Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The Films of Pedro Costa
Just look at any film by the Lisbon-born, 56-year-old director Pedro Costa, whose category-defying body of work includes eight features and a handful of remarkable shorts, and you’ll find something thrillingly rare in contemporary cinema. On the occasion of the U.S. release of his latest, Horse Money, we are proud to present a comprehensive survey of this modern master’s world.
Aurélien Gerbault
2006|
France|
78 minutes
Echoing the strategies Costa used in Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, this rare personal portrait of the filmmaker follows him during the production of Colossal Youth, visiting the Fontainhas neighborhood while expounding his views on the current state of cinema. Screening with: Our Man (Pedro Costa, 21m).
Pedro Costa
2000|
Portugal / Germany / Switzerland|
170 minutes|
Portuguese with English subtitles
Q&A with Pedro Costa
In Vanda’s Room, which Costa shot in Fontainhas with a two-person crew and in close collaboration with the movie’s nonprofessional stars, is a seamless convergence of fiction and nonfiction, a thrilling dilation and expansion of cinematic time, and the discovery of a new, immensely rich visual vocabulary unique to the digital image (here printed onto 35mm film).
Pedro Costa
2009|
Portugal / France|
100 minutes|
French with English subtitles
Introduction by Pedro Costa
Costa’s shimmering, casually seductive portrait of the actress/singer Jeanne Balibar and her band at work has delicate feeling for the start-stop rhythms of jam sessions and the way musical phrases can echo with a quiet, suggestive force. An NYFF47 selection.
Pedro Costa
2001|
France / Portugal|
104 minutes|
French and Italian with English subtitles
Q&A with Pedro Costa following the July 23 screening
Filming two of his formative influences—Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet—in a stripped-down editing room as they worked on a new version of their film Sicilia!, Costa locates moments of great humor and tenderness. A revealing study of two of modern cinema’s most intrepid pioneers.
Jacques Tourneur
1958|
USA|
85 minutes
Dana Andrews (Night of the Demon) stars as a brainwashed Korean War vet alert to the dark secret of the firm to which he’s just returned in Tourneur’s rarely screened Red Scare thriller.
Paulo Rocha
1963|
Portugal|
91 minutes|
Portuguese with English subtitles
Widely considered the founding text of the New Portuguese Cinema, Rocha’s coming-of-age film follows 19-year-old Julio as he goes to work as a shoemaker in Lisbon, where his working-class values end up colliding with the bourgeois trappings of modern life.
Howard Hawks
1955|
USA|
105 minutes
Howard Hawks’s big-budget epic about the building of the pyramids—the severest, most costly flop of his career—has since emerged as one of his most fascinating films: a wild, dramatic staging of precisely the kind of large-scale organized labor it took to produce.
Jean-Marie Straub
1965|
West Germany|
55 minutes|
German with English subtitles
In Not Reconciled, which Costa recently cited as a major influence on Horse Money, Straub-Huillet brought an intense sense of the present to Heinrich Böll’s narrative of three architects reckoning with their family’s traumatic wartime past. Screening with: 6 Bagatelas (Pedro Costa, 18m).
Jean Grémillon
1932|
France|
51 minutes|
French with English subtitles
Introduction by Pedro Costa
In Jean Grémillon’s gritty, sinister fairy tale, which Gaumont hacked to nearly half its original length on release, a violent love triangle emerges between three of the marginalized residents of a luxury ocean liner: a magician, a mechanic, and a beautiful, mixed-race young woman.
António Reis
1976|
Portugal|
108 minutes|
Portuguese with English subtitles
Q&A with Pedro Costa
Reis and Cordeiro’s landmark documentary-fiction hybrid was a major influence on the rebirth of Portuguese cinema and a clear predecessor to Costa’s own blend of verbal folklore with direct cinema, using form to investigate an entire country’s collective unconscious.
Just look at any film by the Lisbon-born, 56-year-old director Pedro Costa, whose body of work includes eight features and a handful of remarkable shorts, and you’ll find something thrillingly rare in contemporary cinema. It might be the moral ferocity with which Costa, who made his first feature in 1989, films the lives and trials of Lisbon’s immigrant poor, the intense focus with which his camera captures the shape and atmosphere of specific neighborhoods, buildings, and rooms, or the unprecedented richness and textured clarity of his images—especially those shot, in the case of his more recent films, on digital video.
Costa turned to moviemaking at a period when Portugal was coming to grim terms with its colonial legacy. It was in part from his original, unorthodox ways of watching the work of some filmmaking masters—Yasujiro Ozu, Straub-Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Tourneur, to name a few—that Costa found a vocabulary with which to confront his country’s past. Labels slide off his movies: they are “formalist,” yet they pulse with life and warmth; they are ascetic but also deeply expressive; they are patient and yet possessed of a powerful momentum and a strong sense of rhythm.
Ever since his second feature, Casa de Lava (1994), Costa’s films have been anchored in two related places: the Cape Verde archipelago and Fontainhas, the slum in which many people from that long-colonized country found themselves after moving to Lisbon in search of work. It was in Fontainhas that Costa shot In Vanda’s Room (2001), now a landmark in the history of docu-fiction cinema. By that time, the neighborhood was already in the late stages of demolition, and in Costa’s work since it has manifested a ghostly, burnt-out presence. These two more recent features, Colossal Youth and Horse Money, both starring the nonprofessional actor Ventura, are some of the glories of modern cinema. On the occasion of the U.S. release of Costa’s latest, Horse Money, we are proud to present a comprehensive survey of this modern master’s cinematic world.
The work of Pedro Costa has progressed in slow, measured steps, but each step has been a giant leap.
—Cyril Neyrat, The Criterion Collection
The Samuel Beckett of world cinema... His career arc is one of the most fascinating in modern cinema.
—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
