"Hide what the spectator most wants to see" (Ozu)

Not seeing, hearing a love letter by Ventura, recited to Lento. COLOSSAL YOUTH (2006).

I see useless beauties
Extinguished in the night of doubt

And the flowers are not real
And the earth becomes barron

Soon I must say nothing

Yet if I walk the earth
The reason is that others too are there
Who like me spoke haltingly
When we were not entirely silent. 

Excerpt from Ailleurs ici partout
(Here There Everywhere)
by Paul Eluard
trans. Gilbert Bowen

By no small miracle did a 35mm print of COLOSSAL YOUTH (JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA, 2006, Pedro Costa) make it to Los Angeles. And by no small miracle was I able to find out about the screening and attend on September 27th (thank you Andre D., Filipe, Curtis, and David N.). It came by the good graces of Thom Andersen, still one of the great torch bearers of modern cinema/history in Los Angeles, and under the most unassuming of headings: Film Today, Andersen's class at CalArts (30 miles from city). I must dwell on Andersen's vanguardism for a moment and point out that this CalArts screening of COLOSSAL YOUTH was the U.S. premiere. What's more, no sooner did that week's artist-in-residence Costa leave the campus, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul was on his way. If there were only a way to amplify from Andersen's cinema pickups 30 miles out to the the public of Los Angeles! If this were done regularly I'm convinced it would reduce traffic, if perhaps increase loitering, as any good film screenings should. Anyhow "all great civilizations are based on loitering."

I've seen COLOSSAL YOUTH only once (to Andersen's credit, it was actually screened twice). For an extraordinarily concentrated film like COLOSSAL YOUTH -- an object so deeply hewn on every plane and every register -- this is both a curse and a blessing. The need to verify (or overturn) certain things about COLOSSAL's narrative is immediately and intensely felt; one wants to see it again straight away. But as the film sustains in the mind (something that goes on for weeks) the inscrutability of it strengthens into stanzas and its poetry reemerges. I don't believe any amount of dvd extras could destroy its mystery. The film's relation to time (narrative and cinematic), it's images (which remain overwhelmingly strong), the many stories of it's individuals and their implications -- what of these things will "set" upon further viewings?

While wondering this, for better or worse, I have begun comparing COLOSSAL to other films. There are few films that stand on their own two feet as steadily as COLOSSAL YOUTH, and lest the many film references below give any other impression, let me admit that they are my own attempts to stand. Mystery, and yet...

And yet one question haunts me now: is the film's narrative actually unequivocal? Upon seeing COLOSSAL I immediately thought "this is what it must've been like to see LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD in 1961", but the possibility of unequivocality has lead me to NICHT VERSöHNT (Straub/Huillet, 1965). Were people seeing NICHT VERSöHNT just once then scrambling for the Böll novel on which the film is achronologically based? Were they seeing NICHT VERSöHNT several times and ignoring the Böll text? In any case, in 1969 Rivette said this about NICHT and it could well apply to COLOSSAL YOUTH:

"Straub imposes on the spectator (the virgin spectator viewing the film for the first time, at any rate, but also in part a subsequent viewings) an obscurity in the language, which seems wilfully indirect, apparently unaware of him as the addressee (even if he nevertheless, though tacitly, fulfils his task), and which prevents him from direct attainment of the 'knowledge' it seemed to be entrusted with bringing him; the film functions before him as a dream, one might say, as the product of an unconscious (but whose unconscious? Does it belong to the literary text? To fifty years of German history? The Straubs? The 'characters' in the film ? )..."

(from 'Montage' by Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre, and Jacques Rivette - Cahiers du Cinema, No. 210, March 1969 - an heroic translation by Tom Milne)

Straub/Huillet's film is a complex operation on and materialization of a literary text (as always with them) and though prior knowledge of Böll's story far from dissolves all mystery of NICHT (it's not a puzzle, in fact it's articulations are inexhaustible), there is a known source in Böll to keep one's footing. They are realizing pre-existing material via excision and liasons (as Rivette calls them) and they are doing enormous work with a text laid out in front of them (see the Straub's heavily marked scripts), shuffling and emphasizing here, totally eliding there.

