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cHaPter 7
Digital Realisms
To address realism in world cinema today... means engaging with what has been termed the ‘ontological turn’, the ‘return of the real’, the pres- ence and agency of ‘things’. Thomas Elsaesser
hree films about Fontainhas... a neighbourhood that does not exist any more, since it has been bulldozed by the local authorities. The first film opens with a medium close-up of a teenage girl. Her name is Tina. She sits in a shadowy corner of a room, probably her own room, on the edge of an old bed. There is a pillow, a blanket and the shabby wall in the background; nothing else is in the frame. Tina looks fragile, defenceless, exhausted. For forty-five seconds we look at this bleak image of her sitting there. She looks back at us, straight into the camera. Then she looks down, hiding feelings of shame perhaps. Finally she leans her head against the wall, too tired, it seems, to sustain our gaze or that of the camera any longer. The opening shot of the second film is equally static and once again we are offered a glimpse into the private world of a bleak bedroom. This time we see two slightly older women sitting on a bed. It is Vanda and her alarmingly emaciated sister Zita. Both of them are drug addicts. They are chatting, coughing and smoking heroin. It looks like a daily routine, almost lifeless. These are, it seems, two more exhausted women in another shabby apartment that is sparsely lit and meagrely furnished. But the quality of the image is now crisper, sharper, more colourful, since it has been shot on digital video. The third opening image is also shot with a digital video camera, but it has a different motif. Now we remain outside and look instead at the façades of tremendously rundown buildings. We see them at night-time as they radiate a sense of mystery or even horror. Because it is digital, the image looks like a gothic paint- ing; in fact, it is hauntingly beautiful, even though it frames badly deteriorated apartments. The horror that these buildings possibly contain is emphasised by the sound that shatters the tranquillity: that of furniture being tossed out of a window.
T
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The next shot shows a woman throwing her husband’s furniture out of the apart- ment. Her name is Clotilde... another exhausted woman.
Tina, Vanda, Zita and Clotilde are the major female protagonists in Pedro Costa’s films Ossos , No Quarto da Vanda and Juventude em Marcha , which are the following chapter’s main examples. All of them were actual inhabitants of what once was Fontainhas, a rundown slum on the outskirts of Lisbon. However, those three films – sometimes also labelled as the Fontainhas Trilogy
- do not exclusively portray these exhausted, apparently lifeless women. They also attempt to portray the neighbourhood itself, its community, past and present, as well as its spaces and places, its dilapidated buildings, half-empty apartments and unpaved streets. Hence, they preserve in recorded sounds and images the memories of a place and the people who once lived in it. Beyond this, Costa’s trilogy is also an appropriate subject by which to study what effects the transition from analogue to digital filmmaking had on notions of (a now revitalised, but modified kind of) realism in world cinema – a style of film- making that has been deployed by Costa in an almost hyperbolic way. Lúcia Nagib and Cecília Mello observe in their introduction to the volume Realism and the Audiovisual Media that since the mid-1990s – at about the same time as filmmakers began using digital recording devices – realist film practices return in the form of numerous new movements, new waves or ‘new cinemas’ across the globe. According to them, world cinema’s post -postmodern ‘realist revival’ kick started with the Danish Dogma 95 movement in particular, which ‘signalled the end of irony and intertextuality, and the re-establishment of moving image’s ties with objective reality’. 1 The new realist waves that came to the surface in Denmark, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Lithuania, Romania and many other countries from the mid-1990s onwards are, according to Nagib and Mello, clear evidence of a ‘return to the Real’. (Nagib and Mello 2009: ivx). The following chapter will outline what Nagib and Mello describe as a post - postmodern ‘return to the Real’ in world cinema against the background of the digital turn to describe one of this era’s key paradigms as ‘digital realism’. Yet, it will also compare two different kinds of ‘digital realisms’ in cinemas that dis- tinguish themselves specifically through their camera work and editing styles, the first of which is related to movements like Dogme 95, and the other to films like those of Pedro Costa. The former can be related to the docufictional cinéma vérité-style of the French Nouvelle Vague , since it is an explicitly ad hoc, non-scripted type of cinema that experiments with minimalistic narrative structures and unconventional editing techniques, while exclusively relying on location shooting, the use of often shaky, handheld cameras and natural lighting to enhance its ‘reality-effect’. The latter could be defined with Paul Julian Smith as contemporary ‘festival films’, which ‘employ little camera
