The cinema of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa is populated not so much by characters in the literary sense as by raw essences—souls, if you will. This is a trait he shares with other masters of portraiture, including Robert Bresson, Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Demy, Alexander Dovzhenko, Carl Dreyer, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Jacques Tourneur. It’s not a religious predilection but rather a humanist, spiritual, and aesthetic tendency. What carries these mysterious souls, and us along with them, isn’t stories—though untold or partially told stories pervade all six of Costa’s features. It’s fully realized moments, secular epiphanies.
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One can’t claim Costa is critically unrecognized. His films have been discussed very perceptively by Thom Andersen, Tag Gallagher, Shigehiko Hasumi, James Quandt, Mark Peranson, and Jeff Wall, among others. (Look online for fine essays by Costa and Hasumi in Rouge and by Gallagher in Senses of Cinema.) But, like Kira Muratova and Pere Portabella, he’s never had a feature in the Chicago or New York film festivals, and he’s been ignored or scorned by most of the mainstream critics at Cannes. Now the Gene Siskel Film Center is offering a retrospective of all his features (though lamentably none of his shorts).
Costa’s films have the reputation of being difficult, but I would argue that three of them are relatively accessible. I had no trouble diving headfirst into his first color feature, Casa de Lava (1994, stupidly translated as Down to Earth), a voluptuous remake of Tourneur’s 1943 film I Walked With a Zombie; the zombie here is Isaach de Bankolé, playing a construction worker in a protracted coma. And Costa’s black-and-white first feature, The Blood (1989), was gripping even though I couldn’t follow all of the plot, its fairy-tale poetics evoking Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955) and its milky whites, inky blacks, and delicate balances of light and shadow suggesting Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) and Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959). Where Lies Your Hidden Smile? shows Straub and Huillet editing their 1999 feature Sicilia!, making only five cuts per day and quarreling endlessly over each one; it reveals the difference a single frame can make and how much the two need each other. Aptly described as a romantic comedy, it’s the only Costa feature that isn’t sad and the best film ever made about filmmaking.
Colossal YouthSat 12/1, 3 PM, Tue 12/4, 6:30 PM
Down to EarthSun 11/25, 5 PM, Tue 11/27, 6 PM
STILL LIVES: THE FILMS OF PEDRO COSTA Gene Siskel Film Center, 11/17—12/4
