Director’s Quest for Truth Among the Downtrodden

By DENNIS LIM

Published: July 29, 2007

FOR someone whose films have until recently gone largely unseen, the Portuguese director Pedro Costa has a pretty vociferous fan club. His admirers include the French director Jacques Rivette (who called him “genuinely great”) and the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall (who claimed that Mr. Costa’s films improve on Robert Bresson’s). He has been feted at festivals and museums from Vienna to Mexico City to Tokyo. His work has been extensively discussed in Cahiers du Cinéma, Artforum and Film Comment. Last fall Cinema Scope magazine produced promotional — or, more to the point, polemical— T-shirts, identical to the “Vote for Pedro” T’s from “Napoleon Dynamite” except for an additional phrase: “Pedro Costa, that is.”

But Mr. Costa, 48, is not uniformly loved by world-cinema tastemakers. The press screening for “Colossal Youth” at the Cannes Film Festival last year was punctuated by a steady stream of departing critics. Detractors call his films slow and obdurate. Their rigor and stringency, along with the ferocious rhetoric often deployed by his champions, have given him the forbidding air of a high-art Spartan.

That reputation does the work a disservice. Few movies are as concretely rooted in physical reality or as profoundly attentive to their social context as Mr. Costa’s. In recent years he has shot almost exclusively in the slums of Lisbon, working closely with the downtrodden inhabitants. Staking out a radical middle between documentary and fiction, he has invented a heroic and quite literal form of Arte Povera, a monumental cinema of humble means. (A retrospective of his films, which has been touring North America, starts Friday at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan and runs through Aug. 12.)

Speaking by telephone from Lisbon, Mr. Costa called his methods a throwback to, of all things, old Hollywood. “It’s like a studio system,” he said. “We go to work every day. We have our economic structure — everyone gets paid the same — and we have our stars.”

Mr. Costa’s first feature, “O Sangue” (“The Blood,” 1989), was not a reliable indicator of things to come. A black-and-white reverie of family disintegration, it is, in the best sense, a young man’s film, drunk on romantic doom and movie love — a rhapsodic style Mr. Costa now regards as “camouflage.”

Frustrated with the rightward drift in Portuguese politics and the scarcity of financing, he ventured abroad — to the West African islands of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony — and made “Casa de Lava” (Down to Earth,” 1994). The story of a nurse who accompanies a comatose laborer home to Cape Verde, it changed the course of his career.

The Cape Verdeans he met sent him back to Lisbon with gifts for relatives who had emigrated there. The delivery mission led him to the shantytown of Fontainhas, where many Cape Verdeans had settled. He decided to set a film in the neighborhood, using residents as actors.

The result, “Ossos” (“Bones,” 1997), centered on the newborn infant of two hapless teenagers, is a parable of economic and spiritual desperation as oblique and concentrated as anything by Bresson. Mr. Costa was dissatisfied with the shoot, not least for having invaded a residential neighborhood with the unwieldy machinery of film production.

“We would be shooting late at night and shining lights into people’s houses,” he said. “I realized there’s something wrong with the way movies are made today.”

Mr. Costa set out to address not merely logistical headaches but also the responsibility that comes with picking up a camera. The act of filmmaking is premised on a discrepancy of power. As Mr. Costa put it, “The balance is off between those behind and in front of the camera.” His next film, “In Vanda’s Room” (2000), went a long way toward redressing the inequality.

Encouraged by Vanda Duarte, an actress in “Ossos,” he continued to film in Fontainhas, which was being demolished. This time he did so with a small video camera, often by himself. He grew close to his subjects and shot for almost two years. From 140 hours of footage he shaped a three-hour film.

A series of shadowy domestic tableaus (the camera never moves, and Mr. Costa used only available light), “In Vanda’s Room” is a stark, intimate portrait of a community whose world is literally falling apart. (Bulldozers are continuously heard on the soundtrack.) It feels at times like a documentary but is actually the result of long conversations and multiple takes. Ms. Duarte and her friends, who sit around, talk, prepare heroin fixes, smoke and shoot up, are not documentary subjects so much as actors playing themselves.

Mr. Costa handled the copious drug use matter-of-factly. “I was never moralistic,” he said. “But I was hoping to get them to see that drugs are a punishment imposed on them by external forces.”

While shooting “In Vanda’s Room” he recognized that he didn’t want to return to traditional filmmaking. “Going to work on the bus I felt exactly like I should for the rest of my life,” he said. “It’s almost not a film at that point. It’s a job you do, a job you like. We could be making chairs or shoes. It just happens to be images and sounds.”

Mr. Costa’s films assert that there are more important things than art, even as they insist that beauty is everywhere to be found. “Art should be more than it is and a lot less than it is,” he said, voicing the implicit manifesto of his films. “Brecht said he made jewels for the poor. He talked about the epic quality of the day-to-day life of common people. That’s something I pursue. I really want them to be heroes.”

He left Fontainhas to make “Where Lies Your Hidden Smile?” (2001), a documentary on Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, the avant-garde filmmakers he had long admired. (Mr. Costa speaks passionately of his “idols” who range from the Hollywood titan John Ford to the punk-rock rabble-rouser John Lydon.)

“Colossal Youth,” which came next, stemmed from an impulse to document the relocation of the Fontainhas residents. Ms. Duarte, now on methadone though still possessed of her signature hacking cough, appears in the film, but the focus is on Ventura, an elderly Cape Verdean whose wife has left him. Mr. Costa again amassed hundreds of hours of footage, but he moves further from documentary to include surreal and mythic touches. Ventura wanders between the old ghetto, where a few stragglers remain, and the new housing project. He refers to the men and women he meets as his children and repeatedly recites a love letter (adapted from the poet Robert Desnos) to his absent wife.

In a sense “Colossal Youth” is a film about walls. The contrast between the worn interiors of Fontainhas, walls on which entire lives are inscribed, and the whitewashed surfaces of the anonymous new apartments is almost shocking.

There is a third space the movie briefly occupies — the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon — and to hear Mr. Costa describe the genesis of a scene he shot there, the walls are again significant. He was driving with Ventura one day when they passed the Gulbenkian. “Ventura told me he worked on the construction years ago but had never been to the museum,” Mr. Costa said, so they pulled over. Inside he noticed that Ventura was drawn less to the art than to his own handiwork: the walls. “He’s moved that his walls have Rubens and Rembrandts,” he said. “But he kept looking behind the paintings.”

by Acquarello

The Rabbit Hunters (Pedro Costa)

Pedro Costa's entry, The Rabbit Hunters is a graceful modulation of his short film Tarrafal from the The State of the World omnibus, a series of elliptical encounters shot from the perspective of displaced Fonthainas elder villagers, Ventura, the paternal, old soul drifting through the vestiges of his dying neighborhood in Colossal Youth, and his unemployed and homeless friend, Alfredo (rather than José Alberto's perspective in Tarrafal). At one point in the film, a cook, having offered free meals of leftover soup to Ventura and Alfredo in the back kitchen, proceeds to brush off the dirt and grime from Ventura's clothing to make him look more presentable, and gives him a filial admonition for his careworn, disheveled appearance. "I'm haunted by lots of ghosts", explains Ventura. Similar to Costa's seminal film Casa de Lava, the characters' existential limbo is also a spiritual desolation borne of a haunted, implacable landscape. In The Rabbit Hunters, the repressed environmental memory has been formed by Tarrafal's unspoken history as a concentration camp site once dubbed the "camp of slow death" during the dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, where political dissidents and anti-colonialists were imprisoned and tortured. In a sense, the prison camp has become the embodiment of a corrosive, suppressed memory that has metastasized and leeched into the landscape, contaminating everyone who has lived on - and off - the land (in one episode, Alfredo recounts having trapped nothing but diseased animals to take home and cook for his meals). Like the long-forgotten prisoners before them, the villagers, too, exist in a state of slow death, discarded by the living and haunted by unreconciled ghosts - an ambiguity that is reflected in Ventura and Alfredo's odd conversations over each other's death experiences. Concluding with a shot of José Alberto's deportation letter that has been affixed to a wall by a pocket knife, the film comes to a metaphoric full circle - illustrating the connection between the trauma of dislocation and institutionalized marginalization.


Tarrafal, 2007

In an episode that occurs halfway through Tarrafal, Cape Verdean immigrant José Alberto, having just received his expulsion notice, encounters the elderly, displaced Fonthainas resident Ventura waiting on the side of a dirt road as his friend, Alfredo tries in vain to catch rabbits by thrashing random bushes with a wooden club. In a way, the idea of silent, enduring landscapes as figurative intersections for other unfolding - and often converging - human stories (a recurring theme in José Luis Guerín's cinema as well) may be seen as a metaphor for Pedro Costa's densely layered themes of dislocation and statelessness. As subsequently revealed in The Rabbit Hunters, Alfredo, too, is homeless, resorting to a life in the streets after having been thrown out of the apartment by his wife. In Tarrafal, this converging image of forced - and implicitly traumatic - displacement and exile is established in the opening images of José Alberto's ironic inquiries to his mother over the derelict conditions of their ancestral houses in Cape Verde from his own ramshackle home in the slums. As the conversation morphs from the neglect and inhabitability of their beloved, deserted homes that recalls the reclamation of abandoned ghost houses in In Vanda's Room, to the strange tales of a blood-sucking phantasm who foretells a person's hour of death by surreptitiously leaving letters in the most mundane of hiding places to be subsequently retrieved at the time of their immutable appointment - an impersonal, life-altering communication that alludes to the state's arbitrary dispensation of deportation and eviction notices in modern day Portugal - Costa illustrates a sense of anonymous interchangeability among the transitory, drifting souls of Tarrafal. Visually, this sense of surrogacy and transplantation is reflected in the repeating angular doorway view of José Alberto's house: first, in the solitary image of José Alberto facing away from the camera as he sits on a wooden plank to smoke, then subsequently, in a reframed shot of Ventura and Alfredo seated on the same plank looking out into the neighboring town, commenting on the profound transformation of the once desolate landscape (note Alfredo's humorous misidentification of stray cats as rabbits that further reinforces their seeming interchangeability). Moreover, intrinsic in José Alberto's sad tale of requesting a work release to single-handedly bury his estranged father, and the rabbit hunters' conversation over their mistreatment and death at the hands of authorities is the specter of Tarrafal's unreconciled history as a prison camp where inmates were tortured and relegated to die a slow death. Composed as skewed, frame within frame stationary shots that evoke the acute angles and distanced address of Straub/Huillet, these parallel testimonies of dislocation, separation, entrapment, and fatedness unfold through supplanted images of interchangeable, moribund, drifting ghosts that integrally reflect their own erasure and social invisibility.