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cinema (the ‘return to the Real’)? Nicholas Rombes argues in his Cinema in the Digital Age that this confluence is less of a paradox, but that both the digital turn and the realist revival, are actually directly related to each other, since it is, according to him, ‘no coincidence that the Dogme 95 movement – with its preference for disorder, for shaky, degraded images, for imperfection – emerged at the dawn of the digital era, an era that promised precisely the opposite: clarity, high definition, a sort of hyperclarified reality’. For Rombes ‘there is a tendency in digital media – and cinema especially – to reassert imperfection, flaws, an aura of human mistakes to counterbalance the logic of perfection that pervades the digital’ (2009: 1). What could be described as the entertainment industries’ ‘obsession with realism’ (to use an expression by Bazin), and hence its obsession with creating hyperreal diegetic worlds via the use of the computer – a ‘hyperclarified reality’, as Rombes puts it – seemingly finds an alternative development, a ‘counterbalance to the logic of perfection’ in the recent resurgence of a less ‘perfect’ digital realism in world cinema. Rombes attributes this to ‘the ruptures and gaps that have opened up as cinema transitions from the traditional analogue apparatus to the digital’, which has made ‘an unexpected resurgence of humanism – with all its mis- takes, imperfections and flaws – that acts as a sort of countermeasure to the numerical clarity and disembodiment of the digital code’ possible (2009: 8). This new, digital ‘imperfect cinema’ which emerged with movements like Dogma 95 is, in fact, a worldwide phenomenon and not only came into being with the aforementioned ‘new waves’, but also within various other inde- pendent film cultures across the globe.^6 Rombes argues elsewhere that these independent films offer ‘an often brutal mixture of underground, avant-garde technique and mainstream... that wove together cinematic traditions that included the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism and cinéma vérité’; the parallel that can be drawn to 1960s new wave cinemas (and particularly to cinéma vérité) is thereby in the first instance a technological one, because ‘[d] igital cameras and desktop editing have made it possible for a greater number of people than ever before to make film’, so that ‘digital cinema has opened up striking alternatives to Hollywood’s multimillion dollar productions, in the same way that 8 mm and 16 mm film had done in the past’ (2005: 2). Apart from the cinéma vérité-style of the Dogma 95 movement and its worldwide followers and/or contemporaries, a resurgence of a different kind of (digital) realism can also be witnessed in what Smith has proposed to call the ‘festival film’ – a world cinema current which employs the traditional markers of neorealist cinema (long takes, long shots, static framing, episodic narratives, inconclusive endings, and so on). 7 This type of film is an equally widespread contemporary tendency and is evident in the work of frequently awarded film festival directors such as Kim Ki-duk, Apichatpong Weerasethaku, Michael
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Haneke, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Gus van Sant or the already mentioned Abbas Kiarostami_._ The works of these very different directors often share almost all the stylistic and narrative elements described by Smith. With regard to this type of realism in such ‘festival films’, Elsaesser explains that
[t]o address realism in world cinema today... means engaging with what has been termed the ‘ontological turn’, the ‘return of the real’, the pres- ence and agency of “things”. On the agenda is a new materiality, a new concern and respect for reference in the visual media, after half a century of mourning the loss of the real, and complaining about or celebrating simulacra, copies without originals, hypermediality and mediatisation. (2009c: 5)
Thus, for Elsaesser, the ( post -postmodern) realism in contemporary festival films ought to be discussed within the framework of what has been termed the ‘return of the Real’ (a return to the use of classical realist cinematic devices as well as to social, ethnographic or mundane topics), the ‘ontological turn’ (these filmmaker’s renewed interest in the ontology of the photographic image), and the phenomenological presence and agency of ‘things’ (objects like houses, goods or even media devices that acquire a diegetic agency or a non-diegetic presence in such films). Elsaesser maintains that what this is all pointing to is ultimately a renewed ‘concern and respect for reference in the visual media’. However, despite this new concern and respect for reference (or indexicality), most of these directors, paradoxically or not, turned throughout the 2000s to shooting and producing their films with digital technology. The digital turn also finds a (third) parallel tendency in yet another ‘rebirth of the documentary’ since the 1990s. However, while in the 1960s sync-sound recording and 16mm handheld cameras facilitated the emergence of such movements as cinéma vérité and direct cinema, most documentary filmmakers of the digital age rather prefer multimodal approaches to the documentary form (see also Chapter 3). Related to that, this resurgence (or second rebirth) of the documentary occurs on both, big and small screens, either as theatrical feature films – produced and distributed by new compa- nies which specialise in feature documentaries for the big screen (for example Dogwoof ) and that are made by the new ‘stars’ of the international docu- mentary scene (e.g. Errol Morris, Michael Moore, Joshua Oppenheimer, Werner Herzog) – or as artisanal, low-budget projects that are made by semi-professionals or amateurs, who release their work on internet plat- forms like YouTube , Vimeo or Doc Alliance Films. Chanan emphasises that this resurgence of the documentary onto big and small screens in times of digital video and desktop editing is ‘either a reaction to the inadequacies of mainstream cinema, or to the inanities of television, and... it has something
