Pedro Costa, O Sangue Realism, not Reality

(Blood), 1989, black-and- Pedro Costa’s Digital Testimonies

white 35mm film, — Volker Pantenburg
95min, still, detail.
© Pedro Costa
With the historical categories of realism in film as background, Volker Pantenburg
analyses the shift in Pedro Costa’s modes of production to locate a singular form
of digital realism within his work.

In the last ten years, the Portuguese director Pedro Costa has established himself
firmly in the international film-festival circuit. His films have been shown to critical
acclaim in Canada, the USA, Japan and Europe, and a recent retrospective at Tate
Modern (in autumn 2009) has given his name further resonance in contemporary
art contexts. Those who do not care much about cinema or contemporary art but
follow Jacques Rancière’s writings have had the chance to come across the director’s
name on more than one occasion. In Rancière’s theoretical framework, Costa
plays the role of an upright counterpart to the political endeavours of those artists
associated with Relational Aesthetics, a movement that, according to Rancière, lacks
integrity and shows how ‘the attempt to overcome the inherent tension of a politics
of art leads straight to its opposite’. 1 In No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room,
2000), on the contrary, Rancière identifies a force ‘that lies in the tensions between
the settings of a miserable life and its inherent aesthetic possibilities’. 2
At first glance, it seems difficult to reconcile what has become known as
the Fontainhas trilogy — Ossos (Bones, 1997), No Quarto da Vanda and Juventude
em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006), all of them set in the poor Lisbon neighbour-
hood of Fontainhas — with Costa’s beginnings as a director. (The Criterion
Collection has recently released this trilogy in a DVD box set titled ‘Letters from
Fontainhas'.) In terms of production, the turning point in his career comes with
Vanda. After Vanda, all of his films, including the documentary on Jean-Marie
Straub and Danièle Huillet (Où gît votre sourire enfoui?, or Where Does Your
Hidden Smile Lie?, 2001) and his recent portrait of the actress and singer Jeanne
Balibar (Ne change rien, 2009) — have been shot with digital cameras, while the
preceding three feature films owe themselves to comparatively conventional modes
of production. In Costa’s case, the shift to digital, low-budget technology is by
no means circumstantial, but accompanies and permits decisive changes in his
working methods and, particularly, in his conception of realism.

II

Costa’s first film, O Sangue (Blood, 1989), an oneiric black-and-white epic about
two adolescent siblings on the run, is a stupendous debut feature. The very first
two shots — a boy getting slapped in his face by an adult in the midst of a nondescript
field — enact what they depict: they are themselves slaps in the face. The power of
these shots results from Costa’s rigorous sense of framing and from the abrupt
violence that we are thrown into without warning. Yet this power is also due to
Costa’s strong allusions to film history. If one is familiar with D.W. Griffith’s
early films for the Biograph Company, one cannot help but feel reminded of the
sparse field that the miserable peasant crosses to till his seeds in the anti-capitalist

1 Jacques Rancière, ‘Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien’, (trans. Maria Muhle), Die Aufteilung des
Sinnlichen, Berlin: B-Books 2006, p.96. English Translation the author's.
2 Ibid., p.98.
3 See Helmut Färber’s meticulous study of D.W. Griffith’s film in Helmut Färber, A Corner in Wheat von
D.W. Griffith: Eine Kritik, Munich and Paris: Verlag Helmut Färber, 1992.