Colossal Youth, 2006

On a derelict building illuminated by the crepuscular glow of a night sky, assorted pieces of furniture and household goods are intermittently discarded from upper level windows, crashing into the razed ruins below. A woman emerges from the shadows, brandishes a small kitchen knife, and recounts her fragmented tale before disappearing, once again, into the cloak of darkness. A deliberative, grey haired man named Ventura hides behind a structural pilaster protruding from a wall - made all the more monolithic and formidable by the low angle shot - as he abstractedly gazes elsewhere, beyond the frame. From this muted, elliptical, and deceptively facile (and seemingly atemporal) opening composition, Pedro Costa establishes the pervasive sense of disposability, social invisibility, longing, and desolation that would define the contextual framework for the film. For the characters in Colossal Youth, the third installment of Costa's loose triptych of quotidian encounters among a community of Cape Verdean itinerant laborers from the shantytown of Fontaínhas in Portugal, the historical landscape of the Cape Verde islands as barren land, exploited colony, commercial way station, slave port, and leprosaria institution is not a forgotten anecdote, but a suffocating reality that continues to weigh on the collective consciousness of its inhabitants, even in their migration and displacement. Within this immateriality of a haunted, unreconciled burden of past - an imprinted spiritual memory of enslavement, isolation, expendability, impermanence, and social rejection - these transitory, everyday interactions may be seen, not as polite, communal gestures, but rather, as personal testimonies of people living in the ever eroding margins of the visible, struggling to emerge from the liminal before receding into the shadows.

At the nucleus of this rended community from the demolished Fontaínhas slum is Ventura, a laborer forced into retirement by disability who has assumed the role of informal village elder to an assortment of uprooted friends, acquaintances, former colleagues, and extended family (a paternal character that evokes the musician with an inordinately large family (from a series of out of wedlock relationships) in Casa de Lava): a recovering drug addict (and titular character of Costa's earlier film, In Vanda's Room) whose awkward maternal instincts reveal her own stunted maturity, a government housing agent bemused by Ventura's vague and often arbitrary requirements for his new home, a daughter still living in the ruins of Fontaínhas awaiting relocation to public housing, an injured laborer undergoing physical rehabilitation who longs for a less hazardous job in his trained vocation as a goldsmith, a museum guard who scuttles Ventura from a gallery exhibiting Diego Velázquez paintings, his lean and angular physicality momentarily cutting a dark and sinuous figure as majestic and transfixing as the works of art that frame him (note Costa's homage to Straub/Huillet in their strategy for full representation (or proportion) framing of the paintings in Cézanne and A Trip to the Louvre), an illiterate migrant worker who enlists Ventura to write a letter to send home to his beloved. However, as Ventura's role transforms from transcriber to author - or more appropriately, ghostwriter - the love letter increasingly takes on the profound weight of his own longing and sense of despair after his lover's abandonment. Inevitably, the repeated recitation (or perhaps, incantation) of Ventura's work-in-progress, visceral prose in subtly alternating forms throughout the film becomes a reflection of the overarching structure of temps morts that characterize the encounters of Colossal Youth itself - the transfiguration of the corporeal into the ethereal through mundane ritual - in all its awkward composition, disarming humility, and poetic ineloquence.


Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, 2001

Nearly twenty years after Harun Farocki paid homage to the profound influence of Straub/Huillet's cinema by filming their exhaustive rehearsal process during preparations for the shooting of their film Class Relations for the documentary Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work..., Pedro Costa captures their equally exacting process of editing their feature film, Sicilia! in Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?. Indeed, as Farocki's film intrinsically captures the filmmakers' working methodology through the framework of his own recurring themes of automation and systemization of processes (even as they apply to the human process of creativity), so, too, does Costa's film illustrate the particularity of their methodology through his own characteristic preoccupation for capturing the allegorical in the quotidian. Curiously, inasmuch as both films capture the rigorous and deliberative nature of their creative process, it is only through the complementation of both films that the nature of the Straubs' collaborative process begins to truly emerge - a portrait, not of inequitable roles of visionary and confidante (as implicitly suggested in the Farocki film as Huillet's role during rehearsals is seemingly reduced to that of advisor and clap board simulator), nor implementer and consultant (as illustrated in the Costa film where Straub is shown to be the intrusive, occasionally tangential, gregarious observer - and comical counterfoil - to the more focused, serious-minded, and methodical Huillet who is editing the film), but rather, as equally creative contemporaries with instinctively defined, yet interactive roles throughout the filmmaking process: one, more conceptual and abstract, the other, more pragmatic and methodical. Ironically, this tumultuous, often colliding process of interactivity itself between theory and application, idea and implementation reflects the complex, yet delicate alchemy of the medium itself, a creative struggle that is articulated by the roguish Straub's impassioned commentary on the subordination of form over idea in Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? that is integral to the realization of their aesthetic.

"The form of the body gives birth to the soul. I've said that a hundred times. ...When someone says, 'Yes, the form, it's the form, the form, never mind the idea', that is a sell-out. It's not true. You have to see things clearly: First, there is the idea, then there is the matter, and then the form. And there is nothing you can do about that. Nobody can change that! ...And through this work, the struggle between the idea and the matter, and the struggle with the matter, gives rise to the form. And the rest is just filling material. ...The same goes for the sculptor. He has his idea and gets a block of marble and he works the matter. He has to take into account the nervures in the marble, the cracks, all the geological layers in it. He just can't do whatever he wants."

This intrinsic "struggle with the material" that defines the process of creation also serves as an allusion to the hidden smile of the film's title. In an illuminating sequence during the editing of a train conversation scene in Sicilia!, Huillet attempts to convey an actor's unarticulated, knowing smile - an illustration of his realization that a passenger seated across from him lied about the nature of his employment - by finding an appropriate intercutting image from their brief exchange. But how can this uncaptured, hidden smile be revealed when the facial expression itself does not manifest in the any of the shot footage? Poring over each frame in search of the indefinable glint in the actor's eye in search of that fleeting image that betrays his disbelief to no avail, their strategy is then to abruptly truncate the shot at the final syllable of the passenger's staccatoed delivery such that the consequence of the lie does not dwell on the prevaricator's image - and implicitly suggest his deliberation over the ramifications of his own statement - but rather, on the delayed response of the listener to suggest his evaluation (and dismissive deduction) of the passenger's seemingly incongruous statement. It is this process systematic refinement - a struggle with the intrinsic properties (and inherent limitations) of the given matter to create implication through elision that is also reflected in Straub's subsequent exposition on the aesthetic evolution of their cinema.

"Most of us begin with a cliché - not always, but most of the time - and that's fine but you have to look at it from all sides and clarify it. So you start with the idea of a discovery, showing a mountain without the window, without anything. A torn curtain. Then you ask yourself, but why? It will inhibit the viewer's imagination instead of opening it up and you say to yourself: 'Yes, after having filmed Mount Thebes in Moses and Aaron, after having filmed Mount Etna, Mount Sainte-Victoire, why add another one?' And so you renounce slowly. Then one fine day, 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 that immediately from one day to the next. You need time and patience."

As the filmmakers alternately engage in recounting personal anecdotes, gentle natured marital sparring, and professional ruminations over their collaborative cinema, what emerges in Costa's reverent and understated portrait is an affectionate, humorous, and indelible image of profound kinship and creative symbiosis - an idiosyncratic, modern-day love story that fuses passion with politics, creativity with conviction - told from the privileged intimacy of irascible, enduring romantics, intellectual peers, social activists, obsessed cinephiles, ageless idealists, and innovative, mutually-inspiring artists.

In Vanda's Room, 2000

The first image of Vanda's childhood friend, Nhurro is an insightfully intimate one. On the morning of the scheduled demolition of his home - an abandoned house in the slums of Fonthainas that he had taken over and settled into as his own - Nhurro takes a final, almost ceremonial, thorough scrub down bath in near total darkness in the midst of pounding sledgehammers and approaching heavy machinery, using buckets of ported hot water to rinse off the soap suds in the absence of running water and electricity. Emerging in the shadows from his bath with the steam evaporating from the surface of his skin, Nhurro's obscured silhouette momentarily appears phantasmagoric and evanescent against the stray rays of light poking through the crumbling walls and covered windows of the barren house, transforming him into an almost spectral, otherworldly figure that is subsequently reframed against a more mundane reality when he awkwardly stumbles from the wet floor while trying to retrieve his clothes from a nearby chair. This metaphysical image proves to be Pedro Costa's most direct illustration of the marginalized, discarded Fonthainas residents as displaced ghosts in In Vanda's Room - a theme that would again surface in Colossal Youth and especially Tarrafal) - a manifestation of figurative lost souls drifting from one derelict landscape to another in the wake of the shantytown's looming, phased demolition, systematic depopulation, and involuntary exile. In an encounter with Vanda that occurs near the end of the film, Nhurro, once again forcibly displaced by advancing bulldozers from his newly claimed "home" (a house that he continues to fastidiously clean until the very end of his brief "tenancy", perhaps as a symbolic gesture of his human dignity), secretly takes refuge in Vanda's room for a few days while searching for other intact, abandoned houses to move into, and resignedly tells her of his life in perpetual transience, "living in ghost houses other people left empty." In a sense, the sad, adrift characters wandering into and out of Vanda's room are also leading impermanent, yet paradoxically static and inescapable lives in the doomed ghost town.

In Vanda's Room also anticipates José Luis Guerín's En Construcción in its untold stories of disposable lives and buried cultures that continue to surface and reassert their inerasable identities from the rubble of area revitalization. Composed of long take, stationary shots, often of cramped interior spaces or narrow alleys framed against neglected building façades, doorways, and even gouged walls that reflect the characters' economic bondage and spiritual captivity, the film's oppressive moral landscape and interminable stasis are also revealed through repeating episodes of inarticulate, idle conversations, hardscrabble drug use, door to door peddling, acts of petty theft, and habitual rummaging (most notably, in Vanda finding an antique model ship that had been inadvertently left outside that alludes to the country's own historical change in fortune from colonial empire to increasingly marginalized country within the economic homogenization of a borderless European Union). But there is also a specter of inevitable change in these uncomfortably intimate moments of destructive (and often self-inflicted) limbo as the remaining residents, too impoverished to move away, await their fate. (In one ironic juxtaposition, the extended image of Vanda resting in an alley with a crate of unsold vegetables is framed against a doorway as the song The Power by Snap! plays in the background.) The news of Nhurro's newfound residence that is mentioned during Vanda and her sister, Zita's opening conversation is supplanted by his subsequent eviction from his latest home during the course of the film. In another conversation, the state-enabled, mass eviction of Fonthainas is reflected in the inequitable dispensation of institutional justice over the apparent theft of Knorr soup cubes, where punishment is exacted against the arbitrary measure of human disposability. Perhaps the most emblematic of its systematic cultural extinction lies in the fate of a middle-aged woman named Geny who, early in the film, anxiously stands near the door of her home, having been evicted on the same morning as Nhurro. Raising a faint smile when a neighbor tries to cheer her up with a tongue in cheek offer of cohabitation, the fleeing moment of lightness becomes even more poignant within the context of a passing visitor's subsequent indirect account of her misfortune. This sobering convergence in Vanda's room - the evocation of Geny's faint smile, told by an emphysemic friend who trades a bouquet of flowers for a supply of respiratory medicine, in the room where Vanda and Zita get their heroin fix - powerfully encapsulates the film's haunted, indelible, and unflinching intimacy: an image of tragic souls hovering aimlessly over their physical captivity, pursuing distractive quests for transitory relief.