Costa's film may seem cryptic at first but there is something of necessity about the way it has been told, with it's soft indications of past and present, with it's particular ways of breathing and duration. If I can call this Costa's policy of presence (partly inherited from the Straubs but also Ozu and Ford) -- that is, the giving of time and weight to each person and place to work itself out "against" the montage and offscreen space -- it is another layer to take in which makes focusing on narrative chronology difficult. (And then there's a friend of mine in Taipei who found the chronology quite tractable).

COLOSSAL is comparable in density to NICHT, but there is another challenge; one of essence and consciousness, and that is of COLOSSAL YOUTH's source. The revelation of Costa's filmmaking, as film critic Quintin has elucidated it, boils down to the filmmaking process itself: "...the issue here is that the whole machinery of cinema is not exterior to its subject -- and by including cinema on the side of his subject, it no longer becomes an instrument of law and order." (Cinemascope 25, Winter 2006). COLOSSAL's subject is not a literary text but the actual stories and memories of the working class and unemployed of the Fountainhas ghetto and the new Casal Boba housing project in Lisbon. Costa has said his films are not creations but meetings. With each meeting we hear struggles orally recollected. Huillet/Straub's restoration of oral culture is taken to heart by Costa. He lives with the people he films, and he works hard everyday with them, with their stories and places. Costa's practice and the dignity and "non-inferiority" (Quintin) of Ventura, his children and comrades that results is nothing less than a restoration of the monumentality of humanity, and it is done precisely with every cinematic means a film is capable of. It's as if a year had been spent on each element of the film: lighting, composition, location, sound, voice, scansion, movement, duration, time, narrative, epic gesture, etc.. This dignity isn't created by Costa, it's been there all along; Costa's camera may often be low-angle but its thinking is the opposite of base. Contrary to professional belief, the cinema must concentrate the aforementioned cinematic elements, and perhaps use some unprecedented ones, to even approach these struggles.




So if the film is based on understanding, not decipherment, will this give any solace to those hostile or dismissive of it?

PRECEDENCE

What is COLOSSAL's surrealism? For me it is too early to say, there's work to be done. There are many factors, even down to its spatial organization that could bring one to call it surrealist. It's also a matter of decoupage. Certainly it is a "hallucination that is also a fact" (Bazin). In the films long recollections where the past and present seem to shift in mid-sentence or in the grand pauses that take up whole chunks of the encounters, there is a dream-like tone and each scene begins (and sometimes even ends) with an "out-of-order" chink for the penny-slot of meaning. But this quality is not the sole domain of Ventura's consciousness, as singular as he is. He and Costa and the cumulative effect of everyone encountered are much more generous. "In this world's structure, dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth" (Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism" 1929).

There is something else underlying Ventura's encounters with the people of Fountainhas and it's something he carries with him wherever he goes. It's something white walls and new monstrosities can't erase.There may be some indication of what Ventura is carrying in John Ford's GRAPES OF WRATH, two films with many affinities.

THOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THEIRS

When Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) sets off at the end of GRAPES OF WRATH it's as if he contained the destiny of the human family to be a community, as if he were setting off as a witness and a realization of that dream at once. He aims to simply be present, not even to take action. To be "all around in the dark" as he says in his famous dialogue with Ma Joad. "To be in the way guys yell when they're mad. In the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready..."

Tom Joad learns from Casey (Carradine) why he gave up preaching: "a preacher's got to know. I don't know. I gotta ask." The gentleman Ventura, in Costa's true record of a tenament gentleman, often doesn't even ask - he is present, he listens and he says what he knows. Tom Joad recollects Casey's words: "Fela ain't got a soul of his own, but little pieces of a big soul. The big soul that belongs to everybody..."

