you don't dream in the cinema")

Sorry that should be "dreams are.." etc

HM is one of my favorites of the year thus far (ran exactly one week in cosmopolitan film capital NYC)

Do you need to have seen the previous films? Because I haven't, and our cinema is screening them, but after the new one has finished its run.

I think it might actually be better to start with the new one. I still think it's slightly depressing to see Ventura aged so much after his commanding presence in Colossal Youth. I might recommend checking the carnation revolution on wikipedia to understand all of that, though. His last five films are kinda connected, and watching them all adds something, but they're also perfectly stand alone

(Casa de Lava more important than Ossos, imo, though it's not part of the 'Fontainhais quartet', but it's filmed on Cape Verde and introduces a letter which plays a big role in Colossal Youth. The whole fixation on Fontainhais by critics misses a lot of what makes these films special, the digital imagery and the transitive nature of the experiences shown. imo it should either be the digital trilogy or the cape verde quintet, but who cares)

Also it's awesome, but I need to watch it again. Have watched it twice but both times at the end of festivals, and while I think I got a lot of it, I was very tired both times.

wins - try and get the DVD of Colossal Youth if you can before otherwise its fine to see it retrospectively.

Its a v dense and draining film - friend I was with just didn't have the energy for a drink after (although drinks before didn't help).

I still think it's slightly depressing to see Ventura aged so much after his commanding presence in Colossal Youth.

See what you mean but I can't highlight this enough: few films capture that utter exhaustion w/life and what it throws at you. It was exemplified by Ventura the most but its there in the atmosphere and the others and how they walk and talk - Vitalina's whisper.

Most of us here don't need to be reminded but this is the migrant's lot. Weird to see this during the Syrian crisis although the people in the film come from the post-colonial end of exploitation.

Colossal youth isn't screening till october but I think I'll hang on for it & just see the latest one first. It's remiss of me but I only vaguely recall cy coming around & don't know costa at all, but the new one played at the recent fest here & I loved the poster and the title cavallo dinheiro, but I skipped it cause I try not to go to things during the festival that will have proper distribution later. totally get the fatigue thing Fred alludes to, and don't see nearly as many films during the 2 weeks of the fest

The solution to festival-fatigue, btw, is to travel to another festival somewhere! Two weeks to AFFR!

you crazy cat

It's only a couple of days. I'm still not able to go to more than three bigger festivals a year (the ones right by) though I got a few I'd love to go to.

Back to Costa, xyzzzz, you're absolutely right that exhaustion is the point, and it's an important point. It's also a depressive point, and seeing it documentary-style is doubly depressing. On the other hand, apparently Vanda from In Vanda's Room is doing much better now.

Saw HM this afternoon with a friend (and about five other people in the cinema oh dear), who joked afterwards that it was like a Portuguese remake of Britannia Hospital.

7 ppl in the theater; well, the rest of the world also views Fury Road as the ultimate in cinema aesthetics, it's not just ILX.

You guys should come to Gothenburg in january. Not really Copenhagen, but in Gothenburg, it was pretty full for an early morning showing.

aside from comedies, my ideal audience situation is me alone in a 300-seat theater.

xpost

I actually prefer a small number of silent people to a bigger crowd - the handful of us who sat through the last Diaz at the same cinema had a ball - but it can't be good business

I have yet to achieve the dream of seeing a film entirely alone

The film itself, I'm adding to my list of horror films that aren't horror films - many of the shots are very scary - great faces and bodies suddenly looming out of the darkness, the brokeness and decay of everything. Yes to 'dense and draining' - and dark literally figuratively - in its way a kind of 'terminal cinema' like godard's weekend (of course another hf that isn't a hf.)

I saw Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster completely alone. That is, right before it started a couple came in and asked 'Is this where Before Midnight is screened?' Then there was a woman who saw the first ten minutes, and then left. The rest of the time I was alone. When I saw Journey to the West at DOX we were just a handful, and it seemed as if half the people left while the camera was still filming Levant's eyes. In Gothenburg I had to sit in front row, because it was so packed, to the same film.

We showed Colossal Youth this year at CAF, where I work, and apparently there were very few people. But it overlapped with the 5,5 hour showing of Jonas Mekas' As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, so the film buffs went to see that one, I think.

“There’s no use to try and make a film about the past; it’s stupid and impossible. Cinema is always the present. Old mistakes are today’s failures. History is always now. That’s what the Spanish writer Unamuno used to call the tragic sense of life. Horse Money will always play in an everlasting present.”

http://whitecitycinema.com/2015/09/21/our-films-should-avenge-an-interview-with-pedro-costa/

Anyone watch Vitalina Varela yet?

caught it at last years lff, a really remarkable work. made everything else i saw at the festival seem rather trivial. had been hoping to catch again when it released but the cinema's closed before i could.

makes clear he's as much an heir to ford as to straub/huillet

I haven't seen his latest, but I've seen all the others except for his first. I'm not excited that he's still filming the same locations with the same actors/people; it feels almost like a hairshirt he's donning to prove that this is Heavy Cinema about Real Issues. Ossos and Vanda's Room were his first films in that milieu, and his best.