Casa de Lava, 1995

The real-life eruption of the Pico volcano in the island of Fogo and the outbreak of cholera in the Cape Verde Islands provide a dense and ingeniously metaphoric contemporary backdrop to Pedro Costa's exposition on isolation, entrapment, moral inertia, and longing in Casa de Lava. Once an uninhabited Portuguese colony situated off the coast of northwest Africa, Cape Verde's geographic location was ideally suited to serve as a logistics center for merchant ships traveling westward to America for the slave trade. In Costa's cinema, this complex history of the islands as a place of involuntary settlement and captivity, as well a waystation for people embarking on journeys into distant lands never to return again, has continued to seep into the present day consciousness of the local population, and is reflected in an introductory montage of the ruggedly impassive residents - composed primarily of women - framed against the austere landscape in the early sequences of the film. The image of repressed violence surfacing through the juxtaposition of the ominous, fluorescent glow of slowly churning lava and the opaque gaze of the villagers is immediately repeated in two connecting episodes to otherwise seemingly unrelated scenes in the Portuguese city of Lisbon: first, in the shot of a somber Cape Verdean migrant worker Leão looking down from the framed opening of an unfinished building that cuts to the shot of the construction office where news of his "accident" sets the worksite into a chaotic scramble for help; the second, in the shot of hospital nurse Mariana (Inês de Medeiros) curiously dowsing her face with a bracing quantity of isopropyl alcohol at the end of her exhausting shift at a coma ward where the gravely injured Leão has been admitted after slipping out of consciousness. A few months later, an anonymously written payment has been dispatched to the hospital in order to cover the cost of sending the still comatose Leão back to Cape Verde after he is inexplicably discharged, and Mariana agrees to accompany her patient as well as facilitate the transfer of medical supplies to the island hospital where an outbreak of cholera has reached epidemic proportions. But the circumstances of Leão's homecoming prove to be even more complicated. Deposited at a desolate open field by a military transport plane en route to deliver military equipment to a distant war (with an equally nebulous arrangement for a scheduled return date), no one has arrived to welcome Leão home (except for an aging violinist who approaches the abandoned couple with the demeanor of a curious onlooker, but will not verify his actual relationship with the patient), and Mariana is compelled to bring Leão to the hospital for shelter, along with the medical staff's far more anticipated delivery of medical supplies.

In hindsight, the absence of men in the establishing sequence of Cape Verdean villagers foretells the underlying reality of the elliptical, opening images, a sentiment articulated by the island doctor that soberingly echoes the haunted memory of the country's slave trading past - that everyone leaves Cape Verde, but no one ever comes back. Indeed, inasmuch as impoverishment has upended the social fabric of the community as able-bodied men leave - and never return - in search of economic opportunity, it has also rended the very idea of family and sense of responsibility. Children are born out of wedlock and neglected by disconnected, self-absorbed, fractured families, emotionally abandoned like the domestic animals that roam the streets (the violinist boasts of 30 children, but cannot even remember the name of his first child), and flagrant transgressions are carried out against each other with virtual impunity from prosecution (a police officer is never seen, even after the theft of medicine in the hospital dispensary and Mariana's attempted assault at the beach).

Within this environment of perpetual estrangement and isolation, Mariana's arrival at Cape Verde can also be seen as an existential waystation between life and death, a recurring theme that is reflected in Edith's (Edith Scob) perpetual mourning of her dead lover, the outbreak of a cholera epidemic in the village, and Leão's reluctant (if not resentful) awakening from his coma - a state of waiting for inevitable passage that seemingly continues to fulfill a centuries-old predestiny that had been sealed with the settlement of the village on the abandoned ruins of a slave port and former leper colony. Visually, Costa reflects this sense of metaphysical transience through recurring murky, crepuscular, and eerily otherworldly images of volcanic activity, clandestine encounters, and waves violently crashing against the shore (most notably, during Mariana's thwarted rape and in Edith's subsequent tearful discovery of the brutally killed dog that had protected her).

Moreover, through the role of the French émigré and local benefactress Edith - a still grieving woman who once followed her politically exiled lover to Cape Verde and decided to remain on the islands with her aimless son (Pedro Hestnes) long after her lover's death - Costa also confronts the issues of lawlessness and socio-economic stagnation that continue to plague many contemporary post-colonial African countries towards the end of the twentieth century. Doling out her lover's pension to ungracious supplicants who swarm around her each month as she retrieves her checks from town in order to plead their case for a handout (not surprisingly, often for a one-way ticket out of the islands), their lopsided relationship is one of disempowerment and parasitic dependency (a sentiment that is also reflected through the villagers' collective reference to Mariana as their savior when she first arrives to the island with a supply of vaccines to help stem the epidemic). Within this context of a culturally perpetuated neediness, Casa de Lava becomes a trenchant reflection of the broader geopolitical issue of continued post-colonial economic dependence endemic within many third world nations - a situation that is exacerbated by an intrinsic dependency on foreign aid and external charity, coupled with a systematic exodus of the very population who can provide the appropriate skills, innovation, and resources necessary to frame the structure for a self-sustaining economy and provide the social stability to - if not transform - their increasingly fragmented, isolated, and dispossessed communities.


O Sangue, 1989

Perhaps the most overtly Bressonian of Pedro Costa's body of work (albeit suffused with the brooding shadows of a Jacques Tourneur film), Costa's first feature, O Sangue, nevertheless bears the characteristic imprint of what would prove to be his familiar preoccupations: absent parents, surrogate families, unreconciled ghosts, the trauma and violence of displacement, the ache (and isolation) of longing. The thematic convergence is insightfully revealed in an episode that occurs near the end of the film, when the older brother Vicente (Pedro Hestnes), having been held captive by his father's nefarious associates on New Year's Eve in a half-baked attempt to collect his father's unpaid debt from him, awakens in the darkness of an unfamiliar apartment to the sight of a restless silhouette on the balcony - the shadow cast by his father's mistress (Isabel de Castro) that has been made spectral and incandescent by the transient glow of exploding fireworks and the sweep of wind against translucent curtains (a sense of otherworldliness that also reinforces a captor's earlier idea of conducting a séance in order to contact Vincente's missing father (Canto e Castro)). Costa establishes this sinister atmosphere of sudden, erupted violence in the film's opening sequence: the prefiguring sound of a slammed door and scurrying feet that subsequently reveals a frontal shot of Vicente on a muddy road as he is suddenly slapped by his wayward father while intentionally blocking his path, trying to prevent him for leaving by imploring him to show consideration towards his younger brother Nino (Nuno Ferreira) who has been left home alone in the middle of night in pursuit of him. Cutting to the image of Vicente riding his scooter through the empty streets at twilight, and subsequently, the schoolteacher, Clara's (Inês de Medeiros) realization that a student, Rosa (Sara Breia) has run away from school with Nino, the image of dislocation and fugue also becomes a resurfacing idea, a reflection of the characters' own desire to reinvent and transform in the aftermath of loss that is reflected in Nino's impulsive attempt to rearrange the furniture, and his subsequent request to similarly dress Vicente in his clothing while accompanying him to school after their father's disappearance (a longing for change that is also implied in Clara's selection of a new haircut for Nino). However, when Vicente and Nino's skeptical uncle (Luís Miguel Cintra) pays a visit and finds the brothers home alone on Christmas Eve with Clara, his heavy-handed, if well-intentioned decision to take Nino away from home and form a new family with his fragile son Pedro (Miguel Fernandes) would lead the brothers into their own journeys of self-discovery in their isolated quest to return to their broken home.

It is interesting to note that in illustrating the brothers' (as well as Clara's) subverted attempts at escapism (and figurative erasure) - the persistence of a haunted past (an apparent allusion to Tourneur) that is ingeniously reinforced in the discovery of a body on the lake near the fairgrounds where Vicente and Clara go on a date - Costa introduces the idea of an irrepressible, hidden history that continues to haunt present-day consciousness. Costa expounds on this theme of place as the eternal witness to a deracinated history in evoking Cape Verde's tragic legacy (as leprosarium and slave port) in the moral contamination of the forgotten residents in Casa de Lava, as well as the concentration camps of Tarrafal (in Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters) that perpetuate a sense of moribund captivity to a contaminated, dying land. Similarly, the contrast between the abandoned, rural family home and the sterile, anonymous apartment buildings where the brothers are held against their will in O Sangue may be seen as a prefiguration of the Fonthainas diaspora itself, from the transitory sanctuary embodied by dilapidated, condemned spaces (In Vanda's Room), to the soullessness of uprooted communities represented by impersonal, high density, public housing (Colossal Youth). In this respect, Vicente and Nino's instinctual struggle to escape also represents a moral captivity to a traumatic history, an elusive homecoming that paradoxically embodies both liberation and surrender to the will of fate.

Ossos e Intimidade

por Sérgio Dias Branco e convidadas

Esta é a transcrição da sessão 2 do ciclo de projecções e debates Os Sentidos da Cidade. Dez encontros entre o cinema e a arquitectura, organizados por Sérgio Dias Branco (SDB).

24 de Abril, 2002.

TEMA: Intimidade.

FILME: Ossos (Costa 1997).

CONVIDADAS PARA O DEBATE: Prof.ª Doutora Arq.ª Dulce Loução (DL), professora de Projecto na licenciatura em Arquitectura da Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa. Elisabete França (EF), ex-crítica de cinema do jornal Diário de Notícias, jornalista na área das Artes e Multimédia da mesma publicação.

TEXTO INTRODUTÓRIO (por SDB)

Intimidade. Não há modo de dizer ou ouvir esta palavra sem sentir a violação do inviolável. Ou que se desvanece o espaço que o discurso e a escuta tentam desvendar no momento em que é dita, no instante em que é escutada. A palavra pretende evocar. É uma imagem que profana, porque tenta representar aquilo que conhecemos demasiado para querermos enunciar. O íntimo como o sagrado não pode ser representado. Estas palavras com que escrevo compõem uma ilusão que não consegue reduzir essas paisagens inomináveis a uma imagem mental, a uma ideia, a um conceito. Pedro Costa evita esta violência exercida sobre as coisas. O seu trabalho paciente procura captar o que se revela num olhar furtivo, numa respiração demorada, num gesto cru. Aceita que a linguagem dos corpos é, talvez, anterior a toda a ordem e invenção. Que as suas presenças são os limites do secreto, as manifestações do espírito. Que quando eles falam só podem falar da solidão e do medo. Porque sob essa fala corre um processo simples, lento, sem palavras, de ligação com as pessoas e com os lugares, para que o amor e o desespero possam ser vividos sem terem que ser comentados. Partilha, feita de silêncios e frases cortantes, que precisa do olhar humano do espectador para existir. Ao contrário da palavra. Intimidade.



DL: Eu quero dizer que não tenho nada preparado, como calculam, porque cansada de dar aulas já estou eu e tenho muitos objectos para dar aulas teóricas. Portanto, tenho imensa dificuldade em dizer alguma coisa organizada sobre intimidade e a propósito desta fita. E acho que as coisas correm sempre melhor quando estamos à mesa do café e eu acho que nós já esgotámos grande parte da conversa ali, a tomar bicas. Aquela que eu via que, eventualmente, pudesse ter sido a razão pela qual o Sérgio me pediu para vir cá dizer umas palavras sobre intimidade, é porque eu acho que se acredita que a arquitectura teve e tem o papel de resolver este tema de um modo que eu imagino que seja, ao longo dos tempos na sociedade ocidental, considerado como politicamente correcto. A arquitectura teve essa coisa fantástica de lhe ter sido atribuído o direito, o dever, a responsabilidade, de regular espacialmente a relação entre as pessoas. É nesse sentido que eu penso que o Sérgio me pediu para vir cá. Devo dizer-vos que, para início de conversa, tenho a maior das dúvidas de que o tenhamos conseguido, nós enquanto disciplina. Portanto, esta é a minha primeira abordagem.

EF: Ia pegar na nossa conversa de ali fora. No sentido em que, pelo meu lado, eu vejo as condições do bairro em que o filme é rodado como condições ao mesmo tempo de abertura a uma intimidade e de fechamento. Aliás, o filme acaba com uma porta que se fecha. Se as pessoas quiserem fecham a porta e mais nada nos é acessível, da sua intimidade. Mas antes disso aquilo que vemos é que elas vivem com janelas e portas abertas ou entreabertas e estão profundamente sozinhas no seu canto, mas chegam-lhes todos os ruídos das ruas, as falas, as músicas. E nesse sentido há uma certa devassidão da intimidade, se quiserem.

DL: Eu gostei imenso do filme. Não consegui deixar de ficar comovida provavelmente por uma coisa de espectadora, que eu considero muito importante, que é a qualificação espacial daquele bairro. A qualificação até formal. E a dimensão compositiva das presenças todas e das vidas humanas naquele território. E fiquei comovida também por outra coisa. Não conheci este bairro, mas conheci o Alto da Cova da Moura que tinha uma estrutura espacial — não sei se tem ainda, já foi há alguns anos — muito semelhante a esta. E uma das questões que se colocava — neste caso aos alunos do final da licenciatura — a propósito das estruturas urbanas era a de poderem ou não conduzir situações no plano social: é que estes bairros contêm tudo aquilo que são os modelos iconográficos da arquitectura, portas, janelas, ruas, largos, pessoas a passar, têm o mote todo daquilo que habitualmente as pessoas entendem como sendo uma situação urbana adequada. O sítio, portanto, onde as pessoas comunicam e onde — o que é fantástico aqui, ao mesmo tempo desagradável e fascinante — há a aproximação entre as pessoas, portanto o problema da dimensão das coisas e a interposição de distâncias ou a ausência de interposição de distâncias manipula exactamente os mesmos instrumentos que a estrutura urbana tradicional. Só que, readequando as dimensões, origina ao mesmo tempo situações espaciais fascinantes, mas totalmente incorrectas, inadequadas.

Como é que habitualmente a cidade constrói os diversos graus do universo da intimidade? Como diz o Sérgio neste texto: a intimidade não se representa, é parecido com o sagrado. Todos os esforços de representação são esforços menores. São exercícios de aproximação a um desejo de plenitude, neste caso do sagrado ou do íntimo. Mas não deixam de ser exercícios de aproximação. No privado, a coisa já se torna menos equívoca. Só os elementos relativos à dimensão do privado, relativa à capacidade de divisão, podem ser controlados pela arquitectura.

O universo da intimidade é, de facto, uma coisa mais inatingível. E porquê? Quanto a mim, porque a intimidade prende-se com uma incapacidade que tem a ver com o confronto do indivíduo consigo próprio, para conseguir com isso reconhecer os seus limites e interagir com os outros. A definição da identidade provém da definição da oposição entre o privado e o colectivo, na organização social. Esta procura do eu pode passar por um universo que se manifesta como uma profundíssima solidão ou um profundíssimo silêncio interior. E isto é particularmente manifesto neste filme, por oposição à ausência de silêncio naqueles espaços que nós reconhecemos naturalmente como espaços privados, nomeadamente as casas. É uma leitura dificílima, porque o universo do privado, que é o sítio que culturalmente é o lugar da intimidade, onde eventualmente a entidade a existir se corporiza ou se instala, tem os códigos do colectivo. Tem a noção do colectivo, tem a partilha, tem os espaços de divisão. Mas por outro lado existe o espaço do colectivo: o espaço da rua, o espaço da relação entre ruas, o espaço do peão. A estrutura é claríssima e era uma coisa fantástica, carros por um lado, peões pelo outro, largo, rua, a possibilidade das pessoas, porque estão próximas, se deslocam.

Portanto, contém, até do ponto de vista da dimensão, qualquer coisa de muito parecido com algumas críticas que foram feitas à arquitectura por outras pessoas — não presentes, espero eu — num encontro de profissionais de Saúde no qual também participaram arquitectos. Na altura, fui eu e mais uns tantos colegas que debatemos o problema da infelicidade das pessoas por viverem em estruturas urbanas. Enfim, no limite, a situação era esta. Ou seja, o espaço da cidade, exactamente como espaço do colectivo, era o espaço onde a privacidade e portanto a inevitabilidade da intimidade estava a conduzir as pessoas a situações de grande infelicidade. O que, no limite, provocou uma ausência de relação, que é como quem diz: a ausência de cidade podia ser eventualmente o caminho para um paraíso qualquer. Não acreditando eu, nem que a arquitectura tem esta capacidade regeneradora, nem que tem esta capacidade demolidora, aquilo que é fascinante do ponto de vista arquitectónico neste filme, parece-me a mim, é a utilização de todos os instrumentos que espacialmente introduzem um processo iniciático entre o colectivo e o individual e entre o público e o privado e entre o não íntimo e o íntimo. Que passa, por exemplo, pela porta. Que é fantástico: a porta como manifestação do acto de entrar, do acto de sair, do acto de estar dentro ou de estar de fora. E a janela. E a parede. E tudo aquilo que significa a bolha, o espaço de protecção contra o espaço que não é de protecção. Portanto: da casa contra a não casa. A consagração do que é que é o espaço da família. Quer dizer, a consagração de um certo modo de viver e de um certo modo de estabelecer relações familiares. Porque a arquitectura só faz coisas que o conceito cultural não sabe como manifestar. A arquitectura não tem esse talento de inventar uma coisa que está fora do contexto, tudo aquilo que está fora do contexto não é reconhecível, visível. Já não tem clientes, enfim. Isto quer dizer que a arquitectura como disciplina corporiza e manifesta contextos e relações, que são as estabelecidas. Incluindo, evidentemente, o modo como organiza o espaço do privado, ou neste caso, da casa, da morada. A casa é um modo de construir e um modo de manifestar uma relação de natureza familiar. Ou uma disposição de elementos, portas, janelas, paredes. Dentro e fora. O modo como o dentro e o fora se estabelecem dependem de contextos. A arquitectura só tem esse talento, que é conseguir manifestar isso. Há uma imagem fantástica no filme, dele com o saco de plástico, que descreve aquele percurso de aproximação do bairro até à Praça da Figueira. E a estrutura urbana que está presente no bairro é igual à que está presente na Praça da Figueira. É um problema de dimensão. Só muda o tamanho. Eu não consigo explicar isto de outra maneira. Para mim, isto é claríssimo.

EF: É a mesma a uma escala diferente?

DL: Não. Tem outro tamanho, não tem outra escala. São dimensões diferentes. A escala tem a ver com proporção, portanto com a hierarquização de coisas. Estas dimensões têm mesmo a ver com o tamanho maior ou mais pequeno. A dimensão da incomunicabilidade, a dimensão do silêncio, a dimensão do discurso referencial — que é o modo como eu, como pessoa, me situo em relação ao filme, este silêncio, a perda, o autismo, do conjunto de pessoas que circulam e que se cruzam e que aparentemente definem coisas, não só territórios —, a estrutura desse território é igual, só que têm dimensões diferentes, não escalas, porque as proporções não são alteradas. A proporção é a mesma, a dimensão é que se altera.

EF: Mas não há uma diferença entre um local que é uma residência e outro que já só é de passagem? Porque tudo se polariza na Praça da Figueira, na boca do Metro, não é?

DL: É. Mas vamos lá falar de residência então: morada, lar, sítio de morar. Há uma frase fantástica ali, que é assim: “A minha casa é entre as pernas da não sei quantas, mas pode ser entre as tuas.” O sentido de lugar, o sentido de residir, o sentido de morada, é este. Percebe o que estou a dizer? O sentido de morada é este, é isto ou aquilo ou será uma ruína. Eu referia-me à Praça da Figueira, sítio público, que por acaso é contornado por um conjunto de paredes que têm janelas e portas. Nós denominámos aquelas casas do Bairro das Fontaínhas de residência, se acreditamos nisto, as relações de lugar familiar são diversas, são muito diversas daquelas que nós estamos habituados a conhecer como adequadas. As pessoas partilham de outro modo. Aquilo que para nós é o limite da intimidade, que nós consideramos que é a relação afectiva, o acto de fazer amor, é partilhado por toda a gente que passa. A questão está em saber que nós entendemos que o espaço da cama, o espaço do quarto, é um sítio, eventualmente, distanciado do sítio público — aliás, tem sido na cultura ocidental e, enfim, na cultura da casa ao longo do final século XIX e do século XX. A casa é organizada também por esse ponto, esse sítio mais sagrado, o tal lugar da intimidade, que é a alcova, vamos supor. Aqui isto está completamente subvertido, não sei se por razões de natureza distancial ou se por razões de contexto. Ou seja, finalmente, a intimidade é aquilo que nós entendemos como sendo algumas coisas que na cultura ocidental não podem ser partilhadas pelos outros ou a grande intimidade é outra coisa? No sentido de residir, então não é um sítio físico, mas é um sítio de outra natureza. E portanto não representável, como diz o Sérgio.

— Acha que se naquele mesmo espaço existisse outro contexto arquitectónico a interacção das pessoas e o seu comportamento seria igual?

DL: Respondo-lhe assim. Há uns anos fizeram um estudo a propósito de áreas mínimas de habitar e constatava-se que as áreas menores de todas as áreas mínimas de habitar eram ocupadas por japoneses. Isto a propósito também das áreas mínimas do R.E.G.E.U. — foi na faculdade suponho eu, ou alguém já o tinha investigado e nós usámos — e constatava-se que havia uma inadequabilidade na aplicação das áreas mínimas do R.E.G.E.U. para habitação social, porque se entendia que quem conseguia viver em espaços genuinamente pequenos e eventualmente com todas as questões relativas à identidade, deveriam ser pessoas com contextos culturais um pouco mais elevados. Quer dizer que a construção da intimidade, deste silêncio, esta capacidade de estar imóvel, silencioso, sem tocar, está desadequado: as casas de topo de gama deviam ter áreas mínimas, as casas de habitação social deviam ter mais espaço. Ou seja, de facto, a construção da intimidade é um acto — não sei se estou a dizer barbaridades tão grandes assim —, mas é um acto de evolução interior que pressupõe contextos económicos, culturais, bastante mais diferenciados do que a questão da habitação social, daquilo que é habitação social, isto é, auto-construção. Respondendo à pergunta: nós, de facto, viveríamos de um modo diverso, provavelmente porque vivemos noutras casas, acredito eu, mas não sei quão diverso. E, pelo contrário, não sei se as pessoas deslocadas — e é verdade que já há pessoas deslocadas — alterarão, senão de um modo muito gradual, as relações com a vida só porque finalmente já têm um T3. Porque eu não sei se tem a ver com o T3, está a perceber. As relações de casualidade, de intimidade, é isso mesmo, de silêncios, de cruzamentos, desencontros, são inevitáveis. Mas há uma coisa que é fantástica neste bairro: é que a definição territorial está asseguradíssima. Um bairro de auto-construção funciona como outros territórios que têm a ver com modelos ancestrais. Na Alto da Cova da Moura haviam três comunidades que tinham estabelecido localizações e partilha de momentos comuns. E a organização do território era de facto um exercício de apropriação de território. Coisa que nós não sabemos fazer.

— Mas era uma organização táctica ou estratégica?

DL: Não, não. O Alto da Cova da Moura que eu conheço, e que é um bairro parecido com este, é um bairro de auto-construção. Portanto, há uma apropriação de um pedaço de território, onde não sei quantas famílias começaram a construir. E a seguir, entre elas, estabeleceram os limites da sua territorialidade. Decidiram o que partilham, o que não partilham, e qual é a relação que estabelecem entre elas, enquanto grupo, e os outros. Nós não sabemos fazer isso, por exemplo. Graças a Deus, nós moramos em habitação colectiva, que alguns de nós, autores, inventaram para estabelecer o tipo de relação que as pessoas devem ter umas com as outras. O interessante para nós, arquitectos, é ver como é que nós conseguimos funcionar com a auto-construção. Através dessa capacidade, por exemplo.

EF: Bom, ainda relativamente àquilo de que se falou agora, que é uma situação hipotética. No filme aparece, e é a casa para onde a rapariga vai trabalhar, a casa da enfermeira. E aí há já uma relação que é de patroa/empregada, mulher-a-dias.

— E é uma patroa que tenta introduzir-se na vida dela e das pessoas com estão próximas dela. Aquela casa vai servir também de casa para o rapaz, o pai da criança, que é uma espécie de marido das duas empregadas. E, falo por mim, o filme toma como exemplo uma patroa que não é o comum. Ela preocupa-se com as empregadas, mas vive numa promiscuidade, porque não pertence de facto àquele meio. Ela apropria-se de tudo, menos da criança.

EF: Pois, comum não é, pelo contrário, é completamente excepcional. Tanto assim que é a única daquelas imensas pessoas que passam ali, pela Praça da Figueira, junto ao supermercado, a responder ao apelo do pai.

DL: Exactamente.

EF: Mas eu estava a referir-me ao território da casa e à diferença real. Porque aquela é uma casa fechada onde as pessoas vão para trabalhar. Ou no caso do pai, para receber auxílio, porque ela ofereceu o leite que intoxicou o bebé, que depois ficou hospitalizado — e ela é enfermeira no hospital. Tudo isto leva ao nascer de outro tipo de intimidade.

DL: Acho que podíamos começar a falar sobre esse desejo que as pessoas têm de que quando a intimidade é obtida, eventualmente a vida das pessoas seja melhor. As casas das patroas são casas de uma tristeza infinita ou estarei eu a ver mal? São casas sem gente, não têm vida. Só têm resíduos de coisas. Têm copos. Têm pratos. Têm, têm. Não é? Têm máquinas. Têm coisas, não se percebe muito bem para quê. E nós, deram-nos tudo aquilo que, em condições, enfim, teóricas — como sabem os alunos —, são fundamentais para a qualidade de vida das pessoas: janelas, luz, electrodomésticos, máquina disto e despertador daquilo. Não sei se percebem. Não sei.

— A intimidade estará na partilhada forma do bairro mostrado ou na intimidade de ter um espaço para si próprio, na mais completa solidão?

DL: Eu não sei. Mas voltando à história da outra conversa, que também foi um bocadinho traumática para mim, em que se falava de cidade e de felicidade. Eu vim na qualidade de representante daqueles que produzem ou desejam vir a produzir futuros arquitectos ou lá o que é que eles passam a ser. Há uma coisa que eu garanto que nós, que eu pelo menos nas aulas não ofereço nenhuma garantia: é que a arquitectura confira felicidade e que o desígnio da vida das pessoas seja mesmo alcançar felicidade. Isso não posso garantir e não está escrito em sítio nenhum que tenha que garantir. Tenho que eventualmente aceitar a inevitabilidade de construir espaços para albergar vida com todas as características incluindo as mais dramáticas, as mais horrorosas, as mais incorrectas. Não sei quanto à felicidade. Sei que é para cumprir listagens de desejos que um grupo alargado de pessoas determina que são os de um contexto e de uma época. E o que é interessante fazer é eventualmente, de um ponto de vista da definição da cidade, uma comparação de dois territórios ou de dois modos muito diversos, mas igualmente inevitáveis, manifestados espacialmente de dois modos diferentes; sendo que, para meu desgosto, a competência espacial do subúrbio, da periferia, é poeticamente mais adequado do que o outro. É assustador, isto. Ou seja, é mais clara a manifestação espacial relativamente ao propósito. É mais clara a relação entre o público e o privado, por exemplo. Percebe-se essa intimidade numa imagem fantástica que é quando a senhora vai a casa da prima e nós estamos a vê-la numa janela de outra janela, e as pessoas passam e aquele espaço intersticial é rigorosamente igual, com outra dimensão, a não sei quantos espaços construídos por nós e que são dimensionalmente feitos para as pessoas partilharem coisas, mas de facto são espaços feitos para pôr outras coisas. Ou seja, aquele espaço do ponto de vista arquitectónico é igual a este, só que por acaso aquele é mais qualificado do que este do ponto de vista poético. Pode é ser problemático.

— Acha que os condomínios fechados, que estando fechados ao exterior deviam projectar uma imagem de intimidade entre pares, não são muito diferentes destes bairros suburbanos, onde isso existe, essa partilha da intimidade? Não sei se me estou a fazer entender.

DL: Está. Esses condomínios são construídos por duas ordens de razões. Primeiro acho que as pessoas têm terror da morte e vão à procura de segurança. E a segunda é porque o condomínio fechado projecta uma imagem e as pessoas vivem desesperadas à procura de uma imagem para projectar. São muito diferentes destes bairros, porque a gente é completamente diferente. As pessoas aproximam-se umas das outras e coabitam por razões. As pessoas têm hábitos próximos porque provêm de contextos próximos. Enquanto que aqui é o facto de serem todos muito pobres e terem todos que partilhar. Portanto, não é um acto intencional, é uma situação precária, enquanto que no outro caso é mesmo um acto intencional, as pessoas desejam aproximar-se daquilo que supõem vir a ser a sua paz, por razões que se prendem com o isolamento em relação aos outros. É um exercício assim um bocadinho prévio a este da intimidade e é um pouco adolescente, do meu ponto de vista: a gente reconhece quem é, por oposição aos outros, que não são como nós. Talvez um dia consigamos ser alguma coisa, no dia em que conseguirmos. O problema é que nós só conseguimos ser alguma coisa quando nos separarmos do grupo. Esta coisa do grupo tem esta vantagem e esta enorme desvantagem. Além de que o condomínio fechado tem outra coisa assustadora: é que ocupa pedaços fundamentais da cidade, porque tem esta característica, essa sim, claramente “voyeur”: penduram-se no sétimo andar para ver a vista, retirando da cidade essa componente, não chamarei estética, mas visual. As acessibilidades, as localizações fantásticas, e depois não interage pura e simplesmente. Esse é que é o verdadeiro gueto, do meu ponto de vista. Isto é capaz de ser o mais incorrecto politicamente e o Sérgio devia desligar o gravador neste momento. Mas tem mesmo a ver com isto. O condomínio fechado é um grande gueto, as origens são completamente diferentes, as pessoas não sei se partilham o que quer que seja ou se vivem na ilusão de que, porque moram juntas umas com as outras podem, eventualmente um dia, vir a partilhar a fantástica piscina do condomínio. É um problema de imagem, neste caso. E um problema de vida, no outro. Como eu estava a dizer, não são comparáveis.

— Na sessão anterior falou-se da autenticidade da arquitectura e do cinema. E esta auto-construção é um exemplo de um arquitectura ainda feita para o Homem, construída pelo próprio, em que há uma totalidade, uma autenticidade, bem diferente do absurdo de algumas arquitecturas.

DL: Agora vou falar como membro da Ordem dos Arquitectos. Eu acho que esta profissão de arquitecto tem uma componente ética e social poderosíssima, sem a qual devia ser retirada a carteira profissional a todos aqueles que não entendessem este tipo de conduta ou de missão que o arquitecto deve ter. Se falasse como académica provavelmente diria que a disciplina da arquitectura avalia relações num contexto cultural e manifesta essas relações — e só faz isso. Não tem que funcionar contra elas, até porque esta função da arquitectura só se manifesta porque o contexto pede. Se falar como docente aproximo-me muito mais seriamente da atitude do missionário do que da atitude da academia. E se falar como docente provavelmente fico numa situação horrível de não conseguir explicar a todos os futuros arquitectos que aquilo que eles estão a fazer são exercícios de natureza transitória, meramente instrumentais, para conseguirem construir arquitectura. A arquitectura, de facto, não é imagem nem é progresso, é uma tarefa árdua de procurar pelo menos que a vida das pessoas não seja agravada por más soluções por parte daqueles que tinham obrigação de garantir uma infra-estrutura mínima de habitabilidade das coisas. Os arquitectos, em função do lado da barreira, responder-lhe-ão de maneiras tão diferentes quanto estas. Porque, em última análise, ao arquitecto profissional acontece uma coisa interessante: é que ele só faz arquitectura se tiver com quem. E esse quem é o contexto económico, é o contexto social, o contexto cultural, somos nós, é a sociedade. Portanto, nós nem sequer podemos fazer projectos sobre o vazio por uma razão simples: os projectos não são arquitectura e os que vão para a gaveta perdem o sentido. Nós não somos donos das obras, não somos donos da pedra. Enfim, andamos aqui no meio disto tudo.

EF: Eu creio que me perdi um bocadinho a tentar acompanhar a conversa. Mas nesta parte final direi que, ao contrário do que disse em relação à arquitectura, o cinema é imagem. Imagem ou a ausência dela, imagem e som a partir de uma determinada forma de território, concretamente no fim deste filme, quando a porta se fecha, deixa de ser imagem e é ainda som.

No contexto da obra do Pedro Costa a mim parece-me que este bairro — e no Bairro das Fontaínhas ele já fez dois filmes, o Ossos e o No Quarto da Vanda (2000) — foi onde ele chegou de um trânsito da Ilha do Fogo em Cabo Verde onde esteve para fazer a Casa de Lava (1994) e onde estabeleceu relações com algumas destas pessoas, relações essas que se mantiveram e que o levaram ao encontro de outras pessoas que coabitavam ali, com aquilo a que talvez se pudesse chamar tribos do império, digamos assim, misturas de crioulos. E este lugar é, do ponto de vista da intimidade ou do afecto a ela, o lugar de uma comunidade que de filme para filme é um tema para Pedro Costa. São comunidades de onde se exclui o pai e isso aliás acontecia logo no primeiro filme, onde se matava o pai: O Sangue (1989), que ele rejeita muito por considerá-lo um bocado “arty.” Depois, no segundo filme, na Casa de Lava, há um filho que é devolvido à origem, que é acolhido basicamente pela comunidade das mulheres. E quando se chega ao Ossos, há um pai que finalmente leva o filho para tentar salvá-lo, mas que é eliminado por esta comunidade das mães, onde todas querem ter mais um bocadinho daquele bebé. Até que chegamos ao No Quarto da Vanda e o pai pura e simplesmente não chega a aparecer. Portanto, esta é a imagem que eu vejo a percorrer os filmes do Pedro Costa. E onde ele se encontrou mais. De tal maneira que se no Ossos ainda tem actrizes profissionais misturadas com aquela comunidade é retirando-lhes completamente o “glamour” que ele pretende ir ao osso do que me parece ser a sua procura de uma certa essência do humano — confirmada, de resto, em entrevistas que tivemos tanto acerca do Ossos, como depois acerca do No Quarto da Vanda. E se o que fascina o Pedro Costa nestas pessoas é, como ele me dizia aqui a propósito do Ossos, “uma espécie de língua nova que brilha na escuridão,” a mim também me parece que os filmes dele constituem no cinema uma espécie de língua nova que brilha na escuridão. Tudo isto é muito escuro, mas tudo isto é uma língua cinematográfica profundamente poética.

SDB: Queria só aproveitar a oportunidade para deixar uma nota, que foi uma coisa que eu não expliquei no início. Não devíamos ter passado este filme. A primeira ideia foi passar o No Quarto da Vanda, só que parece que o filme já não existe. No outro dia, estava a conversar ao telefone com o João Antunes da Cinemateca Portuguesa — e que também vai participar neste ciclo — e ele falou com o Pedro Costa na semana passada e deu-me algumas informações. Curiosamente, esta semana, e isto é uma mera coincidência, na sexta-feira este filme vai passar na RTP. E a RTP queria passar o No Quarto da Vanda, simplesmente o filme já não existe. O filme está a ser remontado pelo Pedro Costa, portanto podemos dizer que haverão várias versões. A semana passada tivemos o Sicília! e tal como eles fizeram outra versão daquele filme, cuja montagem aliás foi documentada pelo Pedro Costa — é uma ligação interessante o facto do Pedro Costa ter feito um documentário sobre esta segunda versão do Sicília! —, também o Pedro Costa resolveu remontar o seu filme. Era só para esclarecer que é por isso que nós passámos o Ossos.

— Tenho visto alguns filmes, mas não tenho esse conhecimento cinéfilo que demonstrou. De qualquer modo, será que um filme destes pode traduzir a força do feminino no presente? Será que os homens se estão a afastar do poder?

EF: Eu não dei, de maneira nenhuma, esse tipo de interpretação. Eu limitei-me a fazer uma leitura sequencial dos filmes do Pedro Costa. E não posso responder pelos criadores. Posso quanto muito tentar ler as suas criações. Mas parece que cada um procurará criar alguma coisa que, de certo modo, confesse as suas falhas mais profundas. No caso do Pedro Costa, provavelmente será a falha materna, porque a mãe lhe morreu quando ele tinha oito ou nove anos. E portanto ele privilegia altamente a comunidade das mulheres e das mães.

SDB: O No Quarto da Vanda não tem actores profissionais, mas há uma actriz que aparece nos três primeiros filmes dele, que é a Inês de Medeiros.

EF: Ele disse-me numa das entrevistas, já não sei em qual, a propósito de um destes dois últimos filmes, que tem de haver sempre uma mulher de alguma idade, que no caso de O Sangue era a Isabel de Castro, no caso da Casa de Lava era a Edith Scob, uma actriz francesa, no caso do Ossos é a Isabel Ruth, e no caso do No Quarto da Vanda é a mãe da Vanda Duarte.

SDB: Professora, se tiver alguma coisa para dizer, diga.

EF: Eu não tenho nada para dizer... Não, ia dizer uma coisa horrível que é começar por perguntar se a arquitectura tem um feminino e um masculino. Esta leitura do papel da mulher ou da mãe ou da demissão do pai...

Vamos lá ver se a gente se entende: há aqui um processo que eu não sei se tem a ver com o exercício do patriarcado no sentido em que se estava a colocar. Eu acho que as mulheres sempre tiveram poder, mesmo quando cederam simpaticamente aos homens a possibilidade de se ocuparem dessas tarefas mais visíveis. A intimidade é uma coisa feminina. É no feminino. E a arquitectura também é uma coisa no feminino. Sendo que eu odeio a frase “a arquitectura feita por mulheres”. A arquitectura masculina ou feminina: eu acho que a arquitectura, essa entidade, não tem a ver com o universo masculino ou feminino. Mas tinha que dizer o que eu acho que é essa a situação do matriarcado e do patriarcado. A cultura ocidental é claramente matriarcal, no nosso contexto cultural então, do sul da Europa, é claramente matriarcal. Sempre foi, porque as mulheres têm aquilo que é mais essencial na vida, determinam as coisas mais fundamentais, exactamente porque são aquelas que operam as grandes transformações. Há uma frase que aquele homem, o marido da Clotilde, diz e que é importantíssima: quem assegura a vida daquela família é ela. A atribuição, no sentido da vida na sua dimensão global, é esta: é a casa dele, mas ela é de facto o garante daquilo tudo. Mas eu acho que, no limite, é um elogio. E provavelmente, ao nível da estrutura da arquitectura e culturalmente, quando a arquitectura não tinha essa questão funcional que fazia com que tivesse que ter casas de banho e cozinhas, nem nada determinado, quando só havia lugar para o fogo e o sítio de ir buscar água, quando as funções do espaço da casa não estavam organizadas com atribuições espaciais próprias, as casas construíam-se em função de relações de intimidade que não tinham lugar físico. Como é que eu consigo explicar isto? Toda a gente conhece o Palácio da Vila, em Sintra. É um paço medieval que tinha uma coisa que eu acho belíssima imaginar-mos, que é assim: a corte quando lá ia incluía as pessoas e os adereços. Portanto, é a ideia de que a casa, a morada, é alguma coisa habitada. Por isso é que eu dizia à bocado que não me parecia tão diferente o facto de haver sofás ou isto ou aquilo, para a construção da intimidade, ou da boa maneira de viver, ou da maior felicidade se quiserem, face à ausência dessas coisas no outro território, no território das Fontaínhas, porque houve tempos em que as pessoas não associavam a privacidade ou os lugares de intimidade a localizações físicas fixas. E aquilo que acontecia quando a corte ia para Sintra era: quando chegava a corte havia de haver um sítio, que era o sítio dos fogões, das chaminés e havia sempre um sítio onde se confeccionavam coisas, porque tinham outras ao pé. Depois, as pessoas organizavam-se a partir do sítio onde o rei dissesse que era a cama dele. Ou seja, havia uma hierarquia que não era coisa física, portanto tinha a ver com estas importâncias, que determinava a dimensão de afastamento das pessoas em relação à cama do rei, que contrariamente ao nosso modelo, era o momento mais consagrado. Aliás, toda a gente conhece aquela história de que o grande momento público era o banho do rei em França. Portanto, a ideia de intimidade ou o que são as hierarquias dos espaços e das coisas são determinações que provêm de quem tem mais poder. E se nós avaliarmos como é que tradicionalmente, no século XIX, a casa se organizou acabamos por perceber bem o poder da mulher. No momento em que a mulher disse ao homem: “muito bem, tu agora vais para a guerra e fazes e aconteces” ou “agora não há guerra e tu trabalhas e nós remetemo-nos a esse trabalho menor, horrível, de gerir a vida e os filhos e consolidar tudo isso”. O marco no território é a casa e quem organizou a hierarquia da casa foi a mulher. Fê-lo foi de uma maneira silenciosa. Era só isto que eu tinha para dizer.

