The Colossal Cinema of Pedro Costa (Part Three)

It is impossible to conclude even a minute comprehension of Pedro Costa’s cinema without addressing the formidable influence which the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet had on Costa’s recent constructions, and particularly on the structuring of his masterpiece, Colossal Youth. The French film-making duo — whose works are identified under the combined authorship of “Straub-Huillet” — is responsible for some of the most stringent, challenging films in the history of cinema. Indeed, the “difficulties” that are sometimes ascribed to Pedro Costa’s work, and especially the frustration, discomfort, or even “monumental boredom” experienced by some in watching challenging films like In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth, are very nearly the same difficulties which have been attributed to Straub-Huillet’s films. Jean-Marie Straub, a combative and loquacious Alsatian (and a professedly Marxist thinker), first came on the scene as a colleague and friend of the Nouvelle Vague directors — Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, et al — who did not himself make a film until 1963, some years after the Nouvelle Vague had made its mark. Straub by then had already met Danièle Huillet when they were film students at the Lycee Voltaire in Paris in 1954. Their partnership — intimate and professional — would last until Huillet’s death in 2006 (notably, the year of the release of Costa’s Colossal Youth, in itself a testament to the Straub-Huillet oeuvre and to the radical solutions the duo proffered to forestall the “death of cinema” Rossellini had once declared).

I previously discussed the ways in which Paul Cézanne and Robert Bresson informed Costa’s work, but these giant voices would not have spoken so conclusively to Costa had he never encountered the films of Straub-Huillet. Properly speaking, Straub-Huillet are the foremost inheritors of the Cézanne/Bresson aesthetic (though Straub has resisted any such categorization or lineage). From Bresson was acquired the physical mechanization of the scenario — of the “models” who perform actions in complete fidelity not to any contrivances of dramatic psychology, but to the material presence they exhibit within the boundaries of the frame. From Cézanne, Straub-Huillet inherited a duty to proceed with patience and deliberation past the initial obscurity of the surface — of nature as it appears at first, on the canvas or bounded by the camera-frame — and wait for the moment when, in Cézanne’s words, “everything falls into place.” The connection to Cézanne is more explicitly pronounced, since two of Straub-Huillet’s films are devoted to his work: Cézanne (1989) and Une visite au Louvre (2004). The 1989 film is a kind of cinematic transcription of Joaquim Gasquet’s dialogues with Cézanne on the nature of art and the master’s working philosophy.

Costa confesses that when he first encountered Straub-Huillet’s films, a completely new way of thinking about cinema unsettled his earlier prescriptions. For one thing, his youthful attachment to the revolutionary punk format proposed by Godard was loosened by what he perceived to be Straub-Huillet’s far more radical work: “Godard seemed very old to me, suddenly, when I saw [...] the films of Straub. They were the fastest, the most furious, the most beautiful, sensual, ancient, modern.” Indeed, Straub-Huillet are a continuation of the Godard method of directly involving cinema in the disruption of conventional (and thus politicized) film standards, but in a way more enhanced and considerably less impatient, less rapid than Godard’s tweaked velocity. (In this we may analogize Straub-Huillet as the “post-punk” figures to Godard’s “classic punk” persona, a correlation that goes a long way to explain the translation of Costa’s Juventude em marcha — literally, “Youth on the march” — into the less politicized but more poetic “Colossal Youth,” intentionally or not, the title of an album by post-punk outfit Young Marble Giants.)

Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet

Where Godard actively engaged the audience’s attention using instruments of self-referential irony and pop cultural subterfuge, Straub-Huillet didn’t bother to engage the audience even on a minimal level of entertainment, choosing instead a forceful, precise, time-specific austerity which demanded a nearly total political/ethical participation by the audience. Their films eschew all efforts at decorum or embellishment, defy any standardized expectations for basic narrative amenability, and fully surrender to the objective cohesion of their subjects, whether they are centered on a people, on objects, or on a performance: and these spectacles are built up by eschewing the familiar cinematic methods of editing and non-diegetic solicitation, choosing rather to suffuse the frame with the material duration of the subject’s presence and the acts thereof. When Straub-Huillet film, for instance, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron (1973), the entire opera is played out using only natural direct (diegetic) sound (the player’s actual voices are used) and sparse cutting, so as to respect not only the integrity of the performance, but the physical actuality of the players. In this regard, the direct overlay of the opera’s score should be considered “diegetic” since the world spoken of and rehearsed is that of Schoenberg’s opera: the score is not used for “background” or “effect” as in a Hollywood film, but is a synchronous entity concurrent with the baritone’s voice.

For Straub-Huillet, the essential purpose of cinema can only be elaborated through its real-time proximity to the material and mechanical conditions which allow for the subject to be described. For example, in Straub-Huillet’s Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), rather than conveying the intellectual life of Bach through a dramatic narrative of his celebrity and personality, Straub-Huillet choose to demonstrate the meaning of “Bach” in the actual performance of his works, from which we learn more of him than we ever will from his biography. So too with Cézanne, who is as much a “text” and a body of work as he was a man and a thinker.

After the arduous completion of In Vanda’s Room (edited by Dominique Auvray, who had worked with Costa on Casa de Lava, and also with Phillipe Garrel and Claire Denis), Pedro Costa struck the rare opportunity to document Straub and Huillet at work on re-editing their 1999 film Sicilia!. The documentary was to be a part of a short film series for French television, Cineastes de notre temps. The Straubs at the time were working at Le Fresnoy multimedia art center near Lille, in a small editing room where Costa found himself restricted to filming the Straubs in the dark while they worked. According to Tag Gallagher, “For Costa, it was like being in Vanda’s room a second time — another confined space.” Gallagher notes that though Costa himself declared the documentary on Straub-Huillet (released in 2001 as Où gît votre sourire enfoui?) to be very “anti-Straubian,” the documentary is ultimately centered on the Straubs and the way they make films. Thus Where does your hidden smile lie? (translation) is “Straubian” in the same way that the films of Straub-Huillet can also be considered “anti-Straubian”: that is, the methodology at work is so devoid of ornamental psychology or personality, of flagrant authorship or signature, that the films become absorbed in their subject and loosen their grip on overly intentional structures. What transpires instead is an authoring of the work that draws its force from resisting “the easy way out”; in other words, from seeking to impose one’s own slant on a surface that is more resplendent, more responsive, when taken on its own terms. This self-erasure on the part of the artist — which is paradoxically what makes Straub-Huillet’s films what they are, “Straubian” — counteracts the conventional willfulness of those artists who, in Straub’s words, “distort reality” by flaunting “the so-called wealth of their imagination”:

There are those who stick close to reality and do not put their imagination in there, their limited imagination of limited creatures. And then there are those who distort reality for the sake of the so-called wealth of the imagination… The result is [...] that the imagination is much more limited in the work of the second family than in that of the first. Because there is less patience in the work of the second family and, as someone once said, genius is nothing more than a great deal of patience. Because if you have a great deal of patience, it is charged with contradictions at the same time. Otherwise it doesn’t have the time to be charged. Lasting patience is necessarily charged with tenderness and violence. [...] There’s a temptation to show a mountain. [...] Then one fine day you realize that it’s better to see as little as possible. You have a sort of reduction, only it’s not a reduction, it’s a concentration and it actually says more. But you don’t do this immediately from one day to the next! You need time and patience. A sigh can become a novel. (Selection quoted from Où gît votre sourire enfoui? by Tag Gallagher in his essay “Straub Anti-Straub“)