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their alternative and often very personal works’ (2012: 2). Hence, this new wave of Southeast Asian cinemas consists by and large of a new generation of independent filmmakers, some of whom were recently awarded at prestigious film festivals, bringing this ‘microcinema’, as Baumgärtel calls it, into the spot- light of the international film scene.^8 Considering its recent achievements and experiments with novel forms of filmmaking, Baumgärtel insists that the rise of Southeast Asian independent cinema ‘is one of the most significant develop- ments in World Cinema right now’ (2012: 6). The Indie revolution in the Philippines is, however, ‘not a film move- ment’ in the traditional sense, as the subtitle of the documentary Philippine New Wave: This is Not a Film Movement (2010) by Khavn de la Cruz sug- gests; and that is in both senses of the phrase: firstly, because these directors predominantly work with digital video rather than with celluloid ‘film’ and secondly, because this group of independent filmmakers can hardly be called a ‘generation’ nor subsumed under a unified ‘movement’. Nevertheless, in the following paragraph I will highlight some prevailing features of a select body of slum-set films, which were made by filmmakers who could be described as the most outstanding representatives of the digital Indie revolution in the Philippines: Jeffrey Jeturian (born 1959), Brillante Mendoza (born 1960), Jim Libirian (born 1966), Auraeus Solito (born 1969) and Khavn de la Cruz (born 1973).^9 As diverse as these filmmakers’s visions of the cinematic medium and their individual stylistic approaches are, the most prevalent feature of this body of films is that, apart from the almost exclusive use of handheld DV cameras and the willingness to break the rules of mainstream filmmaking in the spirit of Dogma 95, there is a remarkable focus on what Rombes has described as imperfections, mistakes and flaws. In other words, these filmmakers share a certain sensibility towards what is imperfect (both aesthetically and socio- politically), and particularly towards what is imperfect, wrongful or unjust in the city of Manila. It is thus no coincidence that the city’s sprawling slums are the preferred setting of many of these independent Philippine films. Some scholars have pointed to a national tradition of alternative and inde- pendent filmmaking upon which these Philippine filmmakers build, by refer- ring for instance to Fredric Jameson, who has observed that ‘Philippine cinema has a vibrant tradition of social realism’ (1992: 190). In the 1970s, a new gen- eration of ‘social realist’ filmmakers (or what to some is the Philippine version of Third Cinema) set out to modernise their country’s film culture by return- ing to social realist themes, which were already present in neorealist inspired Philippine cinema of the postwar era. A key figure of that generation was the already-mentioned Lino Brocka (see Chapter 6), but also Ishmael Bernal, who mixed, just as Brocka did, genre elements with a neorealist style, for example in his Manila By Night ( City after Dark ; 1980) – a portrayal of Manila’s night- life, its prostitutes and drug scene, partly set in the city’s slums. Directors such
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as Bernal and Brocka had a profound impact on today’s ‘generation’ of digital filmmakers who, since around 2000 have returned to the slums of Manila to shoot their independent films. This new ‘generation’ addresses social issues in a far less politically subversive or allegorical way than the previous ‘social realist’ generation. 10 This is partly due to a radically transformed socio-polit- ical and economic situation; the Philippines are by now a democracy and in the 1990s the country adopted a neo-liberal economic system, witnessing an increased accumulation of wealth, while leaving behind its former status as an underdeveloped ‘Third World’ dictatorship. However, it is essentially because of its economic policies that the country has also witnessed a massive resur- gence of rural-urban migration and with it a widening gap between the rich and the poor during the last two decades. This is most visible in the country’s capital, where according to the UN-HABITAT, today approximately one third of Metro Manila’s total population (2.5 out of 9.4 million), lives in often heavily overcrowded slums which lack basic infrastructure and sanitation facilities (2003: 215–16). Considering that urban poverty is a persistent and a growing, rather than a vanishing problem, it comes as no surprise that many of these digital ‘underground’ filmmakers explore, just like some of their Third Cinema predecessors, life in the slums of Manila. In so doing, they often provide a sometimes subtle, often outright critique of the city’s neoliberal economic climate (capitalist cycles of exploitation, a culture of materialism or ruthless greed and egotism), its ‘imperfect’ politi- cal and juridical system (corruption among politicians, the police or judges) and what kind of personal impacts these systemic and institutional flaws have on Manila’s most disadvantaged citizens. 