Costa fait un film de genre digne de Tourneur

par ANTOINE THIRION

Quant à Tarrafal, des voix portugaises donc crédibles sont allées jusqu`à y voir le meilleur film de Costa. Sans concurrencer En avant, jeunesse, Tarrafal présente la même perfection en format court, qui raconte la notification d`expulsion faite à José Alberto, immigré cap-verdian de Fontainhas. Le film tire son nom du camp de concentration pour prisionniers politiques créé par le régime salazariste, en 1936, au Cap-Vert. José Alberto croise des proches disparus ou morts, parmi eux Ventura dont il serait un autre fils, et leur parle comme s`il n`en était rien: dans les conversations, il est question d`un diable dévitalisant ses victimes après les avoir prévenues par lettre – et il est clair que ce diable a un ministère. C`est là que Costa retrouve la force des films noirs et des westerns, au-delà de la beauté intrinsèque du surcadrage d`un paysage désolé ou d`un plan épique sur un poignard fixant l`Avis d`explulsion à un poteau. Tarrafal n`est pas un film sur la violence mais sur le Mal, et la lutte sociale est à sa mesure.

Cahiers du Cinema, Février 2008, Nº 631

"I Have to Risk Each Shot"

By Michael Guillén

Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa - a traveling retrospective organized by Lisbon's Ricardo Matos Cabo - launched at Toronto's Cinematheque Ontario and has since traveled on to the Vancouver International Film Center, Manhattan's Anthology Film Archives, the REDCAT in Los Angeles, the Harvard Film Archive, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Chicago's Gene Siskel Film Center, Seattle's Northwest Film Forum, Rochester's George Eastman House, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and recently the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California.

Pedro Costa was artist in residence at UC Berkeley as a Regent's Lecturer, sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and - along with the series (coordinated for PFA by Kathy Geritz) - delivered the annual Regents' Lecture. For over 50 years, this prestigious program has brought to the University individuals distinguished in the arts, letters, sciences, and business whose careers are outside of academia.

Daniel Kasman logged notes on the entire series when it hit Manhattan. Dennis Lim likewise previewed the series for the New York Times while Manohla Dargis focused in on Colossal Youth. The same one-two punch was delivered at the Village Voice, where Ed Halter previewed the series and his then-cohort Nathan Lee wrote up Colossal Youth. Scott Foundas previewed the series for LA Weekly when it played REDCAT, as did the Boston Phoenix's Peter Keough when it came to Harvard. After watching the series at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote up his thoughts for the Chicago Reader.

Though nominated for the Golden Palm at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, the film's critical response at that festival could almost be described as hostile, as noted at GreenCine Daily. Perhaps there's something to be said for seeing a film in proper context, which this retrospective admittedly redresses?

My thanks to Kathy Geritz, Susan Oxtoby and Shelley Diekman for arranging time for me to sit down with Costa to discuss the series.


James Quandt has written that this traveling retrospective "acts as both primer and corrective, introduction and redress." Having traveled around with the retrospective to several cities in both Canada and the United States, have you found this to be true? Has the interaction with your audiences served to wake them up to your work?

Well, "waking them up" is perhaps too much. It has been a different experience because mostly in Europe the films are shown isolated, each one on their own, so they have no relation to each other like here in San Francisco or in Toronto, where the films have been screened daily, nearly in chronological order. In that sense, it's more interesting. Audiences make their own montage. They make their own associations, which is good.

I like retrospectives. When I was young, I had the chance of seeing a lot of films by, let's say, Japanese filmmakers - 15 films by Ozu - every day I saw them. With these great films from classic filmmakers, of course each film makes you want to see the next one and it produces your own idea of the filmmaker, of his themes or styles. It's great but it's also difficult because retrospectives in themselves are a difficult set-up.

Let's go back to the beginning, to your first film O Sangue. I can see why in your introduction you characterized O Sangue as a "safe" movie by comparison to your later films, "full" of cinema, "protected" by cinema. You insinuate the danger that was yet to arrive in your later work. What was it you learned from making O Sangue that helped you approach that danger?

It's not exactly O Sangue because - even if it's full of ghosts and demons and dreams, bad dreams most of all - the shooting on that film was quite usual. As I said, it was a first film for a lot of us, especially the actors, so it was rather a strange, very nice moment, a long succession of nights shooting with these big lights and everything. It was a kind of enchanted moment. You can see that, you can feel that in the film probably? All those nights in the park with the river and all of that. So it wasn't exactly this film; it was more Ossos, the following [film].

I did film school and just after that I had four or five years of [working] as an assistant to the producer/director. I did a lot of things from just getting sandwiches for the actors to picking [them] up [and driving them to location]. Those five years just before this film, that was the period where I saw a lot of things that I didn't like. I chose film or cinema; but then I had this experience of the hard reality of making films. What I saw was very bad. I did a lot of films - maybe 20 or 30 - as an assistant and each one of them were mirrors of the worst parts of society, from power relations to all the worst part of our organization as human beings. I was a bit afraid that this work could become the rest of my life because I saw a lot of directors collapsing, failing, afraid, usually in very bad situation[s]. It was all about money or about lacking time. As I was assistant director, my job was to say, "Calm down. Everything's all right"; but I saw that everything was collapsing. That's what an assistant director does more or less, is to calm down the paralytics. It's a phony job actually, at least in Europe.

Then I had this moment in my film where I tried to avoid a lot of things. I think we succeeded. We had a very good crew. We did this film in five weeks. It was very quick and hectic with a lot of lighting. We had no time to rehearse with the young boys. There were a lot of locations. Because I was a little bit experienced with this kind of organization, we managed through it, but it was more a sensing or feeling [of] what the secret of making a good film could be - not the film itself - but the way you make it; the way you live it. It took me many films and many experiences to get to that point, to get things more or less right, as I feel I have now. Now, the film and the way we live the film during the making has begun to balance. I feel I have achieved a certain balance between being behind and in front of the camera. Here [in O Sangue], though there were not a lot of production problems, there is still a lot of me in front of the camera. The balance is not right, correct. It's more [that] everything was a means to an end.

In some ways, I had to pay my debt to a lot of dead people and a lot of films that I liked. This was the way of finishing with that also. What I like about O Sangue is this sense of the long night of childhood that embraces a lot of films that were made and a lot of American books [that I read]. I'm remembering this now while I'm here, but there was a writer that I loved, Flannery O'Connor, and probably the title [of O Sangue] comes from O'Connor. I think I stole some things - like the [relationship of the] boy and the uncle - from one of her books, The Violent Bear It Away.

Momentarily deferring to your detractors, your films have been described as "formidable," "obdurate," "impenetrable," "inaccessible," "difficult" and "a colossal bore"; still, I prefer your own term: "dangerous." What exactly do you mean by that?

Let's not make this pretentious; but in some ways my films are dangerous because I work within limited financial means. There's not that much money that comes in and less and less every year. You can feel it. Also, there are less possibilities of showing my films. But they're dangerous in the sense that I have to risk each shot of my film. There's a French writer, Céline, who I like a lot. He wrote Journey to the End of the Night, a classic novel. He used to frequently say that the writer should "put his skin on the table"; that was his expression. I feel the same way. If you don't risk yourself and the people with whom you're working in almost every shot you make, it's not good, it's useless, it's just another film. For me, this danger takes a lot of forms. I'm shooting with video, which - perhaps - some people think is easier and has more freedom, is cheaper. It is cheaper - you can do it yourself - but at the same time, if you want to do something ambitious, it's difficult for this small-medium machine to accommodate so much ambition. Can it produce a bigger form? A bigger picture? Sometimes, I think, not always. It's a very limited machine, a limited medium, and you can easily make false moves.

It's risky to try to use video as I'm trying to use it, almost like a 35mm camera. It's no different for me. I used to work with a crew and big cameras. I have the feeling it was safer for me when I had this crew, these assistants, this large machinery. It was protection. I was surrounded by people that were there for me, sometimes a bit naïvely, sometimes very sincerely, but that's a kind of work that no longer interests me. I don't know. There's a danger to the kind of engagement video affords, letting yourself be in reality, aware of certain aspects of reality. When I did films in 35mm with a crew, every day the thing that I wanted to shoot, to film, was happening either to the left or the right or behind the set-up - it could be some bit of the actors; it could be just a bit of light on leaves; it could be something happening just to the side - and with a big crew and cameras, lights and everything, you never had time to turn the camera and just shoot this small spot of sunlight on a rock. You never have the time. If you do that, it will kill your production schedule. So you never do it. The producers don't allow it. The machinery does not allow it. It's too complicated.

Again, this freedom or lightness in the way I work now doesn't mean that it's completely improvisational or that it's a vacation with a video camera. Not at all. I try to impose, almost, the same discipline and the same consciousness as working with a 35mm camera; but I feel that everything is really more risky. Technically, because we have to be as good as with a 35mm camera, which is nearly impossible. I'm adjusting my camera to conditions and always trying not to make false moves because video is not good for certain things.

Not to be too pandering, but - along with Thom Anderson who was writing about this in his article for Film Comment - if anyone has proven that video can approximate film, it's yourself. Colossal Youth, along with Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates, both filmed on DV, are some of the most beautiful cinema I've ever seen. They're almost shocking in how accomplished and beautiful they are. Where the danger transfers to the spectator is in having to learn how to appreciate and acknowledge the accomplishment and recognize the beauty of limited formats.

One of the things I especially respect about your work is that you grant agency to your audiences. You're not just spoon-feeding us. The films pull us into their gravitational orbit and require an accommodating physicality, an attention, exploration, engagement, endurance.

It's not only me or the style or the way the film is structured; it's more the rhythm of the people inside the films. They also put themselves in danger because they are naked. These are naked people; they have been all their lives really, not only sentimentally, but socially, economically. They have little and they're giving a lot in the films. Giving a lot almost like actors though, for me, better than actors. They're more sincere. They want to share, they're trying to express some things, and - in that sense - they also are very much in danger. They reveal a lot. I think they expect that the viewers and the audiences can be as naked or as responsible or as conscious. Responsible is a good word because it's about memory, it's about rhythms, it's about different timelines and timeframes, all these people, and you have to accept that or walk out.

It would be inexact, I think, to try to talk about the spirit of this place Fontainhas because it strikes me as much more embodied and - as you've described it - material. I love how you have framed your characters in doorways and window frames, often at skewed angles. Can you talk a bit about your compositional eye?

No.

No?

No. To be very frank, people are always comparing and referring to filmmakers of the past. I forget to mention that there is a tradition that moves me a lot. Here, in France, in Portugal, in Spain, there were people all over the world at the beginning of the 20th century who were photographers. One of them even called himself a "citizen." They were more or less amateurs - you could say documentary photographers - because photography was so young from the turn of the century until the 30s when it became something else. But photography is still something that touches me and I always forget to say this because it replaces for me a lot of things that I miss in film today and in filmed documentaries. I don't like to talk about framing or the composition because I don't know how to talk about that. I really don't. I know that in Fontainhas it comes from the material space. You have to think about the space.