By the time Tom Joad orally passes on these words above, the words of a friend literally beaten to death by a system, he has suffered the material loss of home, of work, of family, and he has suffered the material and spiritual tragedy of "people living like pigs and good rich land layin' foul". Ford's film shows the Joads doggedly tricked and exploited at every turn while trying to get work and find a home. The Joads find in every outskirts camp and every job the impossibility of "eatin' stuff they raise, livin' in houses they build." This constant laceration and the feeling that all humanity has been scarred is carried by Ventura as well and confirmed by the people who tell him their stories. This yearning for purposeful work in one's own interest as opposed to proletarianization is repeated several times by different people in COLOSSAL YOUTH. One of them is temporarily selling toys out of a large plastic bag. Later the same man (?) tells Ventura about his life and work from a hospital bed. A scene of prostrated confession, as in so many Ford films (an illness or wound nursed with feelings exposed in THE LONG GRAY LINE, HORSE SOLDIERS, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND, DOCTOR BULL).

As Tag Gallagher points out in his very lucid (if less loving) chapter on GRAPES OF WRATH, in this film Ford focuses on the effects rather than the causes of the Joad's disenfranchisement. But the causes are at least within reach from the step by step presentation of the exploitation. This is only partly present in COLOSSAL YOUTH where the effects of the effects have already been long contemplated. It's closer to trauma, but also wisdom.

In GRAPES, when there is time (!), this traumatic wisdom comes across in vignettes between Tom Joad and the people he meets, people often ducking the cops; just kicked out of somewhere or about to be. These people relate what has happened to them in ricorsi (a term used by Gallagher to describe instances of "reliving" in Ford and Straub/Huillet). Though COLOSSAL's vignettes are vast and make up most of the film, the ricorsi of both films reverberate, one overlapping the other as they are approached or departed (like the vibrating bottle in Ventura's room as he paces). Just momentary stasis in GRAPES; prolonged stais in COLOSSAL: both squating down in some barely lit temporary place, both transitory.

"Twilight makes even very clear handwriting impossible to read" (Goethe)

In both films the camera is often below eye level, about waist high. The compositions are wide angle but planar rather than spatially deep. People and things rarely move toward or away from the lens -- they move in, from side to side. Costa and cinematographer Leonardo Simões (I've yet to find details on Simões contribution) sustain an extremely low lighting scheme that Ford and Gregg Toland only occasionally hint at in GRAPES (extraordinarily enough however). According to one Portuguese review, COLOSSAL was lit entirely with natural light reflected off of nine different mirrors Costa came equipped with. The lighting of both films is natural and abstract at once. In Michael Sicisnski's extremely sensitive review of COLOSSAL he reminds that "Costa's hieratic lighting effects were possible [because] his subjects were living with holes in their ceilings").

DESTRUCTION

Daryl Zanuck tacked on the ending of GRAPES as it is, with Ma Joad's epilogue speech. Ford intended to end it with Tom Joad setting off...


In Gallagher's view Zanuck's ending "virtually destroys the films trajectory toward inevitable disintegration/revolution, in favor of perseverance/abidance."

The above still frame could be right out of one of the more Fordian scenes in COLOSSAL, where Ventura, his daughter and another man stand outside their home, nearly in salute, to watch a funeral procession off screen (THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT). But what is this image's context in GRAPES? It's the last shot of Muley's flashback recollection of the destruction of his home by the Shawnee Land & Cattle Company.

Destruction is seen in Ford's film whereas in Costa's it is mainly heard through a complex off-screen sound construction. In Ford's film the demolition is seen as enacted by a "Caterpillar" (not unlike those used by Israel to bulldoze the homes of Palestinians). Ford does a brief montage of Caterpillar tractors in the middle of Muley's flashback to show the volume of the destruction of homes ("for every one [tractor], there was 10, 15 families throwed right outta their homes"). The montage is of tractors -- not tractors destroying homes -- therefore in a different film this montage may have been a hymn to socialist construction or, to be more up to date, a cry against the construction of something horrible like a McDonald's or ill-conceived like a liberal-bureaucratic-reformist housing project. The potential of a thing to be constructive or destructive.




If the below still frame showing Henry Fonda walking through a skeletal doorway (with a tire hanging on it and the sky above) looks a bit like surrealist painting, those signs among him are more expressionist in context, considering that Joad (Fonda) has just been told that the outskirts camp they've been staying in is going to be burned down by contractors. Earlier the contractors came to the camp looking for workers but some of the workers were wise to the contracter's tricks. The only way the contractors can get the cheap labor is by the desperation of burned out refugees.