11 One of the older filmmak- ers of this new wave ‘generation’, Jeffrey Jeturian , emphasises this point in a paradigmatic way as follows: ‘What interests me are personal stories, intimate stories. But in the process, I would also like to capture the political and social background of my characters’ (Jeturian 2001). Through narrating stories that involve instances of sexual exploitation (in Jeturian’s Pila-balde / Fetch A Pail of Water ; 1999) and sexual (or homophobic) discrimination (in Auraeus Solito’s Ang pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros / The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros ; 2005), gambling (in Jeturian’s Kubrador / The Bet Collector ; 2006), youth and gang violence (in Jim Libirian’s Tribu ), petty thievery (in Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador / Slingshot ; 2007) or homicide and the misuse of institutional power (in Brillante Mendoza’s Lola ; 2009), these new wave direc- tors often focus on the interrelations between the private/intimate and the ‘imperfections’ of the Philippine society at large. The characters these direc- tors portray are, however, far from innocent victims of their socio-political or economic circumstances as David Bordwell, for instance, has observed with regard to Tirador , a film that reminded him ‘of Los Olvidados , both in its unsentimental treatment of the poor and its political critique’ (Bordwell 2007).
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and centred on the actual shoot, rather than on scripts, props, designed sets and a professional crew.^14 The use of digital video is for Cruz not merely a technological device, since ‘with its qualities of mobility, flexibility, intimacy, and accessibility, [it] is the apt medium for a Third World Country like the Philippines. Ironically, the digital revolution has reduced the emphasis on technology and has reasserted the centrality of the filmmaker’ (2012: 123). Indeed, films like Kubrador , Tirador , Ang pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros or Tribu perfectly illustrate that the ‘digital has often enabled the shooting of films on locations and among populations which would otherwise be inacces- sible to audiovisual reproduction’ (Nagib 2011: 7). They also illustrate that digital video, with its kinaestehtic qualities of ‘mobility, flexibility, intimacy and accessibility’ (Cruz), is a liberating device, in the way that it reestablishes the central importance of creativity in the process of filmmaking. Regardless whether analogue or digital, the handheld camera device enabled the shooting of still and moving images in crowded, remote or previously inac- cessible areas like slums. As already outlined, this historical arc spans from the 1890’s ‘detective camera’ to its rediscovery by independent filmmakers in the digital age (see also Chapter 2). Movements such as Dogma 95 or the Philippine New Wave produce similar claims to ‘vérité’ via the handheld camera device. In Dogma’s Festen ( The Celebration ; Vinterberg 1998) for example, the blurry, pixilated look of digital video images, combined with the use of the shaky, handheld camera, provides the impression that the viewer is a witness to amateur footage shot by one of the family’s members at a family festivity, since these video cameras were initially promoted and sold for exactly that purpose, the private recording of weddings, family vacations or other family gatherings. Similarly, in Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador , the shaky, handheld camera features prominently throughout the film, especially in the opening sequence, where the viewer follows an actual police raid in the slums during sleeping hours (the film here also references a similar raid scene in Lino Brocka’s Jaguar ). Illuminated only by pocket lamps, the handheld camera hectically follows the policemen through the labyrinthine alleys, corridors and shacks of Manila’s Quiapo neighborhood, so that the spectator literally par- ticipates (in a way like Riis, as a recording police reporter) in chasing down its delinquent inhabitants. What Bolter and Grusin would call a claim to ‘imme- diacy’, or what Anne Jerslev has described as Dogma 95’s ‘aesthetics of pres- ence and immediacy in time (now) as well as in space (here)’ (2002: 48) is, no doubt, enhanced through such a highly kinetic or purposefully (or supposedly) amateurish use of handheld DV cameras. This (performative) way of using the camera is also a way of insisiting on cinema’s ‘unlimited power’ to convey the reality of a specific place and its people, as Lúcia Nagib has so fittingly put it (2011: 32). It is, to use Nagib’s own term, a physical realism that is produced by this way of filmmaking.