This is the kind of place that - I don't know if you know the Arab or African countries - but this place is the old Arab town, the medina, the casbah. These photographers that I'm talking about, certain filmmakers, there's something that has to do with the medina and the casbah. I think film was born there. It's supposed to be there. It has to do with the exchange and trade of things, it's very obvious. Morocco is a country where I've spent a lot of time alone for long periods of time. The noise, the sound, the way people organize life; there are 10,000 people in a very small space. They live in basements, on many levels. You would be amazed how the houses have so many families and all kinds of ways of moving around without being seen. It's very complex. This is very interesting also to study in my country, this kind of place, because they no longer exist, they've destroyed them, demolished them.

Again, it has to do with this frontier between the public place and the private place. You see more of that in In Vanda's Room. It's a room but the idea of being alone in your room is not accurate because all the neighborhood is passing through all the time. Sometimes the street can be much more secret and closed. These kind of spaces are obviously fascinating. It's one of the things we've lost a little bit in film. I'm not saying I'm doing it well; but this was a space that existed. You only have to see films by Chaplin.

My friend Jean-Marie Straub says something obvious, "When you see a film by Stroheim, you are afraid for people when they cross the street." It's that material. It's two things. One, he was saying cars are bad. Second, the very powerful effect that just crossing a street at a street corner could really materialize fear on the screen; it's just incredible. Fritz Lang, the way he organizes space - I'm saying Fritz Lang but it could be 30 different filmmakers - all of them, even the not very good ones, are fantastic. Today, you don't see doors or windows. You never see a door. If you see a door, it closes in perfect silence. "Stuck in a perfect silence," that's what Jacques Tati used to say. Now a door closes and it's a different conception of space. I don't know if it's a conception that people accept today. I don't know how to answer your question.

I'm satisfied; I think that's an evocative response. I love the reference to the medina.

I'm excommunicated. There was film criticism that I really hate completely, that almost killed people that I like, like Straub, all this semiology, and I hated that and I still do. It's pathetic if you read it today. I think everything communicates. They say nothing communicates. Perhaps people have difficulty communicating but things communicate. They organized space to communicate. That's what was the cause of one of my fascinations.

I accept your answer about photography's influence upon your work and the integral presence of an image, separate from efforts to interpret or transform an image into a metaphor or a representation or a symbol. I acknowledge your efforts to apprehend directly the integral presence of images in your own film work. That being said, I'd like to discuss the scene in Colossal Youth where Ventura visits Lisbon's Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. That museum sequence is exquisitely beautiful with its paintings on the walls illuminated by mirror-deflected light and Ventura seated on the red sofa. Were you trying to go for a "painterly" effect?

Not really, no. The scene is a surprise for me - as it was a surprise doing the scene - and as it is now probably for someone who is watching the film. Suddenly, after all these moments with the people at Casal Boba, and probably thinking the film will go like this to the end of the film, suddenly you have this very extravagant moment. It's like another planet in the film. But for me it was a surprise and it came about because one day we were passing the museum. We were not shooting and Ventura and all of us were in the car going somewhere, I don't remember where, and he told us, "I built this. I did this." Actually, it was his first contract when he came to Lisbon. He worked four years on the construction of the museum. I asked him if he had been there after the opening and he said, "No. I never went inside after I made it."

I proposed that we could go take a visit that afternoon. And then began the idea of making something there because immediately - as Ventura was walking into the museum a little bit ahead of us - I saw a guard at the door walking towards him. I'm sure he was going to say something like, "You're probably searching for something else; not this museum. You're not in the right place." He had this sense - something that was said in the museum scene - that people like Ventura don't belong in those places, they don't come, they're not welcome. Museums are for "other" people from "other" classes.

This, and the idea that perhaps the museum could be the best place for Ventura to talk about his arrival in Lisbon, the moment he started working, and the moment when he had his work site accident and also because we had all these "children" that were possible - the film is about Ventura finding, searching, taking care of all his lost children, imaginary or real - we could have another one at the museum; it could be the guard; perhaps not his real child, but another young man telling his story and talking about his problems. All of this together seemed good, in the museum especially because it was also a way, of course, for me through Ventura to balance art, classical painting, and work, just work like we do in the film - I insist I'm just working and not making compositions; I'm not making paintings, that's for sure - taking art a bit lower and putting our film a bit higher. We had to confront Rembrandt and Holbeins and Van Dyck, all these Flemish, French and English painters; but we had an excuse, and a very good excuse: Ventura had made the walls for them. If you like, this is also a metaphor, Ventura is in this museum watching and admiring and really moved by his own work, his walls, his floors. It just so happens that there are some Rembrandts hanging.

This was very good for our work because it joins a conception or an idea or a belief that I have that Rembrandt or Van Gogh or Picasso are just workers. They were workers. They were craftsmen, rather than "sacred artists." I see no difference between Ventura's work and Van Gogh's, let's say. They can be moved the same way.

The scene in the museum brings a little bit of the art into the film and, of course, says also that we say hello to these artists but without being too reverent. I don't like films that try to be paintings or try to imitate paintings or try to be close to certain paintings, as I don't like films that are too close to films, to cinema. A lot of vanity and fetishism is involved in that and I'm trying to get rid of that. So this museum scene is for me a nice way to come together with people that we liked in the past who did the same work we did. Very tough, very hard. Reubens worked like that with enormous canvases that he spent months and months trying to find something; it was not about some secret or strange mystique; it was just work, and our's too, so we meet and we do this moment where it's not only an homage to Holbeins and all the paintings but it's an homage to Ventura's work also.

Well, there's work and there's work. I've been taught that within indigenous cultures there's a belief that soulfulness is embodied and corporeal and that it comes through the body to register as creative expression. In other words, it comes from within and literally emerges through the whorls of the fingertips into the creative object. Fine craftsmanship is thus recognized as soulful. When I first read about Ventura's visit to the Museum, I considered that he was in essence admiring the soul he put into those walls.

I admittedly foist metaphors on films. I psychologize characters on the screen. In that respect, I don't think I'm that different from most moviegoers. This is how I've been taught to watch and understand movies. So I agree that your films are indeed challenging because they're more like being plunged into the presence of something; but even you have said that - though not during filmmaking - afterwards psychologizing goes on. An interpretive construction occurs after the film is made. Reading reviews of your films, it's noticeable how frequently construction and architectural metaphors are used to describe your creative process. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, for example, says you are assembling life one room at a time. Several writers are - as is to be expected, of course - obsessed with your doors and windows and walls. If I understand you correctly, you're not psychologizing a film when you make a film? You're working at directly apprehending what's already there? Unconsciously, however, is a certain psychologizing going on?

The best answer for your question is something I shot in my film on Jean-Michel Straub - Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? - the film about the editing. They say something that is not a mystery but that everybody tends to forget a little bit. All the critics and people that write about cinema, they tend to forget what is evidence for me and for Straub. He says it and I could say the same thing: there is not so much psychological investment when we are working. We're not trying to compose a dream or compose with dreams; but of course psychology comes into the film and - for me and for Straub and for a lot of filmmakers, especially the most classical ones, the ones that depend on at least some kind of narrative; it can be modern but they have this minimum narration they have to achieve - psychology comes into the film when you edit the film.

When you edit the film, you are composing, you are analyzing, you are choosing more deeply than when you are shooting. Of course you are choosing certain things when you are shooting a film - you are choosing a space and not another; you are choosing an action and not another; you are choosing a smile against something else - but when you're editing, you're choosing and you're going deeper and that can affect the psychology of a character, of the film. It depends on how you cut your film. It depends on how you put your shots together. It can say things and there it launches a lot of possibilities. That's when a lot of psychology is coming into the work. It's like that; you cannot refuse it. It's like Straub says in the film, you cannot refuse it because - if you cut close to a smile; if you cut close to someone that cries; then you have your next shot and it's larger and the reaction or response of someone to this laughter or this cry - this is psychology. This will tell things in another way, in a psychological way. I cannot refuse it. I'm just saying that when we are shooting, we are trying to concentrate on something that is very dry, actually, very dry. We're trying to get to what's rough. It's not a sketch. We start with the sketch of a thing and then we try to improve and improve and improve, but in movement, in rhythm.

It's more like a musician perhaps than theater work. There is not much psychology; feelings are absent; we tend to expel them to find them again at this editing stage. That's also very fascinating because you can change a lot of things and create a lot of affinities, which are psychological, even more than psychological. Editing is almost a psychoanalytic process, as you can see in the film about the Straubs.

I think the exact term would be "psychoid" rather than psychological, in the sense that you're not trying to create a meaning or generate equations saying this means that or this is the consequence of that. To be in a psychoid state is to say you are seeing with the psyche, imagining with the psyche. The affinities an audience might catch might emanate from a psychoid state and might not be your psychological intentions at all. You may not have put an affinity there; but, a spectator can look at a well-crafted, well-edited image and feel an affinity.

Sure. Then there is the interpretation the audience chooses or makes; but, that's another thing. Yeah, when you are structuring or constructing your film, in the editing especially, you're creating enemies, affinities, certain things begin to become enemies of other things, some things connect very closely, just because you cut one or two or three frames. It's fragile and magical. It's unexplainable. You cut a little bit and images become closer in every sense. You cut large and they clash.

I can't even fathom that work: shaping 340 hours of footage down to three hours. I can't imagine the process or the commitment of time. You took a year to edit Colossal Youth?

Yeah, it takes a long time. But it's great because it forces you to be patient. It's a discipline that, I think, lacks in a lot of cinema today in general. It's a lesson - well, this is very pretentious and reactionary - but, it's a good lesson for young people. I think young people today are used to things that are so easy; the films are so easy to see and easily made. That kind of work is everywhere so they don't imagine hard work. Probably they don't want to do hard work. I tend to say that it's not a mountain of suffering that comes for you; it's just work you should do like everybody else does in all aspects of society, like the simple guy that has a shop and opens the shop at 9 and closes at 6 or 7 every day for years and years. Cinema should be like that and not just special and incredible with funny and strange moments in six weeks of the life of someone. It should be everyday. It should be patient. That's the only way to learn a little bit. You should give film time. You should give cinema more time today. That's what I think it lacks a lot.

When I see a movie, I always see that they had no time to think. It's like Jean Renoir. Renoir said something that is not very true; but he said his American films, the films he made in Hollywood, were all bad because he had no time. He couldn't get used to the four, five, six week production schedule, shooting very fast, so he said his films were not good and that - after the films in Hollywood - he had to go to India to do something where he could really discover and work properly. He did The River.

Speaking of that temporal quality to film, you've used the term "material" to describe your films, and suddenly materiality in film seems better than metaphors in film! Letting something just be what it is a