Pedro Costa | 55

This content downloaded from 128.171.57.189 on Sat, 14 Sep 2013 10:29:02 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
classic A Corner in Wheat (1909). 3 And when the father lifts the suitcase and leaves III
immediately after hitting his son, you are not mistaken to identify this suitcase
with the one that Karl Rossmann (Christian Heinisch) forgets on deck of the This shift is already perceptible in Casa de Lava. Costa initially wanted to remake
steamship in Straub/Huillet’s Kafka adaptation Klassenverhältnisse (Class Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), an uncanny tale of vodun and
Relations) made five years prior to Costa’s debut. Costa’s film self-consciously obsession set in the West Indies. Casting Edith Scob for one of the female leads
inscribes itself into a strong cinematographic tradition, and in retrospect, it seems added a second strong reference — she had worked regularly with the French
quite different from the films he made later in Fontainhas, both in aesthetic and film-maker Georges Franju as a young girl, and in particular in his horror classic
economic terms. 4 Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1960). Costa’s notebook bears witness
For although O Sangue was a small and independent production, it was made to his original plans for the film — they show collages directly confronting stills
with a team, a script, actors, lighting technicians, an assistant director and so from Franju’s film and other film-historical sources with photographs from
on. Costa felt uncomfortable with the burdens and impositions of a regular film the Cape Verde Islands. 7 Yet the story as it eventually unfolded detached itself
production, but it took him until In Vanda’s Room to find an alternative. The two from these bonds: the comatose exiled Cape Verdian construction worker Leão
films he made in between, Casa de Lava (1994) and Ossos, were shot in colour, but (Isaach de Bankolé), who is accompanied to his native island by a young nurse
the basic parameters of production stayed the same: he still operated with a bulky (Inês de Medeiros), has clearly been marked by Portugal’s colonial history and
production network, used 35mm stock and worked with a director of photography. its post-colonial echoes. And when one watches the movie, one can sense that the
However, between Casa de Lava and Ossos, a different kind of reality began location — the jagged, volcanic hills and exuberant colours of the Cape Verde Islands
to impose itself. The artificiality that every film production entails is confronted — as well as the non-professional actors from the local population offered resistance
with forces of resistance due to political and economic realities. Casa de Lava is
set on the Cape Verde Islands, one of the earliest sites of Portuguese colonialism
and a crucial location for transatlantic slave commerce. In Ossos the Fontainhas
neighbourhood of Lisbon, a shanty town and home to a large number of immigrants
from continental Africa and Cape Verde, slowly becomes the protagonist of the
picture. Between the reality of Casa de Lava and the reality of Ossos, Costa himself
acts as a messenger. As he has recounted numerous times, he took on the role of
an amateur postman:

We were accommodated in a small village, and at the end of the shooting
on the Cape Verde Islands, the people gave us letters for their sons, husbands
or cousins who had emigrated to Lisbon. They handed us news, presents,
tobacco and coffee for friends and family members. When I arrived in
Lisbon, I looked for the neighbourhood that is situated a little north of
the city — an African and particularly Cape Verdian neighbourhood —
and played the postman. I told them: your son is fine, we made a movie
together, and since I spoke a bit of Creole, I was accepted very quickly.
I was constantly invited for dinner, to a party or wedding and I started
staying there, passing the time, talking to people and making observations,
drinking with them. This is how, one day, the idea came up to make a movie
in this neighbourhood. 5

At first sight, this sounds like nothing more than a pretty anecdote. Yet beyond
the anecdotal character, Costa’s recollection indicates a shift on several levels:
from the film-historical references of O Sangue and Casa de Lava to the social Pedro Costa, Casa de Lava, to Costa’s scripted ideas and made the film change its direction. ‘Casa de Lava may
reality of Fontainhas, from fiction to documentary, 6 from working under 1995, colour 35mm be the film of Costa’s that poses the most constant and furious tug of war between
‘professional’ conditions to working in small communities akin to family contexts. film, 110min, still. Hollywood narrative and the non-narrative portraiture of both places and people,
The roots in film history that are so clearly sensed in O Sangue are at the time © Pedro Costa staging an almost epic battle between the two,’ Jonathan Rosenbaum writes about
of making the trilogy complemented by a method that draws its energy from the film. 8
a particular location — Fontainhas — and the non-professional actors that Costa
has been collaborating with ever since Casa de Lava, in Ossos, In Vanda’s Room IV
and Colossal Youth.
By the time of In Vanda’s Room, this tug of war — to pick up Rosenbaum’s metaphor
4 Costa even tried to hire Stanley Cortez, the director of photography of Charles Laughton’s classic The — had definitely been decided in favour of the ‘portraiture of both places and
Night of the Hunter (1955) for O Sangue. He wrote him a letter without knowing that Cortez was already
dead at the time. See Mark Peranson, ‘Pedro Costa: An Introduction’, Cinema Scope, issue 27, Summer
people’. Costa’s film shows the lives of Vanda and the other inhabitants in between
2006, p.9. the noises and rubble of the demolition works. The film can be seen as both a
5 Johanna Bedeau and Mariani Diphy, Passeur du réel: Pedro Costa, radio feature, France Culture 2008
(author’s translation). Letters have been a prominent, almost allegorical element in Costa’s films since
subtraction and an expansion. A subtraction, in that Costa works without a script
Casa de Lava. In Colossal Youth a letter from the earlier film resurfaces and becomes a central relay and without ‘action’ in a conventional sense. He does not use a cameraman and
connecting the different temporal layers. Rancière has devoted a beautiful essay to Ventura and his
letter. See Jacques Rancière, ‘La lettre de Ventura’, Trafic, issue 61, Spring 2007, pp.7—9.
6 Costa has talked at length about his particular (if somewhat counterintuitive) understanding of 7 Excerpts from Costa’s notebook, mostly collages of texts and images, are to be found in the extras of the
‘documentary’ on the occasion of a seminar at the Tokyo Film School. The transcript has been published French DVD of Casa de Lava.
online by Rouge. See Pedro Costa, ‘A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing’, Rouge, issue 10, 2007, 8 Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘A Few Eruptions in the House of Lava’, 25 June 2008,
http://www.rouge.com.au/10/costa_seminar.html (last accessed on 11 March 2010). http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=8094 (last accessed on 11 March 2010).