The humility and patience which Straub describes is a trait of the Cézanne/Bresson aesthetic; the will to create — to add unto, to augment, is “contradicted” by the will to reduce, to abide, to wait. One technique urges the artist to put more of him/herself into the work, while the other method is to allow the work — the frame plus the object/subject contained inside — to reveal itself steadily by channeling its natural rhythm, permitting its vegetable growth to unfold in layers. Straub, like Cézanne and Bresson before him, chooses the latter volition, in itself a choice that “charges” the work with “tenderness and violence.” Straub isn’t describing passivity, but active vigilance. The friction that occurs between the artist’s intentions and the subject/object’s concrete value saves the work from collapsing into either hollow interpretation or absurd fallacy; something “material” is gained by virtue of proximity — identification with what is seen (by allowing it to be seen rather than interpreted). This is what is meant when Straub claims that “it’s better to see as little as possible”; namely, that freedom comes to the artist, as it comes to the musician, when he/she has restricted him/herself to the intrinsic limitations of the instrument, the scenario, the idea. The frame, then, does not imprison, it liberates — because it gives form to the originally amorphous idea, the invertebrate matter of thought.

The “lasting patience” which Straub speaks of, we find, was the same inner strength that helped Costa negotiate the charged interiorities of Vanda’s living quarters. One fine day Costa realized that “it’s better to see as little as possible”; or, in Costa’s paraphrase of Straub’s meaning, he learned it was better to “lose reality” than to strive to capture it. Costa maps out the images of In Vanda’s Room following the opposed binary of “Interior” versus “Exterior”: he first establishes the interior domain of Vanda’s room, which serves as a sanctuary for herself and her impoverished and drug-afflicted neighbors, serving also as a repository for the interpersonal acts that define the relationship shared by Vanda and her neighbors; this interiority is subsequently countered by shots of the exterior surrounding Vanda’s home, mainly scenes showing the ongoing demolition of the buildings that constitute Vanda’s neighborhood (we do not know why exactly these buildings are being torn down, but we learn later that residents of the Fontainhas barrio are being forced out into new apartment blocks as a kind of public welfare project). The binary is kept intact by opposing, on the one hand, the seemingly eternalized preservation of the interior life in which Vanda and co. are (momentarily) allowed to persist in, and on the other, the methodic, chronologic destruction of the same buildings that house Vanda and co.

Still from Pedro Costa's "In Vanda's Room"

As everything physically crumbles around them, Vanda and her family manage to share a stronger bond on-screen than in their own lives, which are gradually threatened by the progress of the demolition crew. Indeed, Costa’s project fulfills two roles: (1) he is able to give back to the people onscreen — some of them Cape Verdean immigrants who are struggling to survive in a foreign economy — a testament to their existence under threat by bulldozers and wrecking balls (machines which serve as a metonymy for the much-larger cultural/material dispossession suffered by the bottom-class immigrants and sub-altern workers who find themselves miserably displaced from their homes and from their dreams); and (2) Costa gives them a cinematic materialization of what Vanda and her family possess and cannot be taken away: their cultural/social interdependence, their coded rites of love.

Inevitably the residents of Fontainhas are driven out, and the shantytown is destroyed; where once they had a history, albeit a paltry and tormented one, now they were left with no history to relate nor a culture to pass on to future generations. Even a history of poverty and enslavement is a history that must be recounted for generations to come — survival and culture are always at stake. Intuitively, Costa latched on to the Straub-Huillet project, perhaps sensing a way out of the fresh problems he was confronted with after finishing In Vanda’s Room. One quality that excited Costa in the work of Straub-Huillet was their ability to render ancient texts and surfaces using purely modern means. The later works of Straub-Huillet, especially their multiple adaptations of Friedrich Hölderlin‘s The Death of Empedocles (of which there exists three written versions by Holderlin, all unfinished, and five cinematic versions by Straub-Huillet, who with characteristic Cézanne-like obsession, reworked each film adaptation making only minimal, often imperceptible changes), were filmed in a restrained “textual” mode, by which I refer to the little-to-no deviation from the texts they used for their films. We find in these films, as in all their work, a strict fidelity to the literary text chosen for the scenario: the voiceover is employed for no rhetorical purpose other than the recitation of a text considered inviolable because it is wholesome. This is a principle of their working philosophy, that the parts of a film — text, sound, person, scenery, light — must be considered separately, recorded separately or at least with attention to each one’s particular wholeness, lest they are mixed together in a “lazy” and confused “soup” that distorts the distinctive purity of each element. The text — be it by Hölderlin, Corneille, or Pavese — is itself an individuation to be registered with the same attention to detail as the face of the actor, the tone of a voice, or the specific shade which a tree makes in the sun. The Straub-Huillet methodology thus does not distinguish between text and actor, and certainly not between “ancient” or “modern,” since all these characteristics are, in fact, taking place in the present, within the ever-present frame of the camera, at the moment they are filmed. Such is the cinematic nature of myth-making.