Above, the "agitator" (conscious worker) flees the cops through a doorway. The "agitator" flees because he beat a cop that tried to shoot him. The cop missed the "agitator" hitting a woman bystander instead.

Andre Breton called his novel NADJA "a book with a banging door". Costa seems to always mention doors and doorways. For him they are something fearful and something hallowed. It's where fiction/reality may be discovered or where the reality/fiction may bar itself from you. Ventura and Lento hang their hats next to a door banging with the wind and cold. In one of the first few shots of COLOSSAL Ventura approaches a dilapitated building, shakes the hand of a man standing by it's doorway, and they both wait outside. Loud banging and screeching are heard. One level of the noise drops and another man comes out of the building through the doorway -- a friend of Ventura's who will share lunch with him in the next scene.

V +/- V

The scenes between Ventura and Vanda in her room are the convergence of old and new. Vanda repeatedly mentions the brand-name of diaper and Ventura does not comprehend this; Ventura, (witness to past times of palpable solidarity and community) is attentive in silence while a TV yammers on for attention and domination; we watch Vanda's constant and mortal coughing and her million songs of experience next to her daughter's quiet youth and song of innocence.

As COLOSSAL proceeds and it is evident that Costa is mixing the naturalistic gait and words of Vanda with Ventura's more stoic exchanges, Vanda and her room begin look like a mixture of Walter Brennan/Monument Valley and one of Godard's TV documentaries. Ford often mixed acting styles and tones (MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, THE LONG GRAY LINE, 7 WOMEN), contrasting the colloquial and homespun with the grand responsibilites and fates of a new landscape. And Godard has been one of the only ones to convey and critique the din of domestic TV presence by means of the cinema, to discover the labyrith of social relations created by a blarring TV (NUMERO DEUX, FRANCE/TOUR/DETOUR/DEUX/ENFANTS).

As these articulations intermingle in Costa, it raises the issue of modernism and traditionalism (over and underdetermined in both Godard and Ford). I must leave this to those who are much better at distinguishing such things, where they need be distinguished. As both issues have bearing on the perceived "enterability" of Costa's work I must say that distinguishing is probably less important than engaging with the subject (which this post may show, is hard to do in it's absence). Costa has taken huge amounts of time to do this himself. Some critics are so cynical they consider Costa's practice a kind of MacGuffin (David Walsh). His films can be dismissed with a few words like "for a small fan-base". (The first half of that Goethe line is: "Whoever wants to accuse an author of obscurity ought first of all to have a good look at his own inward self and see whether it is really light in there.") . Meanwhile, whole countries are turned to dustbowls by global capitalism. Like the Straubs, Godard, and even Gehr before him, Costa is charged with elitism; but (as Gilberto Perez points out) what could be less elitist than making films with means that anyone could take up (16mm in OTHON [Straubs], a pocket 16mm camera in NOONTIME ACTIVITIES [Gehr], video in HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA [Godard], video again in IN VANDA'S ROOM and COLOSSAL)?

Trompe-l'œil

In GRAPES Ford repeatedly shows the Joads together or singly approaching or being approached by people ostensibly offering help. Often these are wolves in wolves clothing but speaking with the modesty of sheepherders. Their methods and tricks are exposed (the economy of effects). Even Ford's New Deal camp director seems suspiciously dispassionate, a simple bureaucrat (he emphatically shows no reaction to some of the Joad children's hijinx with a camp toilet).

In two succinct sections, Costa shows some skepticism toward a welfare agent offering an apartment to Ventura. There is a vacancy in this housing project and the agent has a clipboard telling him it is meant for Ventura. Ventura goes to see it; he stands in this completely empty room with white walls -- walls that seem to try to blot out the past that saturates every other encounter. Costa/Simões completely wash out the windows to the outside world.

When Variety called Ventura a "vacant guide", they not only missed everything made visible by Costa and Ventura as he stands in this abstract white room, everything Ventura carries with him, but they may have also succumbed to the State's notion of "occupancy" (the housing project). The white walls "have spiders" as Ventura points out. The apartment is not big enough for all of his children, Ventura tells the agent. The room looks like the end of 2001 (Kubrick). But will Ventura grow old and die here (in minutes, seconds, years?). It should be reiterated that the struggles of Ventura and the other inhabitants new to the Casal Boba housing project are ongoing.