56 | Afterall Pedro Costa | 57

This content downloaded from 128.171.57.189 on Sat, 14 Sep 2013 10:29:02 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
focuses mainly on one location — Vanda’s room — which gives the film its title,
and acts like centre of gravity, a shelter in the midst of the deafening works of
dredges and wrecker’s balls tearing down the neighbourhood. 9 On the other hand,
In Vanda’s Room is the result of an immense luxury Costa allowed himself: the
luxury of taking his time, spending months and years with the people living in
Fontainhas. Both In Vanda’s Room and its ‘sequel’ Colossal Youth only became
possible under two conditions: they required that Vanda Duarte and her sister Zita,
Ventura (whose surname we never get to know) and the others — the characters in
his films as well as the people he lived amongst — accepted Costa not as a film-maker
but as a trustworthy fellow inhabitant. And they required the technical means to give
testimony to this situation of duration and togetherness without having to involve
a large team. This is where digital technology and a particular form of realism
come into play: when he started working on the film with Vanda and the others,
Costa bought a small low-priced digital camera (a Panasonic DVX 100), and started
working with light reflectors rather than additional light sources.10 What kinds
of realism does this shift make possible in Costa’s work? And how does it relate
to traditional discussions of realism?
Pedro Costa, No Quarto da
Vanda (In Vanda's Room),
2000, colour 35mm film,
178 min, still.
© Pedro Costa
V (4) Realism is a mode of perception; it has subjective components on the spectator’s
Traditionally, there have been two distinct (if sometimes overlapping) ways of
thinking about realism in the cinema. On the one hand, realism was conceived of
as a quality inherent in the photographic character of the medium. Often referred
to in terminology building on C.S. Peirce’s semiotics as ‘indexical realism’, it means
that the images taken by the camera and stored on the filmstrip are inextricably
tied to the objective reality, regardless of what exactly they recorded. 11 Siegfried
9 The expression ‘without a script’ by no means implies that Costa didn’t develop scenes and acting
routines with Vanda and the other locals of the neighbourhood. As Costa explains in the illuminating
conversation with Cyril Neyrat, the process usually began with an observation of some everyday
gesture, dialogue or interaction that Costa would ask Vanda, Zita and the others to repeat several times.
See Cyril Neyrat (ed.), No Quarto da Vanda. Conversation with Pedro Costa [DVD and book], Nantes:
Capricci, 2008, pp.63—73 (especially the chapter ‘Le texte et la répétition’).
10 Costa shot In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth with a digital camera but transferred the footage onto
35mm film for the final print.
11 Tom Gunning has recently made an interesting suggestion to reconsider cinematic indexicality in terms
of movement rather than in terms of photographic referentiality. See Tom Gunning, ‘Moving Away
from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality’, differences, vol.18, 2007, pp.29—52. See also
Philip Rosen, ‘Old and New: Image, Indexicality, and Historicity in the Digital Utopia', Change
Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, pp.301—49.
58 | Afterall
This content downloaded from 128.171.57.189 on Sat, 14 Sep 2013 10:29:02 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Kracauer’s ‘redemption of physical reality’, Stanley Cavell’s ‘automatic world
projection’ or André Bazin’s ‘ontology of the photographic image’ all point to this
same quality, no matter which metaphor the process attracted (the image as ‘trace,’
‘imprint’ or ‘transsubstantiation’ of the real). This model has, of course, been
much criticised since the 1960s, when terms such as simulation, construction
or deconstruction were given far more credit than the supposedly naïve concept
of realism.
On the other hand, realism was used as a label for stylistic features attributed to
specific historical film contexts or movements. French ‘poetic realism’ of the 1930s,
Italian ‘neorealism’ or what some critics recently described as contemporary North
American ‘neo-neo-realism’. 12 In these cases, the label is not meant to describe
an a priori capacity inherent in the medium, but a particular way of utilising it:
this might imply mobile cameras and smaller teams that make it possible to work
without film studios and artificial lighting, or it might imply the prominence of
the long shot and stories dealing with marginalised social groups.
I would argue that Costa’s films since In Vanda's Room challenge us to replace
the ontological question what realism is by an attempt to locate different forms of
realism at different points of the production and reception of movies. Without any
claim to completeness, I would propose to differentiate four phases of realism, or,
