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Juventude em Marcha
Author(s): Jean-Louis Comolli
Source: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry , Issue 24 (Summer 2010), pp. 62-
70
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Central Saint Martins College
of Art and Design, University of the Arts London
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655929
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Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry
In a close analysis of the role of the frame in film, Jean-Louis Comolli highlights how
Pedro Costa's Fontainhas trilogy makes the invisible film frame visible: a political
gesture, a response to the confusion of the world with its spectacle.
The question of the body in cinema — of the filmed body — is inseparable from the
question of the frame. Like the visible body, the visible world is framed by cinema. 1 We
could say that everything that is cinema, good or bad, is framed and has always been
framed. The filmic image, the photogram, the shot are framed and cannot be otherwise.
This is not the case with visual events we can group together under the heading ‘specta-
cles’. A fireworks display, a circus act, a military parade, an airplane taking off, a tall
building exploding: all these appear to their initial viewers as unframed, meaning that
they are viewed within the same spatial field as normal human vision (180 degrees).
These events are only placed in a frame when they are filmed. In opera or the theatre,
the stage is framed on three sides, but the very nature of these dimensions — despite
the fact that they are fixed — keeps the stage’s wings from functioning like the off-screen
of cinema: one knows that the wings, backstage, are contiguous with the stage, that they
are its extension and do not amount to the otherness of an ‘outside’.
This is not the case in film. There the frame by definition restricts our normal field
of vision, which becomes limited, constrained, truncated. The viewer’s gaze is framed
at the same time as the space being observed. The film frame, therefore, is a direct
expression of the confinement of the scopic impulse. My desire to see has been framed:
limited and formatted by this rectangular opening which is not present in normal
perception and comes into play only when watching a film. The cinematic viewing
experience becomes radically different; it separates itself from any visual experience
encountered outside the darkened cinema. The frame distinguishes between nature and
art. It is artifice, and the value of this artifice is precisely that it is not natural. This is why
there is something desperate — an unease, a phantasm of normality — in the temptation
of a naturalist aesthetic to which so many films yield today. This naturalism is something
that the deliberately pictorial quality of Pedro Costa’s films rejects. The trilogy of films
Costa made about the Fontainhas neighbourhood in Lisbon, which today no longer
exists — Ossos (Bones, 1997), No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room, 2000), Juventude
em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006) — tells us forcefully that it is up to art to cast in relief
the world that has been lost. But the figuration and locating of this world must refuse to
re-naturalise the very thing that ruined the world: the present-day reign of merchandise.
The abasement of the weak and the ruination of the losers — the obsessive concerns of the
persecutory logic governing competition — are taken up by art as if they were an opening
onto grace and a direct path to beauty, beyond good and evil, the opposite of any form of
miserabilism: the grace of the weak, the beauty of those without any power, the angelical
forms of those who are ‘nothing’.
And yet this restriction of the visible brought about by framing is an opening,
a call to the non-visible. Taking a section of our normal field of vision, the frame cuts out
a portion of the visible and confines and encloses it. In this way the field, a portion of the
1 In this article the author makes full use of the range of a word’s meaning in the French, which is often
difficult to render in translation. In the original, the visible world is not merely ‘framed’ by cinema;
the verb used, encadrer, also means to regulate, monitor, control, legislate, etc., often in a repressive
and/or official sense. The noun form used in the previous sentence, cadre (frame), thus carries a sense of
repression and confinement. This term, for example, also designates workplace management personnel,
while workers lower on the ladder are encadrés: their work is regulated and subjected to disciplined
control. These sorts of meanings underlie the terms frame and framed throughout the text. —Trans.
Pedro Costa | 63
2 André Bazin, ‘Peinture et cinéma’, Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1999, p.188.
of the picture. It took three films to arrive at this shelving of an old accessory of classical Pedro Costa, Juventude
cinematic dramaturgy. Goodbye Jacques Tourneur, goodbye Nicholas Ray, goodbye em Marcha (Colossal
Fritz Lang! And even Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, goodbye! Here Ventura Youth), 2006, colour
can only repeat and reread the same letter, begin the same gestures and gazes over again. 35mm film, 155min,
Here the characters no longer have any freedom. And the viewer? Hardly any more. still. © Pedro Costa
We can take this poorly, become alarmed that the system of frames prevents and even
forbids any escape into the off-screen. We might (we should) suppose that the world
bears within it a piece of reality which coincides with the non-visible and which might
thereby elude the domination of the spectacle. That is not the gamble this film takes.
But there will be other films by the same film-maker that won’t take the same approach.
The last film in the trilogy speaks to us about today; it obliges us to see this visible version
of the world that we do not wish to see. And therein lies all its grandeur.
70 | Afterall