In one amazing eye level shot in COLOSSAL (like GRAPES the camera sometimes changes to eye level when the authorities are around) Ventura is being led around in the new apartment by the welfare agent. The agent opens a door and they enter an empty bedroom. The door is slowly self-closing however, soundless and sterile, giving Ventura enough time to briefly take a look then slip out before it closes. Ventura goes off-screen, effectively closing the door to the agent who is still inside the empty room glorifying the beneficence of the housing project to himself. These scenes inside the new apartment are Costa's sharpest and most biting.

LAST SHOT

In these possibly overlong notes on COLOSSAL YOUTH in the absence of much dialogue or a chance to see it again, I have ignored much of the film to emphasize a few small bits. Another film, ZVENIGORA by Dovzhenko, also came to mind after the CalArts screening; it too uninhibitedly leaps from era to era, deals with time, roots, sons, fathers, whole peoples, stubborness, destruction, and the designs of the state versus the folk -- and it does it with urgency and unabashed texture, like COLOSSAL.

As Mark Peranson has said in Cinemascope (Number 27, Summer 2006) the youth of "youth on the march", the COLOSSAL YOUTH, are represented in the film by Vanda's young daughter; she's barely in the frame throughout the film and all the more stronger for it. It's a Renoirian idea that explodes in the final shot. Vanda asks Ventura to watch her young one while she goes out to do some housecleaning work. The next shot, on which the film will end, is of Ventura lying on his back in Vanda's bed, one leg crossed over the other in the air, Vanda's daughter in the extreme lower right hand corner of the frame creating a tension, standing dormant her small subtle movements. "You must give the feeling the frame is too narrow" (Renoir). The young one remains silent in Ventura's presence, as she did during her mother's long soliloquy. Considering Ventura's "function" in every other scene -- dutifully listening to others, orally passing on the poetry of his love letter, roaming on his feet, etc. -- this silent scene between Ventura on his back and the young one half out of frame raises the question of the fates of both without naming it, without designating it's future terms. It reminded me the last shot of WAGONMASTER by Ford, of sudden progeny: a pony climbs a hill, fade out.

My only concrete discovery in all of this is what most certainly must be an Ozu reference of Costa's in the final shot. Either that or an astonishing coincidence. Looking back at RECORD OF A TENEMENT GENTLEMAN by Ozu, I find in Ozu's final shot almost the exact same crossing of the legs in the air as Ventura's in COLOSSAL's final shot-- not to mention the same tension of youth and uncertain future:

R.I.P.

João Bénard Da Costa

"(...) buzina. Descobrindo o efeito sonoro do seu movimento, a criança repete-o um sem número de vezes, sempre de costas voltadas para a rua e sempre a olhar para a velha. Esta não esboça a mais pequena reacção ao jogo da miúda, mas, embora não lhe vejamos o olhar, sabemos que está com toda a atenção a ela. Atenção que, de certo modo, é devolvida, pois que a brincadeira da criança, sendo também uma brincadeira solitária, é uma brincadeira para a velha, ou uma brincadeira com a velha. (...)"

"Sobre NO QUARTO DA VANDA" 

João Bénard Da Costa

If sensitivity to a single shot or a film's title are worth a damn to the English speaking world, then film critic and historian João Bénard Da Costa's work will one day be recognized and translated. He died today (1935-2009). I only became aware of João Bénard Da Costa through my work on Pedro Costa, and what Pedro and other Portuguese friends have told me of João Bénard's importance. One of the few (the only?) ways you can see João Bénard Da Costa with English translation is in a penetrating interview about OSSOS (Pedro Costa) included on this dvd of the film. He wrote an entire text, a beautiful one, about the above shot, a single shot!, in IN VANDA'S ROOM (Pedro Costa). He wrote monographs on Hitchcock, Buñuel, Lang, Sternberg, Nicholas Ray, Hawks and Ford. He also did the kind of work you cannot completely transcribe or translate since it resides in the minds of hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries, that of being a great director of the Cinemateca Portuguesa since 1980. My impression is that there are many people who could say about the films and the light shed on them by João Bénard Da Costa "I would have died if you hadn't come back." Mr. João Bénard Da Costa is gone. The films will wait "all these years." Is it a lie Johnny Guitar?