more aptly, four phases where effects of realism are produced: (1) There is a form of
realism that presents itself as the result of specific means of production. The fewer
people involved in making a movie, and the fewer props and technology you need,
the greater the chance to capture something ‘real’ without suffocating it in logistics.
Historically, this form of realism has regularly been propelled by ever smaller
cameras and sound equipment: 16mm stock and the Nagra tape recorder, digital
cameras, etc. (2) There is a realism specific to the photographic process. However,
this indexical realism, I would argue, constitutes just one aspect of the whole
complex of realism, and it depends much less on the filmstrip and the chemical
process of inscribing and storing than is usually understood. Rather, it is much
more closely linked to the lenses and the physical transmission of light onto
whatever support these are then inscribed onto. I would tentatively call this
‘testimonial realism’. (3) A third aspect of realism is produced by disproportionate
elements within the narrative. In his famous description of the reality effect in
Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart (1877), Roland Barthes ascribes this effect
to the numerous details in Mme Aubain’s room — details that do not have any
narrative or psychological purpose but, as he puts it, ‘finally say nothing but this:
we are the real’. 13 If one applies Barthes’s concept to film, one would have to
identify disproportional elements on different layers of the film: I am thinking
of excessively long takes that do not use time for narrative necessities, or of dialogue
that does not aim at getting somewhere. A movie such as Andy Warhol’s Chelsea
Girls (1966) best exemplifies how the absence of an imposed storyline or script
leads to a strong feeling that something ‘real’ is happening in front of the camera.
side as much as it has objective ones in the apparatus and the technical process of
making the film. This aspect was much discussed when Jurassic Park and Forrest
Gump took computer-generated imagery to a new level in the 1990s. Yet the term
‘perceptual realism’, coined in this context, might also be adequate for the time
modulations in James Benning’s latest movie Ruhr (2009), where he conflated
the 60 minutes of ‘real time’ showing a coke-quenching tower — a mechanism
for absorbing gases released in the processing of coal — with the light changes
that occurred over 90 minutes. 14
12 See A.O. Scott, ‘Neo-Neo-Realism’, The New York Times, 17 March 2009 and Richard Brody, ‘About
Neo-Neo-Realism’, The New Yorker, 20 March 2009. Scott discusses Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy
(2008) and Ramin Bahrani’s films Man Push Cart (2005), Chop Shop (2007) and Goodbye Solo (2008);
he tries to relate them each to Italian neorealism and a somewhat idiosyncratic choice of what he
understands as other historical examples of neorealism.
13 Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, The Rustle of Language (trans. Richard Howard), Oxford:
Blackwell, 1986. p. 148.
14 See Benning’s clarification in the comment section of the ‘Rotterdam Film Festival 2010 Diary:
Part III’, http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/blog/rotterdam-2010-part-iii/ (last accessed on
11 March 2010).
Pedro Costa | 59
 VI Tom Gunning has stressed that in cinema we are dealing with ‘realism’,
not ‘reality’: ‘Theatre, for instance, makes use of real materials, actual people
Pedro Costa has given a comprehensive definition of realism that combines technical, and things, to create a fiction world. Cinema works with images that possess
economical and contextual aspects. ‘I’m always within a kind of realism,’ he says: an impression of reality, not its materiality.’ 18 This distinction has been made
repeatedly in the history of film theory, yet it risks being forgotten when people
Everything feeds into this realism: the way I work, the decision what to spend mistake the world on screen for something they can dive into and identify with.
the money on, which camera you use, which microphone. All that is part of what Costa is unambiguous about this crucial difference when he — counterintuitively,
I call ‘realism’. And I know very well that every transgression — of a threshold you might say — describes the ethical task of documentary film-making as a gesture
or a border that I vaguely call realism — makes me risk losing myself and the of ‘closing the door’ between film and spectator. ‘We film life, and the more I close
film. This means: if I have too many people around me, too sophisticated a the doors, the more I hinder the spectator from taking pleasure in seeing himself
machine for the location where I'm filming […] I think, we have established on the screen — because I don’t want that — the more I close the doors, the more
a kind of balance between the technical means, the people and the money, I’m going to have the spectator against me, perhaps against the film, but at least he