In this there was a reevaluation (or a rediscovery) of the mythos that drives the present-tense. Costa learned through the films of Straub-Huillet that what is myth is what is eternalized, regardless of surface or depth, because the myth is always occurring in the present state of things; it is always being retold to others and resent in letters abroad and written on walls and remembered in “beautiful new words.” Here was Costa’s realization: what the transplanted, marginalized people of Fontainhas lacked was a working mythology of their place and time: an ever-present myth-making that, if its process could not return them to their homeland, would give them a reinvigorated sense of their location in the world and their place in history. From this unspoken desire for historical validation was born the conception of Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth.

Criterion DVD cover

Colossal Youth, Costa’s sixth film, and the concluding section of the Fontainhas trilogy, is the culmination of the incremental transitions he made since O Sangue seventeen years earlier. Youth is, in sum, the retelling of the letter which was written in Cape Verde and first read aloud in Casa de Lava, the letter which begins “Nha Crecheu, my love…” but which had not been successfully delivered or received by those to whom it was sent. Pedro Costa’s filmography can hence be summarized under the figure of this motif: his films were a kind of training, a steady exercise in unveiling the meaning of the letter he put together in Casa de Lava, a poem which he wrote but for which he could not (immediately) find the right context, the right envelope, the right film. What the letter required, along with the vastness of the misery and beauty contained therein, was the creation of an organic myth; or to use Straub’s terminology, the originary “idea”  (letter/loss/disinheritance) called for the right “matter” (the human voice) to give shape to the proper “form” (the recitation) in which to shine. The letter is methodically, obsessively repeated throughout Colossal Youth as a mnemonic motif to which the principal character clings, a tall lanky Cape Verdean immigrant fatefully named Ventura (this is in fact his real name, and the real Ventura is not so much acting as he is evincing his own factual existence).

Still from Pedro Costa's "Colossal Youth"

Ventura, like a dignified but tragic king, wanders through the frame-contained space of his “kingdom,” the new and oppressively white neighborhood (named “Casal Boba”) which has taken the place of the old Fontainhas barrio. Ventura is a mythic figure, we can tell, in the manner he speaks and also in the way he is able to pass forth from space to space, from structured frame to deconstructed unit, at liberty to invoke the trust of others and to enter any room he pleases (including Vanda’s new abode, where we find her fuller and healthier than before, now off her heroin addiction and on methadone). We are introduced to Ventura in the same way we are introduced to the personae in Costa’s other films: we just see him, as we would in life, on the street, contemplating, sitting, lying down — simply being (this is actually how the real-life Ventura came to be sighted by Costa during the film shoots of Ossos and Vanda). Ventura’s emergence has no narrative device attached, we learn of him through elliptical passages and oblique references. Because Ventura simply appears, assumingly without historical or narrative placement, he is a timeless entity: he seems to exist as Hamlet’s father does, a spectre of the past touring the ruins of the present; or encharging the present — charging Hamlet and his other children — with the duty to rectify the wrongful disinheritance of the past.