- a.r.

Tonight's Kino Slang screenings (here) are dedicated to an ineradicable man, Alfredo Mendes, the protagonist of A CAÇA AO COELHO COM PAU (THE RABBIT HUNTERS, 2007, Pedro Costa), who died last month in Lisbon. We don't know much about the man, save for what's told and how it's told in the two short movies TARRAFAL and A CAÇA AO COELHO COM PAU—momentous sounds and images of Alfredo, all intensity and bitterness, reflecting on life; with the irony of a knockabout and the determination of a man on the lam, he is testy and makes each shot a live wire—all that, and that "He drove a pickup truck delivering papos-secos."

Below is a testimony to the films TARRAFAL and THE RABBIT HUNTERS that I wrote in 2011, initiated by Craig Keller for the COLOSSAL YOUTH dvd booklet as released by Eureka. 

***

Limbo Film(s) 

We cannot accept cinema's death. Not so long as Ventura lives and breathes—and looks off like all those who sing to themselves, yet to the entire world (...Bach, ...Oharu, The Chronicle of..., The Life of... all the nameless exiles). Not so long as Alberto Ze innocently plays with his knife, then suddenly stakes his expulsion letter against a wood post for all to see. Not so long as fathers die, rabbits escape death, and Alfredo wakes at daybreak to tell about it. Not so long as mothers laugh while telling stories of back home, and suddenly become grave about an evil which passes if one is not careful. Yes, so long as a few trees remain, there's a soup kitchen to skim, several cats, and the people are willing, a film can be made, and the cinema is not dead. Its lines are catastrophic.

"You narrate in order not to die or because you're dead already," (Serge Daney). Thus we have Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters, which respectively strike out, each with its own slash—one supernatural, one social—the "or" of that aphorism. That is their militancy. These short films, made with the inhabitants of a housing project—two former masons, a parolee, a mother, a cafeteria cook—narrate. That is their power. Taking advantage of the fluency he gained with the people of the neighborhood, and the fluency the neighborhood people gained with the cinema during the two year shoot of Colossal Youth, Pedro Costa makes these films, or as Bernard Eisenschitz distinguished, "this film(s)", in a mere two weeks, for two separate omnibus films.

30 years after Jacques Tati, in his César award acceptance speech, urged distributors and film people to support short films, the short film still remains elementally in limbo, still disrespected and unaccepted as cinema's life-blood. The proof: the egregious non-reception of these Costa and company films, the richest short film(s) in a half-century.

It's as if Costa wanted to test the limits of the short films' trenchancy, as if he wanted to sharpen one short with the other perpetually through a total, vigorous, concentrated combination of the supernatural, the militant, the local, and the poetic, with oral history and field recording (the song at the end of The Rabbit Hunters), true reverse-shots (across both films), narration, and montage. Even the title, like a scar, Tarrafal—a reference to the Portuguese-established "Camp of Slow Death" in Cape Verde, a prison camp for political prisoners opposing Salazar from 1936-54—is montaged over this contemporary story in Lisbon of a young man's expulsion from Portugal and deportation to an island he never knew, the beating to death of Alfredo by racists, and Ventura’s "lot of departed spirits that walk with me..."

 As if this concentration weren't enough, Costa plays a cat's game (concretely: compare the cats in each film) with the very idea of an international omnibus film contribution (often products of a vague and alienated cultural initiative) for which this film(s) were made. Not in the negative, but in the positive. He has found another vein to tap for cinematic resonance: by separating and multiplying the film(s) into two different omnibuses, the film(s) repeat, differ, multiply and regard each other for all time...

This enormous and brief film(s) have an inexhaustible amount to teach us about the editor's stiletto; as Colossal Youth does about the overall epic, as Ne change rien does about the microphone.

Someday Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters may emerge as the greatest film(s) ever made on the reverse-shot, formally and thematically, and its relation to death and disappearance. Again, it took two films, crossing each other, with we the public hovering between them, to achieve this.