The extended elevator scene (with the soldier) in Horse Money was so jarringly off-kilter with the rest of the movie, it made me wonder if he realizes he needs to change things up but no longer knows which way to go.

VV is the only one I've seen but I liked it a lot. I might have struggled with a solo home viewing, though.

Criterion's streaming most of them; Casa de Lava is a change, practically a Rohmer film.

It's really excellent, think I had it as top 3.

http://jonjost.wordpress.com/2021/08/08/san-pedro-and-vitalina/?fbclid=IwAR0Qv_skp9lp7kk9305iKlY2JTEEmr3wOgJQZJFLi062VafmVjVZ9Ac-dDk

"Colonialism" is a harsh accusation for a white American dude to be throwing around but fwiw the absence of liveliness he refers to is something I've also noticed as a major difference between how African communities actually live in Portugal and how they are portrayed by Costa.

In attempting to illuminate the lives of his characters and their world, Costa’s severe aestheticism instead kills them. Where Costa says he makes these films to give voice to the lives of these immigrants, instead he confines them to a narrow aesthetic trap, his aesthetic trap, far more limited than the socio-political realm to which they are confined in reality. The truth is that precious few people will ever see this film, and of those who do most live in an esoteric realm in which cinema is a bizarre host, in which watching movies, it is believed, will give you insight into the truth of life, a delusion which they share with their fellow cineastes. Costa – by his own admission – grew up in a cathedral, the Cinemateca Portuguese, ingesting his communions there, where he learned the vast catechisms of the cinema and came away with a litany of things he’d learned. He puts these on display for those in the know, a nod to this great name and and that and then another, for the priests to decipher and nod approvingly. Like Biblical citations or the Torah.

As it happens, I have lived in Lisboa a bit, and in the late 90’s visited Fontainhas when it was alive, a favela of homemade houses, mostly of immigrants from Cabo Verde, but also others. It was indeed a place of drugs and booze (just like classier neighborhoods), and it was very poor. But as other similar places around the world, it was also lively, colorful, energetic. As it were, compared to the dour Portuguese surrounding it, it had “rhythm” which came with the African source of its residents.

In Costa’s portrayals, commencing with his early 35mm films, this liveliness is largely absent and in Vitalina Verena, it is utterly absent – perhaps the men playing cards in the suffocating shadows being the only exception. So while Costa claims to be giving these people a voice, showing them to the world from which they are hidden, he is not really doing so; rather he is imposing his grim dour view upon them and claiming it is their voice. Just like colonialists always assert they are doing good for those they have occupied, bringing them salvation through Christ or capitalism. Of course Pedro would counter that his entourage of regulars are full participants, voluntarily sharing this work, and hence it is an expression of themselves, and not just Pedro’s vision. And in the muffled confines of the inner sanctum of his church, this will likely beget assent. As colonizers invariably find reason to ethically and morally take the high ground in their own minds.

That's a well-written piece, but I basically made the same point above in one paragraph that took Jost several pages. I don't feel qualified to judge the movie as either crypto-Catholicism or patronizing colonialism.
In the earlier Costa films, there was at least the feeling that life was continuing somewhere else, just offscreen - you might not expect main characters who were desperate parents or drug addicts to have the "liveliness" you mention, but there was a feeling that the unhappy events he was showing were just a part of the tapestry of the community. With Colossal Youth and Horse Money, heaviness combined with aestheticism grew overwhelming.
I still haven't seen Vitalina Varela. I'm curious what the other three posters upthread who said they liked the film would make of this essay.

What I've heard from people is a lot of gushing about this being Costa's most painterly film yet, which the essay also addresses. Zero interest in watching it but I will probably have to at some point.

Anyway it's weird to me that Costa has this standing as The Authentic Portrayer Of The Underclass while being a rich white dude whose films are mostly seen by other rich white dudes, in Portugal at least. I realise this is by no means unique in world cinema.

In terms of things to criticise in the essay I think he's very wrong about the saudade element - yes it's originally a product of colonialism, arriving as it did with the Portuguese language, but I think if you suggested that to be its standing now to anyone from a Portuguese language country they'd look at you like you're mad. João Gilberto's "Chega De Saudade", Cesária Evóra's godamn signature song for crying out loud, lots of other examples. And of course it resonates for immigrant populations in particular.

Costa is rich?

which watching movies, it is believed, will give you insight into the truth of life, a delusion which they share with their fellow cineastes.

this is just a bizarre statement btw

and weird sentence

It's excessive and snide sure but it is true that a lot of ppl feel more comfortable gaining that insight from movies about community x rather than engaging with members of that community, even if they're living right next to them.

Costa is rich?

Well-off, upper class, yes. He's not a billionaire or anything.