Looking at Costa’s Cinematic Realism (1)

Realism, as an idea, never stops people to search for new articulations. In film, the debates about this idea seem to be conspicuous in the attempts to define the boundaries between documentary and fictional films—which in certain contexts are not intended to dictate cinema to divide itself into those two opposing categories, but to affirm the film as a world which has its own characteristic reality.

As a matter of fact, the shift of interpretation over realism is always driven by renewals over the mediums and their supporting apparatuses—apart from contemporary political, economic, cultural, social factors of the creation period of the articulation. Even now in the aftermath of television culture and in the middle of globalization era that drives open societies with mass production of mobile, small media gadgets (camera, digital technologized) in good prices (allowing the public to use it freely), realism again demands a new onthological explanation for technical, aesthetic, even sociological crises that shock our modern cinema.

Pedro Costa[1] is one of those who radicalized the essence of “anti-dependence” on story: his film narration is neither linear or parallel. So to speak, Costa is a bard of contemporary cinema, underpinning his cinematic style on “the art of absence”: elaborating a question into cinema by condensing (congealine) camera shots to certain parts while allowing most parts of reality facets remain in the blanket of mystery instead of exposing all events, in order to awaken the audience’s consciousness (not only to show “truth”).[2]

Reading the Costa’s works need not necessarily a psychological approach, but a materialistic awareness. Just as Jonathan Rosenbaum’s language, Costa’s way of capturing material reality is combined with a desire of spiritual exploration, and this style—which apparently refutes exoticism over suffering and poverty (ranges of his themes) and turns upside down the idea of Neorealism—producing a kind of door designed as a site of audience’s “entry-exit” (freely, no ties), instead of a pass to “truth”; Costa composes sounds and images more as a guide instead of mere destination.[3] We can see this more closely in In Vanda’s Room (2000), Colossal Youth (2006), and Horse Money (2014)—three films I chose for this curatorial program of ARKIPEL social/kapital.

Those three films document the lives of slum citizens of Fontainhas District.[4] In Vanda’s Room focuses on the life of Vanda (a heroin addict, an original inhabitant of the area); Colossal Youth and Horse Money focus on Ventura (an immigrant of Cape Verde who fled to Lisbon and is haunted by Carnation Revolution). Unlike previously, Costa produced those three films using DV camera, refusing the conventional production mechanism (involving a lot of crew members and commanding actors to act under screenplay’s necessities), although this doesn’t mean that Vanda and Ventura (and other casts) act without script. They have freedom to play, act, and interpret themselves as characters according to their own terms.

Colossal Youth can be said as a transition between In Vanda’s Room and Horse Money, both from the narrative side and stylisticism. The “rawness” impression in the mise-en-scene is quite strong in In Vanda’s Room. Costa uses sounds around the location (an inclination can be seen from two other films) as part of his cinematic puzzles (provoking guesses on events of the demolition in the slum areas of Fontainhas), where Vanda’s room is the center of the event’s vortex. Takes of static and long duration shots and winding dialogs aren’t likely to fill narrative needs but constitute more an attempt to capture an event’s quality as is. According to Pantenburg, this style indicates “an absence of story burden”—fitting to Costa’s desire of “art of absence”—which has no goal whatsoever except to say: “It’s reality.”[5] The relation between In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth is seen from Vanda’s presence with comparable character’s gestures, which becomes a sort of a twist to the story of Ventura who was wandering and trying to adapt to the new (home) neighborhood while tracing his relationship with people from the past. The Colossal Youth’s expression is not as radical as In Vanda’s Room’s in terms of “scene’s rawness”. Its theatrical style seems to construct more strongly the spectral landscape of Colossal Youth with a folding and ambiguous time span. However, although not all scenes using static camera, and while the scene at the museum even strengthens the story’s disproportionateness, this film still implements a similar approach to the one in In Vanda’s Room in terms of the characters’ inter-dialogs. Meanwhile, Horse Money can be said as “meta-frame” of a problem revealed in the two previous films: a reflection on defeat, sufferings, and hopes. Upon the background of the hospital with catacombs of an unidentified location, Ventura’s struggle with dreams of the past is pictured in nights by Costa in Horse Money; still reminding us of the traumatic impact of the Carnation Revolution for marginalized people.