Costa and the inhabitants have not placed pennies on the eyes of the dead, they've place a film(s). Our theoretical limbo as viewers between this film(s), the very real stateless limbo of the young Alberto Ze, the made-real limbo of a dead man in the film: wheels within wheels within wheels… To take another Walshian idea: a discreet REGENERATION of deposed mass heroes. 

 Andy Rector 

July 13, 2011 

************



Thieves' Highway

COLOSSAL YOUTH
and
KINO
KILLING
KRITIKS















Tuesday, May 30, 2006 
9:05 PM
From GK(...)
To : Andy Rector
Subject : could ebert sound like more of a dumbass?

From Ebert's last Cannes report:
"Sunday morning in the Hotel Splendid breakfast room, my favorite Cannes expert Pierre Rissient predicted that the big prize would shock everyone by going to “Colossal Youth,” by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. Pierre is such a legend they are naming a theater after him at Telluride this year, but he was, to put it delicately, wrong. “Colossal Youth,” unseen by me, tells the story of a Lisbon worker whose wife leaves him, and he moves from a slum to a housing complex. Why didn’t I see it? Because Mary Corliss did. She is the wife of Time film critic Richard Corliss, who told me: 'Mary walked out after an hour because the movie made her feel like rats were fighting in her skull.'”

Tuesday, May 30, 2006,
9:06 PM, 
From : Andy Rector: 
Subject : Re: could ebert sound like more of a dumbass?:

real rigorous, not seeing a film based on the opinion of a bad critic's wife. What a horrifying image...rats fighting in her head... if thats what happens when a filmmaker respects you, you have other problems! Such reactions are deranged, not the films. One only has to ponder the rabidity of the sort of films that ease the minds of critics like Corliss or his wife to know what's healthy and what's not.

Now that's the second reference to "heads" and Pedro Costa films that I've heard. The difference being that Mary Corliss spoke of her own head and Manny (Farber) spoke of the film's head!
________________________________

PEDRO COSTA: It's not a creation its a meeting. I make films because I meet certain people in certain places. (...) And I think that's important to show certain things like that, it's innocent enough...

We don't want to stop, we have things to do, things to work on. I think cinema's tools require us to make efforts; not everything is lost.

Nevertheless I think that I would do everything for cinema to be like it was in the past. It was an art which educated me, which trained me morally, politically, artistically, aesthetically. I learn so much from films and the way I put into practice my production.
When I say production I mean how to treat people. (...)

QUESTION: Do you expect the cinema viewer to make an effort watching your film?

PEDRO COSTA: Yes. But it's sort of an awareness. I'm not asking the cinema goer to suffer, I just want them to be sensitive and that's what worries me about being here (in Cannes). Perhaps people are not really paying suffient attention. And there should be some nervous tension.

from: http://www.festival-cannes.fr/films/fiche_film.php?langue=6002&partie=video&id_film=4360212&cmedia=18368840\

From the Archive of the Youth Brigade For the Import of the Films of Pedro Costa

Two Notes — Hermine, Nevermore, Lip- and Lap- kina

Wildly different climates when....

....in 1977, Jonathan Rosenbaum is moved to say:

"I can only hazard the personal conviction that, with the passage of time, both films (Duelle and Noroît) will be recognised as significant extensions of (and advances in) Rivette's explorations - even if, from the present standpoint, the former seems to hark back to some of the illusionist premises of Rivette's earliest work..." (Introduction to Rivette: Texts and Interviews, now thankfully available here )

...and in 2003 Jonathan Takagi is moved to report:

"The moods (of Histoire de Marie et Julien) range from troubling and disturbing to lighthearted, especially in Julien’s interaction with his cat, Nevermore. Originally the cat was to have a speaking part. Some have reproached the film for the scenes in which the cat obviously makes some “mistakes” such as watching the boom microphone or scrambling back from the approaching camera." (from Jonathan T.'s wonderfully lively Paris Journal on Film Journey )

The twists and turns of fate in the life of anti-illusionism since Duelle are too much for me, though it does seem right absent in Rivette after the unheralded frame lines of the final showdown/lesson in Le Pont du Nord (1982). One thing is for certain: anti-illusionism in general has been utterly co-opted since the era of Duelle to aggrandize the power of advertising, cynicism, reveling in the "lie" of it all, but telegraphing loud and clear nonetheless (this is probably the relief that's felt in seeing home and cell-phone video on YouTube, they're "saying nothing", seeing/hearing everything).