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However, in Tirador , Lola or Ang pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros one can also observe another kind of realism, and that is in the form of a phenom- enological ‘return of things’ in these film’s mise-en-scènes and narratives – a filmmaking strategy that focuses on material objects, or to quote Jim Libirian once more, one that includes ‘many real-world objects or events into the char- acters’ field-of-convenience’, in order to create a form of ‘mimesis-as-diegesis’ (Libirian 2011: 68). What Elsaesser has described as a new interest in the ‘presence and agency of things’ (2009c: 5) finds in the films of the Philippine New Wave a renewed focus on the presence of garbage. Hence, garbage, and by extension filth, faeces, open sewers and scrapped things, designate here not so much an aesthetic, but constitute simply what there is – they simply make up a significant part of the real-world objects in the slums. In the opening scene of Ang pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros for example, the camera follows things, such as free-floating plastic bags, which are driven by the slow move- ment of garbage-infested water in the slum’s open sewer. Then the film’s main protagonist, a homosexual teenager, picks up a flower that is floating in the middle of the garbage. Thus, the film’s opening introduces not so much an ‘aesthetics of garbage’, but simply what there is , a single object of beauty amidst scrapped things. Similarly, during the opening of Lola (Tagalog for ‘grand- mother’) the camera follows a lola’s/grandmother’s repeated attempts to light a candle at the spot where her grandchild was murdered, while the monsoon season’s stormy weather prevents her from doing so. At the same time, we see discarded newspaper snatches, plastic wraps and cups floating freely in the air, and all the while we hear nothing but the wind, as if to announce this film’s stylistic mode (the free-floating camera) and its thematic preoccupation with the tenacious resistance of the Real: in particular the rainy weather and its effects, the permanent flooding of streets and shacks in a Manila neighbour- hood called Malaba, which is built near the bay and which lacks a functioning sewerage system. In some of these films things, objects or goods also acquire an agency on their own. In Tirador (translated as ‘thieves’) ‘things’ are not simply ’what there is’, but they are also diegetic agents in that they connect the residents of Manila’s Quiapo neighbourhood. The film has a distinct focus on the circula- tion of objects, more precisely the exchange of stolen goods among some of the neighbourhood’s residents, such as necklaces, bicycles or ventilators (Fig. 7.1), but also a focus on the illegal exchange of stolen electronic and digital enter- tainment and communication devices, such as DVD players and cell phones. In one of the film’s more extended scenes, a woman’s false teeth (acquired through the disposal of such stolen goods), take central stage when they acci- dentally vanish down the kitchen sink. The camera then follows her hysterical search in the slum’s open sewers, as if to insist that her life depends on retriev- ing it from the squalor in the sewer. Whether one interprets this as a critique
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Instead, the reliance on ‘found’ stories and real-world objects approximates to a (physical) realism which Jim Libirian has fittingly described as a form of ‘mimesis-as-diegesis’. This suggests that the filmmakers of the Philippine New Wave strongly believe in cinema’s ‘unlimited power’ to convey the reality of life in the slums and that they display a renewed concern and respect for reference in the visual media.