If there is a Hamlet to be found in Colossal Youth, he may be dimly viewed in the persona of Lento, a young Cape Verdean who is referred to by Ventura as one among his “children,” though it is uncertain whether they indeed are related this way, by culture if not by blood. Lento and Ventura share the same dilapidated room during large sections of the film, and it is Lento who is enjoined by Ventura to memorize the entirety of the “Nha Crecheu” letter. Ventura, the very embodiment of the letter, keeps the refrains of the letter nestled in his memory, but Lento (also a fitting name, meaning “Slow”) is initially unable to remember it. The source of Lento’s inability is on the surface a technical issue: he lacks a pen and paper to write Ventura’s words down (Lento had asked Ventura for fine words to write to his beloved back “home”); but Ventura insists that Lento memorize the passage, that he may internalize its import. The meaning of this internalization is highly significant: Ventura, who embodies the mythos which the letter carries (by which I mean that the letter presents not only a real possibility for reaching back to the cultural history of those who have been dispossessed and moved to a different home, but also a chance to bring to the present a reconciliation with the past aided by poetic myth and nourished by happiness and fortune — ventura in Portuguese), cannot rest until he has delivered the letter which has come a long distance from Cape Verde (from Casa de Lava) to Lisbon, Portugal, in search of a recipient who will store the letter and repeat it to his children and to the children of his children and so forth. The internalization of the letter, thus, activates the recovery of a cultural heritage, the yearning for it, which they lost during years of displacement, poverty, and hopelessness. Ventura is the walking, speaking symbol for this effort at redemption.

Still from Pedro Costa's "Colossal Youth"

I was reminded only fleetingly by Hamlet (and I accede it is a stretch), but another better correspondence comes to mind when considering the tragic king mode exemplified by Ventura: he is closer to the figure of King Lear, stripped of his properties, roaming the wastes of his shattered kingdom, in search of his true and honest children. Indeed, he visits each one of his heirs, but instead of finding them malicious and ungrateful, Ventura is disheartened to see that they too have been disinherited of their lands, forced into hollow apartments which they find as completely empty — of soul and of family — as the old shanties they struggled to keep and maintain were full and cluttered. Though a fragmented people, the residents of Casal Boba do not lose their dignity. Costa has his non-actors adopt the Greek drama-like declamatory speech module so prominent in the Straub-Huillet films, in which the personae speak to each other in a measured but relaxed vulgar tongue, their words carefully deliberated before they speak, otherwise choosing the gaze or silence as a just response to their state. (The Straub-Huillet methodology adopted by Costa does not end there, as Richard Suchenski points out: one crucial sequence has Ventura visiting the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, for which, we learn, Ventura had originally left Cape Verde as an immigrant worker to help construct and install; as Ventura wanders from room to room and seats himself at liberty on priceless antique furniture — just as a king would in the castle he built — Costa explicitly alludes to Straub-Huillet’s Cézanne films, particularly in the camera’s close analysis of the artworks, evoking the frame-within-a-frame schematic. Ironically, Ventura is later kicked out from the very museum he helped construct in his younger days.) Below is an example of the remarkable likeness of the mannerisms in Costa’s Colossal Youth to the speech, pacing, and even camera placement found in a clip of Straub-Huillet’s Sicilia!:

Colossal Youth is also a film emphatically about the search for liberation. Liberation from space, liberation from containment; but also: freedom from the enslavement of the past, that the future generations, the youngblooded colossi, may march forward in giant strides gripping a tangible history in firm hands. It is a liberation, firstly, of political dimension (at the film’s beginning, Ventura plays a Cape Verdean liberation anthem on a record player, and silently admonishes Lento to listen and take in its rhythms).