Comparatively, the last two films seem more fictional than the first one which presents more documentary elements. However, to Costa, the difference between fiction and documentary film is something obsolete. His films would not lull us into a fabricated world or drown us in a desire to find out what’s wrong and what’s right, what’s fake and real. In this case, Costa’s cinematic construction does not call for the audience’s belief about the beginning that goes to an end (conclusion). Instead, just as Costa says it himself, his films invite the audience to stay outside—outside the screen—giving us a chance to guess what’s behind his films’ “door” (photographic reality). Cinema is not to show us anything; it is to concentrate our vision power on something.[6]

This curatorial sees this Costa’s view as a key statement to understand his cinematic realism. To realize his decision to use a production method that refutes the conventional mechanism inevitably is to look at his realism from the said point of view. The strength of those three films lie in the intimacy between the filmmaker, the camera, and the subjects to be recorded. Such intimacy, pursued to accomplish purity in positioning subjects and matters on their original places, can only be reached by reducing interventions and other psychological disturbances often faced in industrial production ways. This initiative finally affects the storytelling—on account of the casts’ full involvement in interpreting the story as whole as they can, playing roles according to their own—and the visual form resulted—on account of the necessity to negotiate with the recording tools’ quality. However, the composition of such “raw” shots in fact reduces doubt over the characters’ performativity; due to the minimum montage effects and shot manipulation, the question on Vanda’s and Ventura’s presences in the frame, for example, seem to be answered by the shots which are similiar to a sort of original footages of any daily documentation—an indisputable symptom that thrives around the mobile and digital camera culture milieu of the 2000s.

As a closure, In Vanda’s Room, Colossal Youth, and Horse Money are case studies through the cinema about marginalized people with the spirit to fight against exoticism over suffering and poverty themes; framing peripheral problems through mechanisms outside the established one. Whether it’s based on the form and its subversiveness against general tendency, and its production process, also the filmmaker’s intention, these three films are appropriate in elaborating our speculation on social differentiation concerning individual experience inextricable from the collective environment.

Manshur Zikri (born January 23, 1991) is a writer, researcher, media activist, and Forum Lenteng member (Community Based Media Empowerment Program, AKUMASSA). Graduated from Criminology of the Department of Criminology at the University of Indonesia in 2014. A regular curator and ARKIPEL’s catalog editor.

Bibliography
Bazin, A. (1967). The Evolution of the Language of Cinema. In H. Gray (Ed.), What Is Cinema? (H. Gray, Trans., pp. 23-40). Berkeley: University of California Pres, Ltd.

Blakeney, K. (2009). An Analysis of Film Critic Andre Bazin’s Views on Expressionism and Realism in Film. Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse , 1 (12). Retrieved June 24, 2016, from Inquiries Journal: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a?id=86.

Costa, P. (2005). A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing. Rouge. Retrieved June 24, 2016, from Rouge: http://www.rouge.com.au/10/costa_seminar.html.

McKibbin, T. (2011). Realist Theory. Retrieved June 24, 2016, from Tony McKibbin’s web site: http://tonymckibbin.com/course-notes/realist-theory.

Pantenburg, V. (2010). Realism, not Reality: Pedro Costa’s Digital Testimonies. Afterall (24). Retrieved June 24, 2016, from Afterall: http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.24/realism-not-reality-pedro-costa-s-digital-testimonies.

Sullivan, D. (2014, April 27). Art of the Real: Hybrid Cinema Timeline. Filmcomment. Retrieved June 24, 2016, from filmcomment: http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/hybrid-history/.

Williams, C. (Ed.). (1980). Realism and the Cinema: A Reader. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd.

[1] A Lisbon filmmaker, born in 1959, started making films in the 1980s.

[2] See Pedro Costa’s statements of his cinematic vision in Pedro Costa (2005), “A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing”. Retrieved June 24, 2016, from Rouge: http://www.rouge.com.au/10/costa_seminar.html, para. 5-6.

[3] Jonathan Rosenbaum (November 15, 2007), “Films of the Future [on Pedro Costa]. Chicago Reader. Retrieved June 25, 2016, from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s website: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2007/11/cinema-of-the-future/, para. 8.

[4] Some critics unite In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth (together with Ossos) into a trilogy of Fontainhas, which now seems to become a tetralogy with Horse Money.

[5] Volker Pantenburg (2010), “Realism, not Reality: Pedro Costa’s Digital Testimonies”. Afterall (24 – Summer 2010). Retrieved Juni 24, 2016, from Afterall: http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.24/realism-not-reality-pedro-costa-s-digital-testimonies, para. 12.

[6] Pedro Costa (2005), op.cit.