Pedro costa’s fontainHas trilogY (1997–2006)
A similar, but at the same time very different confluence between the digital turn and the ‘return to the Real’ can be detected in Pedro Costa’s three films set in Fontainhas. This neighbourhood was located on the northern outskirts of Lisbon and was mostly inhabited by immigrants from former Portuguese colonies in Africa and the Cape Verde Islands; it has now been demolished and replaced by social housing facilities. In content thus similar to De Cierta Manera , Pedro Costa traces in his ‘docufictions’ Ossos , No Quarto da Vanda and Juventude Em Marcha the slow, but steady demolition of a slum and the re-settlement of its inhabitants into new housing facilities. 16 In other words, the main protagonist of the Fontainhas Trilogy is Fontainhas itself. Costa thereby not only shifts from using classical 35 mm film material (in Ossos ) to DV (in the two latter films), but also from ‘telling a story’ to portraying everyday life in a radically non-diegetic fashion. Unlike in most of the films of the ‘digital underground’ in the Philippines, the stylistic features of the Fontainhas Trilogy are inherited rather from Italian neorealism than from cinéma vérité. 17 Instead of the kinaesthetics, mobility and bodily immersion via the shaky DV camera, Costa relies exclusively in all his Fontainhas-set films on the opposite, namely on keeping a certain distance and tranquility through persistently static, fixed framing and the frequent use of the uncut long take. The imagery of his films was perceived by critics paradoxically as both highly aestheticised and at the same time as documentary-like. These images of wretchedness in Fontainhas remind us at times of painterly tableaux or still- lifes. This is because scenes of everyday life which are often presented in such motionless, uncut takes which last for an unusually long time, are from film to film gradually de-linked from any narrative cohesion. Some of the stylistic ele- ments that Costa uses to create these kind of images were elevated by Bazin and Deleuze for their potential to represent the spatial properties of reality and to approximate the temporal durée of everyday life. It will therefore be especially revealing to focus on these two cinematic parameters, space and time, in the Fontainhas Trilogy. Yet, apart from the trilogy’s style, its mode of production – an increasingly close, almost intimate co-operation between filmmaker
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and non-professional actors – testifies to the director’s year-long struggle to rediscover cinema’s ethical potential (after it has supposedly been lost due to postmodernism), that is, its ability to convey, disclose or uncover the reality of a community and the lives of its people. Hence, in order to uncover the trilogy’s stylisitic features in more depth, it is enlightening to simultaneously also outline Costa’s development as an auteur, particularly, that is, his devel- opment towards rediscovering the ethical potentials of the cinematic medium. Tracing this development is, in my opinion, the key to hermeneutically uncover the cinematic language of the Fontainhas Trilogy , but it also draws a trajectory from analogue to digital cinema, as well as from postmodernism to ‘the return to the Real’. An important part of this trajectory is Costa’s previous feature film Casa de Lava ( Down to Earth ; 1994), which was shot with a cast of largely non-pro- fessional actors on one of the earliest territories of Portuguese colonialism, the volcanic island of Fogo on the Cape Verdes. Casa de Lava ’s plot is quite delib- erately borrowed from another film, from I Walked With A Zombie (Tourneur
- – a horror film with noir elements, set on the Caribbean Islands. Apart from this reference to Tourneur, Costa also alludes to characters, scenes and the mise-en-scènes of other films.^18 In this sense, Casa de Lava seems, at first, a good example of a postmodern ‘mosaic of quotations’ since essentially it is, like Dom za vešanje , a remake which blends elements of different genres with intertextual allusions to other films. However, from an auteurist perspective one can read the film’s main character, the white, middle-class nurse Mariana
- who is on a journey of self-discovery – as the director’s stand-in, his alter ego. Casa de Lava represents in this sense an allegory for the director’s own ‘journey of self-discovery’. More precisely, the encounter between the director, a white, university-educated Portuguese filmmaker with a middle-class background, and the largely impoverished, illiterate and predominantly black African locals living in a former Portuguese colony, becomes a transformative experience for him – at least that is if one believes Costa’s own statements. In interviews he has described his experience of filming with non-professional actors on the Cape Verde Islands as a trigger for a personal and vocational crisis, claiming that he went through what could be interpreted as a kind of hagiographic trajectory of crisis, transformation and redemption.^19 The film’s English release title, Down to Earth , seems then misleading at first, but from this (hagiographic) point of view it actually describes the filmmaker’s trajectory from postmodernism to realism in a nutshell; hence, the director’s vocational crisis and his re-discovery of the ethical potentials of the cinematic medium to convey the reality of a place and its people. This can also be discerned in Casa de Lava ’s meandering style, as if the director (who is in crisis) cannot decide whether his film ought to tell a fictional story about a nurse as a remake with allusions to film history, or if it rather ought to be a non-fictional depiction of the island of Fogo.^20
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of the melodramas of poverty in early cinema.^22 The film is indeed largely ‘silent’: the scenes have very little or no dialogue; sound effects and noises are reduced to a minimum and the story is told almost exclusively through gestures, facial expressions and bodily movements (although even those are reduced to a minimum). The story is, accordingly, quite thin and told in a loose and episodic fashion, focusing especially on Tina, an exhausted, suicidal teenage mother of a newborn child, who tries to get rid of her unwanted son. Her unemployed boyfriend rescues the infant, but then desperately tries to get rid of his son himself, by trying to sell him, by leaving him at a nurse’s house or by delivering him to a local prostitute. Ossos seems, like Casa de Lava , to be ambiguous, meandering as it does between documentary and fiction and leaving it to the viewer to decide whether one witnesses a portrayal of a neigh- bourhood and its people, or a (silent film-like) story of utter destitute and complete despair in the slums. The impression one gets of a pending in-betweenness is because the film represents, for once, another (imperfect) imbalance, this time between narrat- ing a story and a more distinct focus on the (labyrinthine) spatial topography of a place, Fontainhas; on its interior and exterior spaces, its walled alleys, streets and street corners, as well as its private living and sleeping rooms, kitchens or gathering places. The repetitions and alternations of the minimal, elliptic storyline, hence, the father’s repeated attempts to get rid of his son, is continuously supplied with alternating repetitions of statically framed shots that present rather than represent the Fontainhas neighbourhood, strengthen- ing the impression of a labyrinthine neighbourhood in which people get/are lost. In other words, in Ossos Fontainhas is not merely a setting for a story, a ‘diegetic world’, but rather it acquires the quality of a figurative space. This figurative quality is achieved through the deliberate repetition and alterna- tion of statically composed long shots of similar motives, often bird’s eye shots from a rooftop perspective, framing the slum’s crossroads, or shots that frame the entry into Fontainhas (marked by a busy road and a light tower), courtyards and especially half-closed front and room doors. In this way Ossos ’s screen space becomes figurative (as opposed to the diegetic spaces of more conventional fiction films), since it focuses on the geometrical/topographical ‘design’ of Fontainhas, its walls, lines, textures and shapes – similar to how a sculptor would work on a sculpture. Additionally, these repetitive shots mostly frame transitory spaces and places, where the neighborhood’s residents/the film’s characters change directions and cross thresholds, enter and exit Fontainhas, their houses or their private rooms. Costa deliberately constructs Fontainhas as such an on- screen space of liminality. The door, open or closed, but mostly half-closed, is thereby the most recurring visual motif in Ossos , since it indicates the notion of liminality quite literally (Fig. 7.2). However, the visual motif of the door
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can also be interpreted in another way, that is, as a transitory entry and exit device for viewers, signifying their entry into, or exit out of the diegetic world of a film. Indeed, Costa himself has emphasised the meaning of the door in Ossos as, first and foremost, a narratological device. In a lecture to Tokyo film students – ‘A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing’ (2007) – he argued for cinema as an ‘art of absence’, that is a cinema which, in a metaphorical sense, shuts the door to a (diegetic or non-diegetic) world for the viewer, leaving him/her guessing what really happens behind these closed doors. What is absent in Ossos , Costa then argues, is the viewer himself, since he or she is denied a smooth entry into a constructed world. Costa distinguishes between a cinema that opens its doors, such as classical Hollywood, and a cinema that closes its doors, or, as in the case of Ossos , a cinema that leaves the doors half-shut. Whereas in the ‘cinema of open doors’ the diegetic world becomes completely transparent for the viewer, in the latter it keeps the viewer in a state of limbo, or as Costa has put it, ‘[a]fterwards, I didn’t know if [ Ossos ] had become a documentary or if it was still fiction, but I know there’s a closed door that leaves us guessing’ (Costa 2007). Thus, in Ossos the viewer is placed on the threshold between fiction and documentary, diegesis (representation) and mimesis (figurativeness). Costa’s aim to lock out the viewer is, ultimately then, a question of ethics, as the closing of doors denies a film’s spectator a smooth entry into a (fictional) world of a filmmaker’s constructions of a place and its people.
Figure 7.2 The recurring motif of the half-closed door in Ossos.
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made by numerous critics. Metaphorically speaking, both these hyper-real and painterly images show undead bodies living in half-empty ghost houses that are, themselves, in the middle of being destroyed. One could say that Costa’s artistic strategy to highlight the documentary as well as the painterly qualities of the digital medium at once aims at ‘redeeming a physical reality’ (Kracauer) that is highly fragile, that is, redeeming the transient, soon-to-be-vanished twilight zones of a decomposing slum, its half-abandoned rooms and the ailing bodies of its inhabitants, into objects of art. As the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has famously put it, Costa
never misses an opportunity to transform the living spaces of these mis- erable people into objects of art. A plastic water bottle, a knife, a glass, a few objects left on the table in a squatted apartment: there you have, under a light that strokes the set, the occasion for a beautiful still life. As night descends on this space without electricity, two small candles placed on the same table lend to the miserable conversations or to the needle sessions the allure of a chiaroscuro from the Dutch Golden Age. (Rancière 2009)
Apart from this ‘aestheticisation of poverty’ through artistic framing, lighting and mise-en-scène, Costa’s excessively hyperbolic use of long takes – which
Figure 7.3 Unbearably long but chiaroscuro-lit still life of a dying world in No Quarto da Vanda.
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are in the most literal sense ‘unbearably long’ – shift the viewer’s attention to a more temporal experience of figurativeness. Hence, contrary to Ossos , in which space is figurative, it is now time that in No Quarto da Vanda acquires such a plastic or tangible dimension. The very first take of the film already announces this strategy, since its duration lasts more than five minutes: while nothing extraordinary is done or said, we see Vanda and her sister sitting on a bed in Vanda’s room, coughing, chatting and smoking heroin (Fig. 7.3). The number of these long takes is reduced to a minimum throughout the film’s 171 minutes running time. Since these takes are extended to such an unorthodox degree, time is not fragmented and subjugated to the rules of continuity editing in order to tell a story, but seemingly unfolds in ‘real time’, disassociating the images from cause-and-effect relations. In this sense, No Quarto da Vanda not only drastically denies its viewers the comfort of a conventional viewing experience, it also approximates, in the most radical sense, to the Bergsonian idea of durée and the Deleuzian ‘time image’, aiming at persistently and stead- ily chronicling both a bodily and architectural (self)destruction by turning misery into art and art into ‘miserably’ long takes. Yet, through the recurring motifs of decay, death and destruction, Costa’s conception of the cinematic image also refers to Bazin’s ‘mummy complex’ – Bazin’s notion to regard photography as a plastic art that is capable of embalming the dead, of defying the transience of life. Costa indeed referred to the photographic documentary tradition of slum representations to find inspiration for his highly aestheticised imagery, namely to Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives.^23 However, unlike in Riis’s photographic ‘framings of the poor’, in Costa’s hyperbolic long takes it is not only objects that ‘poke through the image’, but also time that pierces the viewer and so acquires a sensory immediacy, since the viewer experiences it as a sensible presence (or ‘present time’). The durée of the in-between – the twilight time in between destruction and re-settlement – becomes in this way a sensory cinematic experience, since the film attempts to ‘embalm’ the dying world of Fontainhas and, simultaneously, let the spectator ‘feel’ that this world is in the process of dying. The last film of the trilogy, Juventude em Marcha , shares a similar ‘realism of the senses’ – as Tiago de Luca (2012) has called it – following on from Costa’s hyperbolic use of the long take and his radical refusal to tell any kind of story, albeit that this time, the place itself, Fontainhas, is absent, and instead the past, the memories of Fontainhas, become ‘present’. The film focuses on Ventura, a 75-year-old retired construction worker, who spends his retirement days visit- ing his former neighbours in the ‘social blocks’ – among them for instance the recovering Vanda Duarte who is now supplied with methadone by the state. In what initially seems to be an age-related, delusional search for his lost ‘chil- dren’, Ventura connects, through his visits, his paternal age and (his imagined or real family) relations, the now scattered community as a kind of ‘founding
