The Films of Pedro Costa

The Gene Siskel Film Center concluded its retrospective on filmmaker Pedro Costa a few weeks ago, and it was awesome. Here's a quick breakdown of what I saw, and again, please mind my brevity, but with two days left of 2007 I am scrambling to review everything that's been released in the past month. But, suffice it to say, in short, that everything I saw from Costa last month (and earlier this month) was fantastic and constitutes some of the best cinema I've seen in 2007.



Tuesday, November 27, 2007

With the release of Costa's Colossal Youth last year, his filmmaking has been at the fore of my mind, though not having seen any of his films before it was diffcult to gauge my expectations. Let me say now that the first Costa screening I attended in late November, Down To Earth (1994) was an aesthetic delight. The story follows a young nurse who travels back to her patient's rural hometown; he is in a coma, she seems in search of some meaning in her life. Surrounded by the mountainous landscape, littered with lava rocks and a scarce few trees, Costa's characters become abstract figures in disconnected space. His shot sequences lie somewhere in between the long takes of Bela Tarr that take on a life of their own, and the bouncy disconnect of Godard, a la Breathless, making us keenly aware of the technology that informs and mediates the actual landscape, at the same time showing us pure moments of beauty that mixes the live human being with the heavy force of nature.


Friday, November 30, 2007

Where Lies Your Hidden Smile (2001) is a must for anyone interested in editing, language, and the semiotics of them both. Following filmmakers Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub as they strain to find the precise moment to cut their film, the story is as much a show of their labor as it is a labor of love for one another. The filmmakers painstakingly advance and rewind the reel of celluloid frame-by-frame, in one scene, to find the the spot where the root of a character's smile begins, a subtle expression overlooked by the untrained eye. The film is an exercise in seeing how a film is edited, and though it requires an almost tedious amount of concentration, it's an experience unparalleled in its drive to show us what it takes to get just the right frame of film onscreen.


Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Colossal Youth was the big to-see film of 2006, and now that it has been released one year later I'm glad to say I finally saw it. Maybe it was the build-up of 365 days of rave reviews that made me slightly less than thrilled about the feature overall, but more likely, Colossal Youth simply fell to the shadow of the predecesors I was lucky enough to see before it, the aforementioned Down To Earth and Where Lies Your Hidden Smile. In retrospect, it actually seems like a familiar exercise for Costa who employs much of the same long-take/long shot aesthetic in Down To Earth (and undoubtedly others, which unfortunately I was unable to see), and, as illustrated in the image above, Costa's characters here too are contrasted against local buildings, structures, and other ubiquitous pieces of the landscape that really pull them out of space. Colossal Youth, for me, looked much like an urban version of Down To Earth. All of that being said, despite any repetition Costa exercised in this particular film it is still an individual masterpiece. The run-time is a bit longer than the others (and felt that way too), but you can think of this movie like you're taking an extended look at artwork on a museum wall; time is handled with a lot of texture that very much slows things down to make you notice everything you're seeing in the shot.