Duelle itself has aged magnificently (my copy thanks to Travis Miles): a story of sun and moon goddesses, seers, and one girl-detective (only in flashes, like Jerry Lewis in It$ Only Money [Tashlin]) played Hermine Karagheuz, with a face, and some gestures, straight from the silent period. There's second-rate magic/illusion by way of tonic lighting changes, and anti-illusionistic but pro-hypnotic richness in the variations of music and body (musical improvisations blatantly played onscreen by Jean Weiner who is consistently surprising when he appears), radical shifts in acting, posture, and costume (Berto's extremely diverse donning  is such a shock each time, that this alone has the odd effect of strengthening the fiction on the one hand, and blaring it's artificiality on the other). Every move of the body and trembling of the fiction threaten to tear the screen to ribbons (one of Karagheuz's screams out of nowhere nearly does). In any case, Rosenbaum seems excited (at least I was) in his footnote on the film and what came after:

"While Duelle might be described, from a strictly commercial standpoint, as a film 'aimed' at a particular kind of audience which no longer exists, the more ambitious and radical procedures of Noroît suggest both an acceptance of the fact of this 'lost audience' and a subsequent liberation from this frame of reference -- thereby marking a return to the sort of experimentation and 'pure research' largely abandoned by Rivette after Spectre."

Alas, 30 years on, Rivette gets reproached when in Histoire de Marie et Julien (2004) he crystalizes some of his former narrative terror and anti-illusionism into one brief shot of a cat on a man's chest recoiling from the camera and the boom, the whole appartus bearing down on them in a tracking shot. A Bazinian anti-illusionism. Once the camera settles, the cat stares up at the boom mic. Perhaps the man (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) is "covering" for the cat when he looks up too and says "nosing around upstairs again? Don't lie, I can see it in your whiskers." This being a film by Rivette the line is sinister (what fiction/terror hovers overhead of our forward stare?), the scene tells a terrible truth on at least two levels, and Rivette once again revives the stakes of the tracking shot to a life or death situation.

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On another note, I was recently struck by Ossos (1997, Pedro Costa), the films ineffable "lead" Mariya Lipkina, and the resemblence of her name to Marfa Lapkina, the "lead" of Eisenstein's The General Line. Mariya Lipkina was not one of the real-life inhabitants of Fountainhas, the district where Costa has been making films for 10 years; she had in fact acted in six Russian films prior to Ossos (quite a few considering her young age). What one wonders is why exactly her filmography stops at Ossos?

Marfa Lapkina, of The General Line, was cast according to the Soviet practice of "typage" (consider the difference in meaning between the word "types" in a capitalist society, and a society attempting communism). In Helen Grace's brilliant article "Hegel's Grave" she describes "typage" as: "a theory which gives a place in the history of the image to figures who are invisible to history."

"If however this face and this body (Marfa's) should disappear from cinema, then it would mean that all human bodies like it are doomed to disappearance not only from the space of representation but from life itself, all these bodies in the name of which an entire moral economy has been formed in the last century and a half. Yes, of course they will die, but I'm speaking more of the prospect of an impression that they never existed at all and that it is only the great men - the Eisensteins, the Hegels - who deserve to be remembered. It is also the concept of a particular ideal cinematic figure - the mass hero - whose future is at stake here."

A similar plea could be made for every face and body in Costa's cinema post-Ossos, namely those that inhabit No quarto da Vanda, Ou git votre sourire enfoui?, and Juventude em marcha. But where has that left Mariya Lipkina? I don't know. Costa obviously stays close those in his films; Thom Andersen reports that Alberto Barros, "Lento", had to explain one of Juventude em marcha's major plot points to Costa after the premiere at Cannes.

Marfa Lapkina did not see Eisenstein's film until fifty years after its making (apparently, in 1978, a film was made of Lapkina's first viewing).

the old and the new (click here for clip)