all these things. We have established an equilibrium that runs into the film, will be, I hope, uncomfortable and at war. That is, he will be in the uneasy situation
I think. In any case, something runs from us into the neighbourhood, and of the world.’ 19 Costa’s martial notion of the antagonism between film and spectator
from the neighbourhood, a lot runs back into the camera and to us. 15 situates ‘realism’ on yet another level: the realities on screen and of the audience
are not linked by any direct form of empathy or identification. What unites them
In the light of the aforementioned four phases of realism, I would describe Costa’s is a feeling of uneasiness.
digital realism as follows: (1) It is explicitly bound to an intimate and collective
production process that guarantees a proximity and forms of collaboration that
would not be conceivable without a small camera and practically unlimited stock.
(For In Vanda’s Room, Costa shot more than 150 hours of footage; for Colossal
Youth, the material amounted to more than 300 hours.) Digital production thus is
the primary precondition for films such as the ones Costa has been making over
the last ten years. (2) The integrity of the indexical process has been much contested
in digital imaging, yet, as I would argue, in Costa’s Fontainhas films the ontological
doubt that has infested discussions about the potential manipulations of digital
images does not really carry weight; it is more than compensated for by the
testimonial powers of the lens and the optical apparatus. No one will have any
doubt that Ventura, Vanda, Nhurro or Bete were actually there at the moment of the
shooting, in the narrow alleys, between the ruins or in the newly-built quarter that
the inhabitants are relocated to.16 It makes no difference whether the images are
stored digitally or on filmstrips; nobody will question the fact that In Vanda's Room
depicts the present of the derelict houses and improvised sheds of Fontainhas in
a specific and very concrete manner. (3) The third facet of realism results from the
aesthetic and temporal structures within Costa’s films. The time that they depict
does not follow narrative concerns. The fixed shots tend to sink in and persist, not
flow. When asked about potential models for his way of addressing reality, Costa
not only mentions D.W. Griffith and the journalist and photographer Jacob Riis,
who photographically documented the lives of ‘the other half’ of the US population
in the 1880s and 90s — the poor and aggrieved — but also Andy Warhol’s work as
a film-maker. He states that Vanda is a close relative to Edie Sedgwick in Warhol’s
Beauty #2 (1965), which emphasised the long duration of shots instead of hewing
to a scripted dialogue and tightly measured takes. Similarly, in the very first take
in Vanda, we witness Zita and Vanda smoking heroin on Vanda’s bed over a period
of almost five minutes. Vanda’s severe coughing and her yawns cannot be subsumed
to any psychological or narrative purposes. Rather they inject a strong sense of
contingency and bodily presence that rigorously insists on just being there. (4)
In both Warhol’s and Costa’s films, realism is a temporal form of experience Pedro Costa, Juventude This form of realism, one could sum up, is nothing that is simply there to
that needs a certain extension in time. This realism relies on duration and patient em Marcha (Colossal be taken and consumed. It results from an experience of sharing a life and a time,
observation, on the side of the director as well as on that of the spectator. This is why Youth), 2006, colour be it with the human beings in Fontainhas or with their portrait on screen that
Costa has been reluctant to have his work shown in a museum or gallery context 35mm film, 155min, contains their collaborative testimony. It remains an open question where Costa’s
and wants his films to be seen in cinemas: ‘I’m not a video artist, I am a film-maker still. © Pedro Costa endeavour takes him now that one of the pillars of his outstanding form of digital
and film is a construction. Pieces are made to fit together, if they don’t the whole realism, the reality of Fontainhas, no longer exists.
thing will collapse, or worse, will lack movement and tension. Every shot or scene
I do depends on the one that comes before and on the one that will come after.’ 17

15 J. Bedeau and M. Diphy, Passeur du réel: Pedro Costa, op. cit. Translation the author's.
16 In the film we never get to know the surnames of most of the people/actors.
17 ‘From black box to white cube’, round-table discussion with Pedro Costa, Catherine David and Chris
Dercon (moderator), Jan van Eyck Video Weekend, 26 May 2007, 18 T. Gunning, ‘Moving Away from the Index’, op. cit., p.44.
http://www.janvaneyck.nl/0_4_6_text_files/David_Dercon_Costa.html (last accessed on 11 March 2010). 19 P. Costa, ‘A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing’, op. cit.

60 | Afterall Pedro Costa | 61

This content downloaded from 128.171.57.189 on Sat, 14 Sep 2013 10:29:02 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions