PEDRO COSTA (and Others) on Casa de Lava and Tarrafal, Part Two

In his Film Comment article on Pedro Costa, Thom Anderson describes Colossal Youth as "an intentionally imperfect film … that is loosely constructed and almost certainly obscure, which creates unfortunate difficulties for some viewers. You probably have to see it at least twice to get it, and to me that is not a virtue." Compounded by Costa's forthright admission that he is still discovering the film himself and that one of his main actors had to explain a major plot point to him at its Cannes premiere, Anderson generously sets virtue aside and suggests: "Perhaps it can be a film in progress for us as well, as we watch it and think about it later. Its construction allows us to shift scenes around and remake it in our heads." (Film Comment, March/April 2007, Vol. 43:2, p. 61.)

In my case, I definitely had to watch Colossal Youth twice and each viewing was a distinct experience; the first befuddled and bedazzled and the second distanced and alert. The same could be said about Costa's short Tarrafal, which I initially caught as part of the O Estado do mundo (State of the World) omnibus at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Although I appreciated it well enough when I first saw it—"Pedro Costa's Tarrafal is an equally powerful film with its allusions to the Tarrafal prison on Santiago Island, Cape Verde. Its narrative moves forward first through cautionary ancestral tales regarding the inescapable summons of death and then through the voices of ghosts who remember their tortured past. It is a political tract rendered exquisitely as a haunting ghost story. Its short length is amplified by textural density."—I didn't fully appreciate Tarrafal until my second viewing, deepened by Costa's commentary.

Introducing the film, Costa identified Tarrafal as the village on Santiago Island, Cape Verde, off the coast of Senegal, where in 1936 the Portuguese came up with the idea of creating a prison patterned after the Nazi concentration camps. Many of the Cape Verdeans he now works with were born in Tarrafal and come from that part of the island.

Tarrafal addresses a social issue "we" all face, namely deportation and expulsion. "It's happening all over Europe," Costa explained, "Here, I don't know, it's the Mexicans I think; [but,] it's happening all over Europe, in France, in Spain, in England, in Portugal." He and his crew experienced it firsthand when one of the young actors who has been in all his films, José Alberto Silva, was recently served his deportation papers, despite his having been born in Portugal. To offset Silva's upset, Costa offered to channel funds received from Lisbon's Calouste Gulbenkian Museum—intended to finance a 15-minute film for the State of the World project—into making a film about Silva's deportation. (Coincidentally, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum is the same museum pictured in Colossal Youth, which Costa included to address and redress the issue that Ventura—who was one of the contractors who built the museum—had never been allowed access.)

Costa decided that the theme of involuntary deportation fit perfectly within an examination of the state of today's world, especially for the disenfranchised and marginalized. "I think it's a horror movie," he explained, "That we made very quickly at the beginning of last year."

The film's setting is important because—at the actors' request—they didn't want to do yet another film in the housing project, neither in Silva's apartment nor Ventura's. "Where do you want to shoot then?" Costa asked them and they said they weren't sure but they wanted it to be away from the apartments. So they walked across the highway to a clearing where there was some tall grass and a gnarled tree and decided to film there. That's when the relevance of this decision dawned on Costa. It was as if the actors themselves, the subjects of the film, were saying that through a series of displacements—first from Cape Verde to Fontainhas in Lisbon, then from the relocation from Fontainhas to Casal Boba, and then the eviction from Casal Boba and deportation from Portugal—they had become complete refugees with no home to call their own. All they could claim was a patch of earth and the open sky. They wanted the film to be a protest of the conditions—the heaviness—foisted upon them and whose burden they must shoulder.

Again, the theme of weight, of gravitas, or—as Costa himself said it in his Tokyo seminar "A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing" (published in Rouge 10, 2005)—"Filmmaking is a very real and serious profession. Serious means heavy, and sometimes the weight of things can be very heavy. The weight of feelings is something to handle with balance and common sense, and so we must never laugh when somebody speaks about God or the Devil. In effect, when we speak of God or the Devil in cinema, we're speaking about good and evil, we're talking about people. We're speaking about ourselves, about the Devil and the God in us, because there's no God up on high, and no Devil below."

Costa has frequently asserted that he wants to create a cinema that deals with "what is not working", which is to say a socially responsible cinema that looks at "where the evil lies between you and I, between me and somebody else, so we can see the evil in society, and so we can search for the good."

In "A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing" Costa likewise compares scenes from Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon and Robert Bresson's Money, wherein cursed pieces of paper are exchanged to reference "what is not working." This shed considerable light on Tarrafal where—along with the folk tale Silva's mother tells him of a man who delivers death messages on pieces of paper—the government's deportation notice becomes a commensurate cursed piece of paper. When I asked, Costa confirmed the Tourneur connection.

"Tarrafal is a remake of Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon," he offered, "where there is this strange parchment that is passed by this very strange man called Karswell—the Devil is called Karswell in this film—and he passes this [parchment] to Dana Andrews, who is a skeptic, a very cold, rational man. This paper actually says [he has]—I don't know how many—maybe 12 hours to live. So [Tarrafal] is moreorless the same story."

Though his friend José Alberto Silva was born in Portugal, his mother Lucinda Tavares—seen in the film—was born in Tarrafal. In Casa de Lava Costa included a scene of the Tarrafal cemetery and the hospital that used to be the Guardians' ward. When they began thinking about this story with this evil letter, this deportation notice from the Minister that you see in the end, Costa recalled Tourneur's film. "It's good the classics," Costa smiled, "because you can go to one of them. It's like Godard. You just have to pick one and everything comes."

Actually, he remembered Night of the Demon when José Alberto's mother was telling her folktale about the man in Cape Verde who had this evil, wicked way of passing a death message to people. The original idea was to make a 15-minute film where José Alberto would say good-bye to a lot of things—his mother, some friends—and in the first scene they shot, where José Alberto and his mother are sitting down and conversing, José Alberto was supposed to say good-bye to his mother. As customary, they filmed the scene every day for a week, José Alberto and his mother Lucinda sitting down in this shack talking, from 9 to 1, then they'd break for lunch, and continue filming from 2 to 6. After a week of filming, they still hadn't said good-bye to each other. They didn't want to. They loved each other too much.

To ward off the good-bye, Lucinda began telling José Alberto this story in one of the takes and it was then Costa remembered the Tourneur film. That's when they associated the cursed paper that delivers death with the notice of deportation.

"Being that you have moreorless paid homage to Jacques Tourneur in two of your films and have described him as a great artisan," I asked Costa, "can you qualify what it is that you admire so much in Tourneur's work?"

Costa described that he had something of a schizophrenic split between Jacques Tourneur on one side and Staub and Huillet on the other. Though this is all right for a film lover, Costa said it was "very dangerous for a filmmaker to have a Straub/Tourneur [split]. Sometimes I'm very dizzy. Not long ago, when Danièle [Huillet] was still alive, I forced [her and Jean-Marie Straub] to tell me some things about Tourneur, because they never talked about him. Actually, they liked some of his films. What they like[d] was the craftsmanship, not only Tourneur but a lot of filmmakers that were just—like I said—artisans, responding to the producers—'You have to do this and this and this'—some of course, like Tourneur, could bring in the films something more. But all of them, they're all very good, they were all so good with space. This side I have of Tourneur [that] is dark, mysterious, romantic or poetic, I cannot help it. The girl can't help it. [Costa chuckled.] But it will stay there. I saw a lot of films by Tourneur when I was young, and not only the ones more related to ghosts or like that. There's a very very beautiful one that is not a Western but almost, it's called Stars in My Crown [1950]. In Tourneur's films they speak in very low voices. They're quiet films. They're almost fading all the time. When I was younger, I loved Tourneur because I had the feeling that I didn't know if the films could go on to the end, they had this fading effect. I was afraid they would disappear; they're so slow."

Argentine film critic Quintín has written that for Costa, Jacques Tourneur and the Straubs "are kindred spirits, even if one is known as a spiritualist cult follower while the others are famously committed materialists. Costa claims that such categorization is nonsensical, and that both Tourneur and the Straubs, as well as Ozu, Ford, Lang, and other classical filmmakers, share the same vision of cinema, one based on precision and truth." (Cinema Scope 25, Winter 2006, p. 67.)

Critical Overview of Tarrafal

Acquarello's write-up of Tarrafal for Strictly Film School is, without question, the most respectful, insightful and thorough; correctly perceiving the outdoor setting "as a metaphor for Pedro Costa's densely layered themes of dislocation and statelessness" and "the state's arbitrary dispensation of deportation and eviction notices in modern day Portugal" as the "impersonal, life-altering communication" of the "blood-sucking phantasm who foretells a person's hour of death by surreptitiously leaving letters in the most mundane of hiding places to be subsequently retrieved at the time of their immutable appointment." Moreover, Acquarello defines a "sense of surrogacy and transplantation", which is to say that José Alberto's fate—his involuntary deportation—is one that could equally be had by any of the Cape Verdeans at Casal Boba. Their helplessness in the face of the State is interchangeable. Again, exile is imprisonment. Acquarello concludes: "[T]hese parallel testimonies of dislocation, separation, entrapment, and fatedness unfold through supplanted images of interchangeable, moribund, drifting ghosts that integrally reflect their own erasure and social invisibility."

Daniel Kasman notes that Tarrafal continues "the aesthetic and production technique Costa has used since In Vanda's Room, but like the jump between that film and Colossal Youth, Costa seems to be distancing his later films from that movie's 'purer' documentary impulse, adding layers of obliqueness, mystery, and cine-influences more overtly." It would be difficult to find a better description of the gradual evolution of Costa's Tourneur/Straub split.

PEDRO COSTA (and Others) on Casa de Lava and Tarrafal, Part One

The pairing of Pedro Costa's second feature Casa de Lava (1994) with one of his more recent shorts Tarrafal (2007)—Costa's contribution to the State of the World omnibus—was a deft stroke of curation; both films light a candle to the influential spirit of Jacques Tourneur.

Observing that connection, I will now divide my observations into two (perhaps even three) entries for purposes of discussion, commiserating with the exchange between Darren Hughes and David McDougall at Dave's site Chained to the Cinémathèque regarding the inadequacy of the short blog entry format to contain all that can and should be said about Costa's work. I will instead take Andy Rector's indispensable cue at Kino Slang and develop my thoughts over a series of angled entries.

Casa de Lava was the first (and only) film Costa made on the archipelago of Cape Verde—specifically the island of Fogo (which translated means "fire")—an island which is basically a big, dark, dormant volcano. One of the things Costa found beautiful about Fogo was that its inhabitants lived in the crater, some 500-600 meters high, and were mostly women; the men having left the island to pursue work in Portugal or Boston. He commented that there is a sizeable Cape Verdean community in Brooklyn.

Casa de Lava is a film Costa made quite a while back at a time when he was not feeling good about living in Lisbon, let alone Portugal. He was "probably" not feeling very well with himself, and had this idea of going away to, perhaps, relax. Mark Peranson's Cinema Scope interview details more fully the sources of Costa's discontent and how it led to his assignment on Fogo, where he found that these people and this place mysteriously and sensitively restored him to many things he believed missing from his country and his people. It was upon completion of Casa de Lava that he was given letters and gifts to deliver to relatives and friends in Fontainhas, which proved key to his future projects.

"I had this idea—which was a stupid idea—of doing a remake of a film called I Walked With A Zombie by Jacques Tourneur, who made a lot of films here [in America] like Cat People, Anne of the Indies, Way of A Gaucho. He was a great artisan. I decided to make something around my memory of that film; a film that has zombies, volcanoes, ghosts, crazy women, dogs, various strange nights, a lot of confusion and mystery. You will see that it's not at all like I Walked With A Zombie; it's something else."

It was also at a time when Costa still had the opportunity and the desire to work with professional actors. Though none of them were "stars" per se, they had reputable careers. He cast a well-known Black actor Isaach De Bankolé in the role of Leão. Bankolé had gained some notoriety in Clair Denis' Chocolat (1988). In retrospect, Costa admits that it was not entirely fair of him to say to an actor, "In this film, there's a part for you" without mentioning that through most of the film the part required Bankolé to be an immobile, non-speaking zombie. By film's end the tension between them erupted, the two got into a fist fight, and Costa landed in the hospital "because [Bankolé's] a big guy." Isaach De Bankolé has since gone on to star in a couple of Jim Jarmusch films (Ghost Dog, Coffee and Cigarettes), Lars von Trier's Mandalay, Michael Mann's Miami Vice, the Casino Royale remake, and the TV series 24.

Costa's friends, the two young Portuguese actors from O Sangue—Inês de Medeiros and Pedro Hestnes—carried over into Casa de Lava; she as the female protagonist Mariana and he as the ineffectual son of Edite, played by French actress Édith Scob. Known for her role in Georges Franju's Eyes Without A Face, Scob accepted Costa's strange invitation to reconfigure the role of Tourneur's entranced Jessica; the lost, White woman under the spell of the island. One of Costa's fondest memories remains working with Édith Scob, who he admittedly adores. Scob was wonderful to him, helping him through the tough shoot. "We had nothing. We had no lights. We had no energy. We had no trucks. It was like a mini-Apocalypse Now for me. [It was] too much for us."

Costa cautions that Casa de Lava is a confusing film that leaves the viewer a bit lost. He attributes this to the fact that he himself started losing himself consciously during the shoot, sharing Mariana's role in the narrative. The story revolves around the arrival of a young nurse on the island who has accompanied the comatose body of an injured laborer Leão. As Costa previously specified, the body of Leão supplies the "dead weight" that thematically runs throughout his films. Mariana's inability to find anyone willing to claim the body creates the film's texture of gravitas. The film's narrative slows down for having no immediate resolution.

Casa de Lava is likewise confusing for being a story about not understanding language; Mariana—who speaks Portuguese—is unfamiliar with Creole. She finds Fogo and its inhabitants mysterious. Edite's behavior—like many of the islanders—borders on the delirious and that delirium permeates the narrative, which (in turn) informed Costa's own experience of the island. He recalled that he began acting irrationally, purposely getting lost every day, changing things in the film immediately after shooting scenes and not following through with what the script called for. His production assistants warned him that his changes were jeopardizing the project and placing them all in danger. He began receiving daily frantic phone calls from his producer Paulo Branco who Quintín writes ended up likewise getting into a fist fight with Costas (Cinema Scope, Winter 2006, Issue 25).

By the middle of the film Costa already felt that—instead of achieving the film's narrative trajectory on a tight production schedule—he wanted to be creating the film with the people in the village. He wanted to rob the 35mm camera, the sound engineer, Édith Scob, Inês de Medeiros and Pedro Hestnes and go off and create an eternal film that would never end. Eventually, he was to approximate this dream in his collaborations with the Cape Verdean residents of Fontainhas and Casal Boba. As Quintín explained, Costa was not just trying to capture the passage of time; he was striving to suppress it.

On the Serenity of Nature, the Confusion of Humanity,
and the Poetic Grasp of Robert Desnos and Chris Marker

Casa de Lava is singularly unique among Costa's oeuvre for being filmed on location in Fogo, Cape Verde, an island of stark, volcanic beauty. Its barren austerity achieves an otherworldly serenity. It's no wonder that its name was equally ascribed to a Martian crater. This otherworldliness belies the film's somehow woefully inaccurate translation as Down to Earth. A better translation might have been Far From Earth.

By contrast to the island's nearly inhuman serenity, Mariana's presence signifies confusion, not only in the language (she speaks Portuguese; the villagers speak Creole), but in the clash of historical memories, haunted by the island's dead dancing around the living, which in turn generates a confusion of identities. Who belongs to the living? Who belongs to the dead? Who belongs to who? Who is Leão's father? Is Alina really Leão's mother? Is Mariana's desire meant to be embraced by Leão? Skirting miscegenation, should it be more appropriately embraced by Edite's son? By contrast to all this potential complexity, the island remains amazingly simple. Costa would love to return to the archipelago to film in his patient style, within his limited and "luxurious" means (little money, lots of time), and with smaller cameras.

He is fascinated with Fogo being a woman's territory. All the men you see in the film are weak, or compromised by vice, or delirious and violent. They are the men who stayed behind while the strong ones moved away in search of work. The women, abandoned, mine their strength in stoic survival and an igneatic loneliness. As in his other films, letters are written home for the first month, the first year, but by the second year they slowly dwindle away into diasporic silence and insurmountable distance: a manifesto of displacement and loss.

Is it any wonder that Costa has incorporated a poem to represent this fading communiqué? Casa de Lava is where we first hear Costa's adaptation of the poem by Robert Desnos that Ventura shifted to incantatory heights in Colossal Youth. Costa can't explain (nor should he) how this poem became the manifesto in his films but it can be identified as "Letter to Youki", the letter/poem Desnos wrote for his wife Youki while interred at the Terezín concentration camp (where he eventually succumbed to typhoid). The alignment between the Nazi concentration camps and the Lisbon slums is sharp and fierce. Exile, Costa is telling is, is commensurate to imprisonment.

Once the letters stop coming, the women stand like sentinels or guardians facing the sea. Costa remembered that in Chris Marker's own epistolary reverie Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983)—which included footage shot on Fogo with (in fact) one of the mothers of the youngest girls in Casa de Lava—Marker captured a small moment whereby through voiceover he describes the Cape Verdeans: "A people of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people."

Filming in Fogo was hard. Sometimes it was so cold at night that the camera wouldn't work. Everything was made of lava, dark, black, sterile. The only work available to the islanders is to construct roads out of cobbled lava rock. They have spent years and years building a road leading to the lip of the crater. When Costa was last there, the road was only halfway constructed.

Then, again, there are the titular houses made of lava. "I don't know if you can feel it," Costa muses, "but they have something to do with coffins. This form. They're so black." The Cape Verdeans don't stay in them. They constantly move in and out of them because during the day they are too hot. At night, as you see in the film, the women sleep on the cold floor at the open door to catch a stray breeze. So, yes, the nature is beautiful and serene; but, it is also violent.

Although Costa only briefly quoted Chris Marker—and inexactly at that—I found Marker's text for Sans Soleil on line to nail his quote. Marker's Sans Soleil text is an evocative document, which encourages me to see the film, and it contains further descriptions which could easily be applied to Casa de Lava.

Describing Fogo, Marker writes: "I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction: the landscape of another planet. Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away." This underscores Mariana's own "alien" quality among the islanders. Perhaps, after all, there is some sense to the translation Down to Earth? As Daniel Kasman summizes: "Inês Medeiros' existential experience on the island is the film's primary grounding."

With regard to the distance between the women abandoned by their men: "Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound ... disembodied." There is a palpable sense of disembodied desire within the characters of Casa de Lava, desperately longing for physical grounding. It's as if this misplaced, unmoored desire is the zombie trance; the hungry gaze of the dead towards the living or—perhaps more accurately—the hungry gaze of the living towards the dead. Or even more accurately, a restless misunderstanding on both sides of the divide. As Costa himself describes the film, Mariana "believes that she is bringing the dead man to the world of the living. Seven days and nights later, she realizes she was wrong. She brought a living man among the dead." A curious number, seven. It is a horizontal orientation; the station when the sun falls below the Earth; monomythic elements abound.

As a further aside, I note that Leão has suffered a fall, the cause of his coma, much like Lento in Colossal Youth has likewise suffered a fall, though his kills him. Though Costa would be the first to protest ready equations, I believe his use of the fall of a laborer in foreign employment is a configuration of the wound referenced by Marker; a wound that Darren Hughes at Long Pauses identifies as the central conflict in Costa's films: "the perilous relationship between colonizer and colonized and the complex history (economic, political, cultural, and familial) they continue to share."

Marker asks: "Is it a property of islands to make their women into the guardians of their memory?" One instantly visualizes Costa's women staring out to sea. Marker comments further: "All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility. And men's task has always been to make them realize it as late as possible. African men are just as good at this task as others. But after a close look at African women I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men."

Within the grip of the epistolary format, Marker salutes "the spirits of unmailed letters", which one could say Costa keenly addresses in his films as well, particularly Casa de Lava and Colossal Youth.

Marker also writes of "mediating animals", which reminded me of the role of the black dog in Casa de Lava; a dog which not only saves Mariana's life when she is being accosted on the beach, but which dies in the arms of a forlorn Edite collapsed on the black sand. Mythologically, throughout the world, dogs are intimately connected with passage into nether regions. They represent an emotional loyalty and—within the mythic gravity of Costa's work—the image holds steadfast and true.

A Critical Overview of Casa de Lava

My favorite write-up on Casa de Lava remains Darren Hughes' poetic essay at Long Pauses. Beginning by taking note of the film's opening "barrage of arresting juxtapositions", Darren then detects Costa's admittedly confused status as an outsider through his employment of a "complex and counter-rhythmic" musical intervention: Paul Hindemith's viola sonata, whose "atonal bursts of dissonance disturb the beauty of the nature sequence." Incidentally, Hughes also has an insightful write-up on Chris Marker's Sans Soleil.

With comparable poetic (though visual) acuity, Pacze Moj delivers a stunning screenshot gallery for Critical Culture. Articulating the tension between civilization and nature, Portugal and Fogo, he writes: "In Portugal, mountains make way for buildings. Excavate, and reveal an apartment building. The man-made precedes the natural. …In Portugal, man has tamed nature; in Cape Verde, nature is slowly taming man. The process of excavation is being reversed." Foreign labor, construction work in Lisbon, lends itself to an interpretation as a fall from Paradise. This plays into the earlier thread of the wound-like nature of falls at construction sites.

At Strictly Film School, Acquarello captures the haunting historicity of the island: "Once an uninhabited Portuguese colony situated off the coast of northwest Africa, Cape Verde's geographic location was ideally suited to serve as a logistics center for merchant ships traveling westward to America for the slave trade. In Costa's cinema, this complex history of the islands as a place of involuntary settlement and captivity, as well a waystation for people embarking on journeys into distant lands never to return again…."

"Casa de Lava," Acquarello concludes, "becomes a trenchant reflection of the broader geopolitical issue of continued post-colonial economic dependence endemic within many third world nations—a situation that is exacerbated by an intrinsic dependency on foreign aid and external charity, coupled with a systematic exodus of the very population who can provide the appropriate skills, innovation, and resources necessary to frame the structure for a self-sustaining economy and provide the social stability to—if not transform—their increasingly fragmented, isolated, and dispossessed communities."

By contrast, David Kehr complains that in Casa de Lava "few ideas emerge apart from some familiar post-colonial editorializing." His anemic point of view lends indirect support to Pacze Moj's richer perspective: "[O]ne of the film's themes could be expressed as the difference between seeing and understanding."

SFIAAFF08—Michael Hawley's Preview

Following up on his anticipatory remarks, Michael Hawley explores some of the films from the 26th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival ("SFIAAFF08"), which opens in San Francisco this coming Thursday, March 13, 2008, and continues through Sunday, March 23, 2008. From there the program continues on at its Berkeley and San Jose venues. Now that we know how SFIAAFF is officially pronounced ("sfee-aahf"), I'm looking forward to hearing how it's mumbled and mangled with misplaced accents and undue emphasis. Oh, and I'm looking forward to some of the films too. Take it away, Michael.

* * *

After weeks of anticipation, SFIAAFF08 is finally set to begin. I have an overstuffed roster of eight films I'm scheduled to see this coming weekend and couldn't be more amped-up for it. In the meantime, here's a look at some of the films I've had the chance to preview, all from the festival's International Showcase, Documentary Competition and Documentary Showcase sections.

Of the dozen or so films I've looked at, the one that most impressed me was Slingshot, a dynamic work from prolific Filipino director Brillante Mendoza (his sixth feature in two years). In its astounding, elaborately-choreographed opening sequence, Mendoza's handheld camera charges headlong into the nocturnal labyrinth that is Manila's Quiapo slum, an urgent voice warning the populace of an impending police raid. Junkies frantically run for cover and thieves scramble to hide their contraband. The cops arrive and start busting down doors, dragging the men of Quiapo out into the night. The next day a local politician bails them out of jail, the raid having been an election year show tactic. With everyone back on the streets, it's a return to status quo, and the remainder of the film is spent observing the diurnal activities of Quiapo's thieves, gamblers, addicts and thugs. In a film full of unsettling images, none has stuck with me more than that of a father smoking crack in an alley chasm, all while holding a baby in his arms. In another curious storyline, a young woman who shoplifts electronic equipment for a living exalts in her new dentures, until she accidentally drops them down a drainpipe and must go clawing through sewage to retrieve them.

Mendoza and screenwriter Ralston Jover target the institutions of church and state with well-aimed scorn, setting the film during a time of local elections and Holy Week festivities. Voters walk away from their polling place with wads of cash, and a man is crushed to death in a religious procession. Police torture a robbery suspect and Mormon missionaries prowl the streets. In the film's final shot, we watch a man being pick-pocketed during a political rally in which the candidates blather on about their faith in God. Relentless and unsparing, Slingshot has the look and feel of a documentary, but was apparently fully scripted and rehearsed (the actors are a mix of pros and non-pros, and I defy you to tell me which are which.) The hand-held camerawork, sepia-toned imagery and minimalist, percussive soundtrack all contribute to making this one of the most original and potent pieces of filmmaking I've seen recently.

While Slingshot presents one vision of Manila's slums, Mendoza's Foster Child, also in the festival, presents one considerably more subdued and benevolent. In another remarkable opening scene, Mendoza fills the screen with an image of Manila's modern skyline, then pans down to reveal its ramshackle slums in the foreground. It's there that we'll spend the day with professional foster mother Thelma, as she prepares to hand off her ward of three years to an adoptive American family. These intimate scenes of familial domesticity, which fill up the film's first half, are followed by a cross-town journey led by Thelma's no-nonsense social worker. Their destination is a luxury hotel where the American family is waiting, and the contrast between the hotel's opulent sterility and Thelma's humble nest is jolting. These hotel scenes play out a bit clumsily, however, especially in the wobbly performance of the actor (?) playing the American father, and a weak attempt to wring comedy out of Thelma's unfamiliarity with the hotel's sophisticated bathroom plumbing. The film also makes a very odd choice by denying us the moment when Thelma and the young boy finally part company. At times, Foster Child comes off more like a documentary on the Filipino child welfare system than a piece of narrative fiction. But there's plenty to appreciate here nonetheless, not the least of which is Cherrie Pie Picache's warm, naturalistic lead performance.

From Indonesia, the festival presents new works from that country's two best known entities on the international festival circuit: Riri Riza (Eliana, Eliana; Gie) and Garin Nugroho (Opera Jawa; Of Love and Eggs). Riza's Three Days to Forever follows two cousins—uptight but likable Yusuf and wild, spoiled Ambar—as they take a road trip to attend a family wedding in Yogyakarta. Fueled by pot and pills, these young urbanites traverse a rural landscape that is both familiar and alien to them (I was often reminded of a similar road trip in Y tu mama también). They get lost along the way, making unscheduled stops at a hot springs resort and a Catholic pilgrimage site, all while ruminating pie-eyed on such issues as marriage, career and their ambiguous place in a conservative, developing nation. A mutual erotic attraction between the two cousins is allowed to play out in an unforced way, and a lackadaisical score of Indonesian indie-pop is its perfect accompaniment.

Garin Nugroho is actually one of four directors listed for Serambi, a documentary/mood piece which reflects on the tragic loss experienced by survivors of the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia's Aceh province (Nugroho is also credited with the film's "creative concept"). The film begins with horrifyingly surreal footage of the tsunami's arrival. We see a wall of water travel down a city street, dragging entire houses, cars and trees along with it as helpless onlookers watch from atop the neighborhood mosque. From here the film focuses on individual stories. Orphans in a refugee camp remember their parents. A man buys his meals at a food stall and eats them on the spot where his house once stood. A young man who plays in a metal band and makes Che Guevara t-shirts experiences a crisis of faith. Although a bit meandering and stagy at times, the film is still an affecting portrait of unruly nature's cruel aftermath.

In Alexi Tan's anemic Blood Brothers from Hong Kong, three pals from the sticks seek their fortune in 1930's Shanghai. In what seems like no time, they go from pulling rickshaws to becoming underlings in a ruthless gang headquartered at the ironically-named Paradise nightclub. Ambition, betrayal and revenge predictably follow, leading the story back to the trio's rural village for one last, nonsensical round of bloodletting. Because I'm not really a fan of this type of genre film, I checked out a number of reviews written by people who are. My disappointment, it seems, is shared pretty much across the board. What did work for me in Blood Brothers was the period art direction and the novelty of seeing gorgeous Shu Qi singing and dancing, as the star performer of the Paradise club. Local audiences may also appreciate the film's star-turn by Bay Area native Daniel Wu, who is expected to attend the festival screenings.

Fortunately, the films I previewed were not all gang slayings, tsunamis and slums. For lighter fare, I'd recommend checking out these two flawed, but very likable flicks: Royston Tan's campy Singaporean musical 881, and Wisit Sasanatieng's Thai ghost story The Unseeable. Michael Guillén has already done a wonderful write-up on the latter, to which I have little to add. This sensually filmed haunted house mystery is more likely to elicit screams of laughter than horror, but fans of the director's Tears of the Black Tiger and Citizen Dog will find much to like here. I know I did.

881 (which I caught earlier this year in Palm Springs) is a colorful and splashy tribute to the world of Getai. This uniquely Singaporean form of musical review is performed on the seventh lunar month, when the gates of hell are opened and the spirits who roam the streets need entertaining. 881 tells the tale of the Papaya Sisters, two untalented young women who make an unholy pact with the Getai Goddess to become Getai superstars. Aided by their ballsy, dictatorial Auntie Ling Ling and her deaf-mute son Guan Yin (played by Chinese/Singaporean heartthrob Qi Yu-wu, who also gets to woo Joan Chen in the festival's closing night film, The Home Song Stories), the duo go to battle against their nasty arch-rivals, the Durian Sisters. Director Tan once again shows off the playful visual flair he first exhibited in 15 (musical chickens, anyone?), and the film's eye-popping costumes should make this a must-see for all self-respecting Bay Area drag queens. The film's brash musical numbers and broad acting, however, do make for a rather bombastic and exhausting movie-going experience that may not appeal to all.

In addition to Serambi, I previewed two other worthwhile documentaries in the festival, Christine Choy's Long Story Short, and Ann Kaneko's Against the Grain: An Artist’s Survival Guide to Peru. Choy's engaging, bittersweet film examines the role of Asian entertainers in America by looking at the career of The Leungs, a husband and wife nightclub act popular in the 40s and 50s, and that of their actress daughter Jodi, who narrates the film. A Chinese-Australian tap dancer and a Japanese-American chorus girl, Larry and Trudie Leung were regulars on USO tours and the Chinatown "Chop Suey" circuit. Their career highlight (and a highlight of this documentary as well) was a May 7, 1950 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in which they sing, dance and tell jokes (and are made the butt of a racist bit having to do with Sullivan's laundry.) Daughter Jodi Long entered show biz in 1962 at the age of seven, when she was cast in the Broadway musical Nowhere To Go But Up (and was the only real-life Asian in the musical's family of Chinese launderers). 40 years later, she would have a leading role in Flower Drum Song, a revisionist revival of the musical her father had toured in for over 10 years. This connection is one of several points over which Long is able to compare her own struggles as an Asian-American entertainer with those of her parents. The film is structured around a stage piece Long composed about her unique life and career, and features some lovely archival material and interviews with her parents (I was particularly moved by Trudie Leung's accounting of her years spent in the Minidoka internment camp during WWII).

Ann Kaneko's Against the Grain is a fascinating look at the relationship between art and politics in Peru, particularly as it relates to the 10-year authoritarian presidency of Alberto Fujimori and his suppression of Maoist guerrilla groups. Kaneko traveled to Peru three times between 2001 and 2006 and chose to profile four very distinct artists. One of them is Eduardo Tokeshi, a Japanese-Peruvian whose flag-art addresses themes of his assimilation into the larger Latin-American culture. In the film he speaks about the racism Japanese-Peruvians have faced since the now-reviled Fujimori left office in 2000. (In one harrowing scene we see an example of this, as the filmmaker herself is nearly attacked by a crowd for being Japanese-American.) The other three artists profiled are Alfredo Márquez, a hippie-punk silkscreener who spent four years in a maximum security prison for painting Marilyn Monroe lips on a portrait of Mao; Claudio Jiménz Quispe, who sculpts 3-dimensional retablos on the subject of Peru's civil war of the '80s and '90s; and Natalia Iguiñez, a conceptual artist whose exhibit La Otra is a series of life-size photographs of upper-class women and their maids.

(Please note that a new film has been announced for the festival's International Showcase section, to be screened on Saturday, March 15, 9:15 at the Castro Theater (the time slot originally held by Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, which was moved to a smaller venue at the Sundance Cinemas Kabuki and is now sold out). The film is Jacob Cheung's lavish 4th century B.C. Chinese war epic, A Battle of Wits starring Andy Lau. Variety's Derek Elley gives it quite a good review here.

Cross-published on Twitch.

PETER BOGDANOVICH—Targets; The Last Picture Show; At Long Last Love

"Costa, Bogdanovich and Welles, oh my! Costa, Bogdanovich and Welles, oh my!! Costa, Bogdanovich and Welles, OH MY!!!" Thus goes the little paraphrased ditty that San Franciscans chant as they warily skip down Market Street, here in the merry old land of EOR ("Embarrassment of Riches"). Between the Still Lives: Films of Pedro Costa retrospective running at the Pacific Film Archives ("PFA"), The Magnificent Orson Welles retrospective (likewise at PFA), and Midnights For Maniacs' eight-film tribute to Peter Bogdanovich running at the Castro Theatre, Bay Area cineastes are being forced to make some fierce choices this weekend.

I wouldn't have missed the opening night of the Bogdanovich tribute for anything; however. Jesse Hawthorne Ficks continues to offer his unique all-bases-loaded programming and—dressed reverse chic in tux jacket, white bowtie and sneakers—audiences couldn't wish for a more handsome, likeable, down-to-earth host.

Introducing Targets (aka Before I Die, 1968), Jesse detailed that his "genuine" Bogdanovich tribute came about in response to recently screening At Long Last Love (1975) at his Midnights for Maniacs Burt Reynolds triple-feature. The film hadn't played in over 30 years and Jesse was terrified that perhaps it really was a terrible film and that there was a reason why it hadn't been screened all this time. His fears evaporated watching the film. Even though the film was detested by critics, Jesse confidently asserted that was only because the critics were "fucking stupid." He found At Long Last Love to be "a genuine Lubitsch musical" way ahead of its time even as it paid tribute to films of yesteryear. Jesse contacted Peter Bogdanovich and argued At Long Last Love had been seriously overlooked and misunderstood and that Bogdanovich needed to come out to San Francisco for a retrospective at the Castro Theatre. Bogdanovich's response was, "Why do you want to play that film?" Through a volley of conversations, Jesse managed to convince Bogdanovich to attend the weekend tribute.

Kicking off the weekend with Bogdanovich's first film Targets—"an amazing exploitation film where you get to see Peter in action, getting drunk with Boris Karloff—a treat all by itself"—Targets was written by Bogdanovich, Polly Platt, and Sam Fuller. "Sam is flying around somewhere," Jesse quipped, "so you have to give him that."

After the screening, Jesse underscored that Targets was the perfect film to start off the weekend tribute because "the movie is in love with movies and Mr. Bogdanovich has always made films for people who love films." Jesse then brought Bogdanovich onto the stage for conversation.

After figuring it out, Bogdanovich realized he filmed Targets 41 years ago. "As you can see, I looked a little younger then." The Last Picture Show was some 38 years hence, to which Jesse indelicately remarked, "I wasn't even born yet!" "You had to say that," Bogdanovich grimaced.

Complaining at first that he couldn't see the audience, Bogdanovich shielded his eyes from the lights and then commented appreciatively, "There's a lot of you!" The audience broke into acknowledging applause. He recalled wrecking up San Francisco during the filming of What's Up, Doc? and Herb Caen writing a vicious column about it, even though they repaired whatever damage they caused.

One of the main reasons he was glad to be able to attend the tribute—which he sincerely appreciated—was for the opportunity to watch his films with an audience. Watching them alone holds absolutely no interest for him, he confessed. With an audience he can momentarily forget all the travail that went into making the films and luxuriate in the communal spectatorship.

"The Last Picture Show," Bogdanovich related by way of introduction, "was one of those life-altering experiences. We all went to Texas in October and—when we came back in December—we weren't the same people. My marriage broke up. I fell in love. My father died. All that happened while we were making the picture. You can't really tell by watching the picture; but, I see it. I remember when that happened and that happened. That was the scene after Cybill cried all night. Her nose was red but, luckily, it was in black and white and you couldn't tell.

"Then when [the film] came out, it changed everyone's careers also. People ask me if I expected it to be so well-received and the answer is no. I really didn't know what to expect. It didn't cost much. It cost $1.3 million, which in those days was not a lot of money either. We actually took quite a while to shoot it; we shot it in 60 days. I just hoped it would make its money back. Then it got all these nominations and awards and great reviews, y'know?

"I remember, we were shooting What's Up, Doc? here when Bert Schneider—who was the producer of The Last Picture Show—called me and got me in the trailer from wherever he was and said, 'Are you sitting down?' and I said, 'Okay, I am now' and he said, 'Do you want to hear the opening line from the review in Newsweek?' 'Yeah….' 'The Last Picture Show is not only the best film in an otherwise dreary season, but is the best film by an American director since Citizen Kane.' I said, 'Holy shit, really?' Then there was a knock on the door, 'Peter, we're ready for you' and I thought, 'I got to get out of here; I'm shooting another shot.' You can't expect those kinds of things. I remember Orson Welles sent a telegram: 'Reading your reviews is like opening presents at Christmas.'

"Anyway, what can I tell you? We had so much fun making this film. I'll tell you a funny story. Ben Johnson, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor [for his performance as Sam the Lion in The Last Picture Show], he turned it down three times. 'Oh Pete, there's too much goddamn words in it. It's kind of a dirty picture. I might want my mother to see it and she can't see this.' So I called John Ford, who I had known for years, and I said, 'Jack, I've got a really good part for ol' Ben and he won't do it. He says there are too many words in it.' Ford said, "Oh Jesus, he always says that! When we were shooting Yellow Ribbon, he would come on the set and say to the script girl, "Any words for me today?" If she said yes, he'd sulk. If she said no, you just have to ride the horse, he'd be happy. Where is ol' Ben?'

" 'He's in Tuscon.'

" 'If you give me the number, I'll call him.'

" 'Would ya?'

" 'Yeah, I'll call him.'

"About 15 minutes later I get a call from Ford. 'Hello, Jack.'

" 'He'll do it.'

" 'You talked to him?'

" 'I said, "Jesus, man, I mean Peter's got a good part for you, y'know, and if he says he's truly worried about it, do the goddamn thing, I mean Jesus, what do you want to be? Duke's sidekick your whole life?" He'll do it.'

"About 10 minutes later an assistant told me, 'Ben Johnson's on the phone.' 'Hello, Ben?'

"[Imitating Ben Johnson with a trembling voice] 'You put the old man on me.'

" 'I really want you to do the picture….'

" 'Oh Jesus, Pete, I don't know, I mean there's so many goddamn words in it.'

" 'Well, when are you going to be back?'

" 'I'll be back next week.'

" 'Well, come and see me.'

" 'All right.'

"He comes to my office. He still hasn't told me if he's really in, y'know? He's telling me this and that and the other thing. His mother thinks it's a dirty picture. Every excuse he can come up with. I remember he even had the script open on his lap or on the table in front of him and finally I said at one point, 'Ben, if you do this picture, you could win the Oscar for this.'

" [Raising his voice.] 'Why the hell do you say that?'

" 'I don't know. I just think you in this part, you could win the Oscar.'

"He slammed the script and said, 'All right! I'll do the goddamn thing!'

"He won the Oscar. He worked 10 days on the picture. Right after that, Larry McMurtry—who wrote the novel The Last Picture Show is based on—and I were working on a script for a western we wanted to do, which never got made; it's a long story. We were going to do a western with John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Ben Johnson, Cybill Shepherd, Ellen Burstyn, and so on. By the way, 13 years later Larry rewrote the script and it became Lonesome Dove; but, when we were doing it, it was called Streets of Laredo, which is the sequel to Lonesome Dove. Anyways, to make a long story short, I sent the script to ol' Ben. He calls me up, 'Hello, Pete?'—this was after he won the Oscar—'Pete, I read the script.'

" 'What do you think?'

" 'Well, it's good but not too many words for me.' That's what happens when you win an Oscar.

"Now, Cybill. I saw her on the cover of a magazine, Glamour, I didn't even know this magazine existed; but, I was buying some toothpaste at Ralphs and there she is looking at me from this magazine cover and she had this expression on her face—I don't know how to describe it—it was a smile but it wasn't just a smile. She was wearing a shirt that had little "I love yous" all over it, literally, and the look on her face belied the sentiment on her shirt. You don't know if she really loves you or not. Her smile was ambiguous, I knew that; but, I thought, 'That's the right smile for this character.'

"So I bought the magazine and—in typical Hollywood fashion—I ripped the cover off and said to my secretary, 'Find that girl!' This is a true story. About an hour later, she came around and gave me a slip of paper that said, 'The girl is Cybill Shepherd, C-Y-B-I-L-L' and I thought, 'Oh shit, C-Y-B-I-L-L.' She was modeling in New York and had done nine covers for Glamour. When I went to New York three months later to do some casting, she came over to where I was staying. …She wore blue jeans and a jean jacket and she was very tall, taller than I expected, not petite, but—y'know—all woman, so to speak. And very beautiful. Actually, she photographs even better than she looks, which is one of those mysteries. She always looked good but she photographed even better." At this juncture Jesse cautioned, "You know, she's going to be here tonight?" Bogdanovich assured Jesse Cybill had heard all this before. "Anyway, I had just had a small breakfast on the coffee table and you know those little vauzes they send up with room service? There was a little rose in there. For some reason, Cybill decided to sit on the floor. The manager sat over there and Cybill sat on the floor in front of the coffee table. Why, I don't really grasp; but, we were talking. 'What do you do in college?' 'Well, I'm reading Doestoevsky' and we were talking about that. And while she's talking to me she's flicking the rose back and forth and I thought, 'That is just how Jacy the character would treat guys. She's perfect.'

"So I went back to California and I said, 'I've got the girl' and they said, 'Did you read her?' and I said, 'No, no, I didn't read her.' 'Well, why do you think then she's perfect?' [Bogdanovich mimics the gesture of Shepherd flicking the rose back and forth.] They said, 'You better read her.' So we flew her out, it was all right, the reading wasn't great, but I knew she would be great, and she was. Right from the get-go, Cybill had a great sense of humor and you'll see—if you haven't seen the picture in a while—she's very funny in a very important way. She understood the character's funny qualities without commenting on them and she plays the comedy scenes great. Jeff Bridges is great. Everybody. I mean, Cloris Leachman.

"[Cloris] had the last scene in the picture. This is a true story. You may not believe it, but it's true. I told her, 'You could win the Oscar for this.' After every scene that we did, she would turn to me and say, 'Is that it?' The most important scene, which was the last scene in the kitchen at the very end, and she came to me about two weeks before shooting and said, 'I want to run through the last scene for you. I want to do it for you.' I said, 'Cloris, I don't want to see it.' 'What do you mean you don't want to see it?' 'I don't want to see it until we shoot it.' 'Can't I rehearse it for you?' 'No. You can rehearse it at home. You can do whatever you want. But I don't want to see it.' 'Why not?' 'Because the first time I see it, I want to see it when we're shooting and you're in front of the camera.' 'Well, gee whiz….'

"Now, I had learned this lesson because Henry Fonda had told me that when he and Jane Darwell came to the last scene in The Grapes of Wrath, Ford wouldn't let them rehearse it. What you saw was the first take. I knew that—for an emotional scene—it's better to save it. The director is really the only audience. I didn't want to waste that first time emotion in the scene when the camera was running. When it came to that scene, [Cloris] was shaking and she did it brilliantly on the first take and I said, 'Print!' She said, 'Can I do it again?' I said, 'No, you got it.' 'I can do it better.' 'No, you just won the Oscar.' And that's what you see in the film, the first take."

After the screening of The Last Picture Show Cybill Shepherd joined Jesse and Bogdanovich on stage and was greeted by a standing ovation. Bogdanovich acknowledged gratefully the appreciative response of the audience to The Last Picture Show. "It couldn't have been nicer. Thank you so much."

Cybill Shepherd was required to see the casting director of The Last Picture Show four times. "I had to be in a bikini to make sure I didn't have any hideous scars for the nude scene." She recalled that—when she met Bogdanovich and he opened the door to his hotel suite—she had never met anyone so handsome and dashing. "I was so excited. I was carrying a copy of War and Peace. Peter said, 'Oh, tell me about that book.' I said, 'Oh yeah, Dostoevsky, he wrote a great book.' I was so nervous. He was so charming. He was a great first acting coach, actually a great acting coach throughout my whole career. It was an extraordinary way to start in this picture because the actors I was acting opposite were so superb. I would have had to work to be bad." Watching the film again, Bogdanovich complimented that—for her first role—he is still amazed at how great she is, how polished.

"I still squirm when I see Jacy," Shepherd admitted. "It still makes me squirm, this performance. I always wanted to believe that I was never like this woman. It wasn't until I wrote an autobiography called Cybill Disobedience that I actually realized that I was more like Jacy than I ever imagined."

Bogdanovich and Shepherd began teasing each other. He claimed to be shocked when he read her autobiography, to discover that more was going on than he ever imagined. He didn't know, for example, that Elvis had proposed to her while he was upstairs. Shepherd claimed to have forgotten that incident. "We had a motto," she said, "never to cheat on each other while we were in the same town." Bogdanovich quickly inserted that she made up that motto; he never knew about it until he read it in her book. He thought, "When did we ever discuss that?"

Although Bogdanovich felt Shepherd did some extraordinary work in Daisy Miller (1974), and despite its great reviews, the film did not do good business when it came out. Paper Moon (1973), which received less favorable reviews, did better business. Daisy Miller was the first of the Henry James adaptations, about five years before anyone else did it, and Bogdanovich recalled they did long scenes without a cut, sometimes 15-18 pages. "You don't notice it, because you're not supposed to," he said, but Bogdanovich remains quite proud about that.

As for At Long Last Love, Shepherd knew the film was doomed because they had such a good time making it. Further, she knew it was a bad sign when she slammed three fingers—two in a closet door and one in a car door—on the day they wrapped filming. She still sports a scar on her thumb.

Jesse teased out the scene in the swimming pool. Shepherd confirmed that swimming live and singing live in a swimming pool is the funniest thing ever because, first of all, you don't want to drown. Secondly, it was supposed to be singing and swimming and she found it was not at all as effortless as Esther Williams' films. Bogdanovich recalled that she pulled Burt Reynolds' noseplug and it snapped back in his face, actually hurting him, and he said, "Owwww" and—though she wanted to laugh—Cybill had to keep singing.

The conceit of At Long Last Love was that Bogdanovich wanted to do all the singing live. "Most musicals are done in playback," he explained, "the voice is recorded in a studio and then on set you lip synch to what's been recorded. But I didn't like that. I thought, 'Let's do it the way Lubitsch did it back when they couldn't do playback and have them really sing live.' Which was challenging since Burt was not a singer—"to put it mildly"—but, then again, he wasn't a dancer either. They got around all that somehow. "It was reviewed as my homage to Astaire and Rogers but it was actually the opposite. It was really about a bunch of frivolous people who couldn't talk to each other so they sang lyrics that were made up by somebody else. Like when you can't think of anything to write and you buy a greeting card." At Long Last Love was really about these superficial people unable to communicate directly. Conceding he might be superficial as well, Bogdanovich said he likes to sing to people too. Shepherd recalled that he courted her during the filming of The Last Picture Show by singing songs. She then talked him into singing one of those courtship songs and joined in. It was a charming close to their on-stage appearance together.

The Peter Bogdanovich tribute continues through the weekend, with Bogdanovich present for introductory comments. The Saturday evening screening of Nickelodeon (1976) marks the world premiere of the director's cut in black and white, which is how Bogdanovich originally wanted the film to be shot, at the objection of his producers and the studio (who won out at the time). Nickelodeon will be preceded by a short by Sofia Coppola called Lick the Star (1998), wherein Bogdanovich plays the small part of the Principal. The screening will be something of a treat for Bogdanovich, as he has never seen it.

On Sunday, They All Laughed (1981)—allegedly Bogdanovich's favorite film—and one which Jesse asserts is "easily one of his best", worshiped by Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, among others, will be followed by the long-awaited Director's Cut of Mask with the full original Bruce Springsteen soundtrack put back in. Songs by Bob Seger were substituted in place of those by Springsteen shortly before the film's release after a failure to reach agreement with Springsteen. Sunday's screening will be the first time it will be shown on a big screen with the reinstated soundtrack.

Cross-published on Twitch.

PEDRO COSTA (and Others) on O Sangue (The Blood, 1989)

Dennis Lim, reviewing the Still Lives: Films of Pedro Costa retrospective for The New York Times observed that O Sangue, Costa's first feature film, "was not a reliable indicator of things to come." In the best sense, Lim elaborated, O Sangue is "a young man's film, drunk on romantic doom and movie love—a rhapsodic style Mr. Costa now regards as 'camouflage.' "

That has not made critics reticient to appreciate O Sangue on its own merits. Dispatching to Senses of Cinema from the 43rd Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale), Michelle Carey proclaimed O Sangue as "undoubtedly one of the most remarkable film debuts of the last 20 years. Filmed in milky black and white, each shot is so carefully composed the film could well be a montage of a thousand photos were it not for the emotive, intelligent dialogue, …dreamy orchestral score and excellent use of pop music." Carey added, "It is probably the only Costa film (save of course the Straubs documentary) to reference other cinema—the 1950s teen dramas of Nicholas Ray, as well as Badlands and The Night Of the Hunter. …O Sangue mixes the pop with the intellectual-political, assuredly blending the boundaries."

In his Artforum essay, revised for the Still Lives brochure, James Quandt wrote: "There have been few more prodigious debuts than Pedro Costa's O Sangue. One of those first films that feels like the unleashing of pent-up forces—long nurtured visual ideas, banked homages to favorite films and directors, a romanticism unseen since early Leos Carax—O Sangue was also something of a false start, in the sense that its dreamy, nocturnal tone, conspicuous cinephilia, and showboating camera work did not establish Costa's true path, which was towards a spare, materialist cinema."

Elsewhere in the Cinematheque Ontario brochure, cinematic allusions were once again traced, including "Murnau, Bresson [that opening slap, straight out of Mouchette], Cocteau, Spirit of the Beehive, Boy Meets Girl." Described as "a moody nocturne", Cinematheque Ontario equally praised O Sangue as "fairy tale, film noir, love story, and murder mystery."

At Strictly Film School, Acquarello has underscored "the characteristic imprint of what would prove to be [Costa's] familiar preoccupations: absent parents, surrogate families, unreconciled ghosts, the trauma and violence of displacement, the ache (and isolation) of longing." Presciently, Acquarello has likewise drawn a similar contrast "between the abandoned, rural family home and the sterile, anonymous apartment buildings where the brothers are held against their will" and has translated the similarity "as a prefiguration of the Fonthainas diaspora itself, from the transitory sanctuary embodied by dilapidated, condemned spaces (In Vanda's Room), to the soullessness of uprooted communities represented by impersonal, high density, public housing (Colossal Youth)."

Though Daniel Kasman has qualified his praise with a critique of the film's overmannered lack of continuity and coherence, he nonetheless finds O Sangue "unabashedly gorgeous."

Pedro Costa's following commentary on O Sangue has been gleaned from the Q&A session following the screening of the film at the ongoing Pacific Film Archives retrospective. My thanks to Susan Oxtoby, Kathy Geritz and Shelley Diekman of PFA for their kind assistance.

On Working With His Young Actors

Nuno Ferreira, who plays the part of Nino in O Sangue, was the youngest actor in the cast. He was only 9 or 10 at the time of shooting. There weren't many child actors in Portugal at that time and—though Costa considered the child actors he was familiar with—he came up with the idea of going to a boy's orphanage, a Catholic school, to talk to the priests. He explained he was making a film and that there was a part for a young boy. In retrospect, Costa doesn't really know where this idea of casting an orphan came from ("it was probably unconscious") but, it was close to the overall mood of the film. Immediately he found Nuno, who he liked very much, and the priests accepted his proposal. Nuno was nearly feral, however, and difficult to control on the set.

That was not true for the other young actors. Inês de Medeiros, who played Clara (and who went on to star in Costa's Casa de Lava and Ossos), continued her career as an actress and, according to Costa, is now directing. Pedro Hestnes, who played the older brother Vicente, has likewise continued his acting career. Even though Nuno was wild and difficult to manage, Costa was very happy with him. He was how Costa imagined Nino or, as he offered: "Probably, I saw a lot of myself in this boy at his age."

After O Sangue, Nuno went through a difficult period. Most of the boys in the Catholic orphanage only lasted until they were 15 before running away. Others stayed until they were 18 years old, at which time the Church helped find them employment, training them to make tables or comparable work; but Nuno was one of those who ran away at 14 or 15. For a while Costa lost contact with him, though he was aware Nuno had moreorless become a mechanic. Then he heard Nuno had become addicted to drugs. As ironic as life is, Costa ran into Nuno in Fontainhas, the Cape Verdean-populated Lisbon district and the site of his later films, where Nuno had come to score his heroin. "It was very strange," Costa remarked quietly, "I was working in this place and this actor who was my dream child was now a junkie." Admitting his impulse to somehow "save" Nuno, Costa proposed work to him, not as an actor but in some capacity on the set, just to funnel some money his way; but, Nuno refused. "He was wild and suicidal," Costa described and he has since lost touch with him, though he has heard Nuno married.

On the Theme of Orphanhood & Absent Mothers

Having just seen Colossal Youth the day before—a film wherein the mother abandons her husband and children in the first scene and where an indefinite patrilineage seemingly drives the narrative forward—the longbody trace of this theme from Costa's first film to his most recent is intriguingly apparent. Costa had likewise mentioned that—as far as Vanda Duarte was concerned—Colossal Youth revolved around her seminal question: "How can I be a mother?"

Whether one wants to entertain the broad stretch that the absent mother in Colossal Youth can translate as an assertion that there is no State to take care of the marginalized Cape Verdeans and that, in fact, the State is responsible for displacing them and pulling them further away from "home", it's unlikely Costa intended such an interpretation. Though he acknowleged that, yes, there were absent mothers in both films and, yes, there was this strange woman in the end of O Sangue (Isabel de Castro)—the father's mistress who could be thought of as a substitute mother—and though in fact many of the characters in his films could be thought of as parental figures of substitution, Costa complained that he didn't really like to talk about his films that way. "That's for the critics," he quipped drolly.

What Costa would offer is that in each of his films there are elements that do reappear, namely a poetic figure who represents "two or three things." For instance, one thing in each of his films that is exactly the same thing is literally a representation of dead weight, something heavy, what I might call a texture of gravitas. In O Sangue the young characters struggle to be rid of this weight, which in their case is this father encased in a bag emptied into the river. Casa de Lava sports a similar weight (though I have not yet seen the film and will need to reserve comment on the particulars). In Ossos the weight or burden becomes a baby, which Costa remarked, "Passes all along the film as a figure of death and life." This very strong baby dies, but then doesn't actually die. Everybody wants to sell it and buy it and—even more mysteriously—the baby's father becomes its mother somehow, so that the question is raised: "Who is your mother? Who is your father?" Or as William Goyen stated in his own architectural reverie The House of Breath: "What kin are we to each other anyway?" Costa conceded that his is a dream of "recomposing the family" to become as big a family as he can make it and claimed he had found such a recomposed family with the Cape Verdeans he's working with now; "Which is more than a family," he asserts, "it's a community." They're all his cousins, nephews, sisters.

On the Sound Design

Placing Costa's first feature O Sangue alongside his recent Colossal Youth elicits another flint-like spark of recognition involving his use of sound. The radical difference between the two films, the shift away from reliance on the non-diegetic to a somewhat organic discovery of the diegtic—from more to less one might say—is pronounced by contrast.

Costa admitted that the sound design for O Sangue is very simple precisely because O Sangue was "a classical shooting." Costa's friend Pedro Caldas did the sound for O Sangue and he basically used the conventional formula of combining direct sound from filmed scenes with extra sounds added in editing. Now that Costa has the "luxury" of more time in which to construct his films, that luxury is extended to his technicians. Olivier Blanc is currently Costa's sound person and Costa described him as someone who "does his own film and is always in motion." Along with Costa's notoriously voluminous takes, which time and DV allows, Blanc has been creating his own archive of sounds from Fontainhas from which Costa borrows to effect his sound designs. Though some of his sound comes direct with his filming, others come from Blanc's archives who—because he is not fighting against a schedule of a certain amount of days he can record—can afford the time necessary to record the real life of Fontainhas and, now, Casal Boba. Because they both have more time, they can collaborate on the sound editing and can compose a design environmentally if not exactly diegetic; a true "soundscape". Cosa recalled having a very low budget for filming O Sangue, let alone little time for editing, everything was very hectic, so for ease he utilized music. This was also partly due, he admitted wryly, because he was "completely enchanted with American movies and their music so I committed some crimes, like using Stravinsky."

Cross-published on Twitch.