For Costa the liberation is an aesthetic one: Colossal Youth is his most beautifully realized work, a project that took 15 months to shoot and more than 320 hours of footage to edit down to its final state of 155 minutes. Shot in high definition digital video, the film’s cinematographic surface, along with the architectural precision of the shots, advance beyond the closed-off graininess of In Vanda’s Room into a fresh realm of interrogation: simply put, there are very few digital films as painstakingly mesmeric as Colossal Youth is, as meticulously paced and mapped out. Colossal Youth is the break with the old avenues of cinema-making that Costa little-by-little unlearned through practice and extreme patience; but it is also the product of a truly classical education in cinema, of all the John Ford, Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean-Luc Godard, Straub-Huillet films (and so many more) he had seen and studied to reach this point. Where In Vanda’s Room (Costa’s first true break) played with the dichotomous antagonism of interior versus exterior, Colossal Youth drops the binary and synthesizes the interior with the exterior, creating a strain of cinematic space in which architecture looms over the margins of the sky, and space in turn swallows up buildings; a cinematic zone not unlike Antonioni’s structures on view in Red Desert, only this time skillfully condensed by Costa’s DV lensing.

The limitations of the frame are at their most expressive and bold: white monolithic buildings are accentuated from a low-angle, as Ventura crouches or stands under them, as if to make the narrow scope of the camera-eye more compact by filling it with grimy or light-blasted byzantine surfaces. “Int.” versus “Ext.” (as the sluglines are known in film scripts) are thus replaced by a new formula: “Ext. = Int.” We come out of Vanda‘s room to find Ventura equally comfortable outdoors as he is at home indoors; Vanda’s new apartment interior, in what looks like an empty dining room, with its ironic high chandelier and blank white wall, feels as much “outside” as it does in. Because all interiors and exteriors are bounded by, subjected to, the camera-frame, the planes by which they are judged are cleansed of spatial prejudice. Like Lear, Ventura discovers his inner truths exposed to the elements — his tattered kingdom spreads everywhere; but in place of madness we find compassion smoldering in his gaze as spiritual matter.

Liberation from these bewilderingly spacious, sometimes cramped zones (I am tempted to just dub this mythic land, the Zone) does not happen, and cannot effect itself, until Lento finally memorizes and makes his own the seventeen-year-old letter from Cape Verde; we find also that other residents of the new village are in search of liberation through the traditional means of confession, to which Ventura bears witness. The reborn Vanda, whose new home Ventura visits frequently, describes the lengths she has crossed to arrive where she is, though even now she still suffers the setbacks of weakness and withdrawal, fighting to gain her composure to care for her growing child and husband. Paulo, a door-to-door beggar unable to support himself because of a construction work accident, also testifies to the everyday struggles he faces; one of the film’s climaxes transpires when Ventura visits Paulo in the hospital, where he finds the beggar bed-ridden and paralyzed by surgery, and Paulo delivers an emotional monologue that epitomizes the spiritual discontent which so many of the displaced are helpless to feel. Though Paulo bears up his suffering, Ventura’s presence does much to secure him, at the very least, against the tide of indifference which drowns out the plaints of the subaltern class. Paulo does not know of the “Nha Crecheu” letter — he is not, as far as we know, from Cape Verde — but his salvation is implicit in Ventura’s (and Costa’s) bearing witness to his anguished existence. The frame, for once, gives the man’s pained voice the form it calls for.

The cinema of Pedro Costa does not terminate with the completion of Colossal Youth. There is the short film produced under the auspices of the Jeonju Digital Project, The Rabbit Hunters (2007), which acts as a kind of epilogue/annexation to Colossal Youth, featuring Ventura in a supporting role (the short film is available to watch in its entirety). And there is also his latest film, Ne change rien (2009), a lush b&w documentary immersed in the music of French actress/chanteuse Jeanne Balibar. It is sufficient to point out (as a way of ending this still sorely incomplete meditation on Pedro Costa and his influences) that the title of the film is directly taken from one of the countless maxims of Robert Bresson: “Ne change rien pour que tout soit different.” (Change nothing so that everything will be different.) Costa, we’ve learned, has profitably abided by this proverb.