Table Of ContentReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa
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ReFocus: The International Directors Series
Series Editors: Robert Singer, Stefanie Van de Peer
and Gary D. Rhodes
ReFocus is a series of contemporary methodological and theoretical approaches to the
interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of international film directors, from the
celebrated to the ignored, in direct relationship to their respective culture—its myths, values,
and historical precepts—and the broader parameters of international film history and theory.
The series provides a forum for introducing a broad spectrum of directors, working in and
establishing movements, trends, cycles and genres including those historical, currently popular,
or emergent, and in need of critical assessment or reassessment. It ignores no director who
created a historical space—either in or outside of the studio system—beginning with the
origins of cinema and up to the present. ReFocus brings these film directors to a new audience
of scholars and general readers of Film Studies.
Titles in the series include:
ReFocus: The Films of Susanne Bier
Edited by Missy Molloy, Mimi Nielsen, and Meryl Shriver-Rice
ReFocus: The Films of Corneliu Porumboiu
Monica Filimon
ReFocus: The Films of Francis Veber
Keith Corson
ReFocus: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky
Sergei Toymentsev
ReFocus: The Films of Jia Zhangke
Maureen Turim and Ying Xiao
ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan
Edited by Andrée Lafontaine
ReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa: Producing and Consuming Contemporary Art Cinema
Nuno Barradas Jorge
edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/refocint
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ReFocus:
The Films of Pedro Costa
Producing and Consuming Contemporary
Art Cinema
Nuno Barradas Jorge
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© Nuno Barradas Jorge, 2020
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Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 Cinema’s ‘Primitive Beauty’: Pedro Costa’s Artistic Formation and
the Making of Blood (1989) 12
2 Negotiating Filmmaking: Adaptation, Location and Docufiction 32
3 Digital Filmmaking at the Interstices 53
4 Critical Reception and the International Film Festival 69
5 Between the Black Box and the White Cube 90
6 Renegotiating Circulation: Retrospectives and DVD Releases 110
7 A ‘Document of Documents’: Authorship, Intertextuality and
Politics in Horse Money (2014) 128
Conclusion 148
Filmography 152
Bibliography 154
Index 165
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Figures
1.1–1.3 Stylistic correlations with classical cinema in Blood (1989):
the evocation of the work of Nicholas Ray, Jacques
Tourneur and of Night of the Hunter (1955) 15
1.4 Still of Blood (1989), featuring Pedro Hestnes and
Inês de Medeiros. This was one of the images used to
promote the film during its domestic commercial
release in 1990 29
2.1 and 2.2 Stills of the initial scenes of Casa de Lava (1994),
featuring footage of the Fogo Island volcano eruption
shot by Orlando Ribeiro in 1951 33
2.3 Resolving spatial restrictions through mise en scène:
still of Bones (1997) featuring Vanda Duarte,
Isabel Ruth and Mariya Lipkina 51
4.1 ‘Family photo’: Jean-Marie Straub, Pedro Costa and
Danièle Huillet in 2001 77
5.1 and 5.2 Pedro Costa’s two-screen video installation Daughters of Fire
(2013), displayed at the São Roque Church 91
5.3 Double-screen narrative compositions of Little Boy Male,
Little Girl Female (2005) 99
5.4 An exception in Costa’s coherent filmic universe: still from
The End of a Love Affair (2003), featuring Gustavo Sumpta 101
5.5 Still from Tarrafal (2007): Zé Alberto’s deportation notice
as a ‘cursed document’ similar to the ones used in
Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957) 102
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FIGURES vii
7.1 Still from Horse Money (2014): the appearance of the
iconic Chaimite armoured vehicle serves as a narrative
device both for a historical setting and for Ventura’s
achronological subjective condition 136
7.2 and 7.3 The epistolary device as narrative juxtaposition between
films: Mariana (Inês de Medeiros) reads the letter destined
for Edite (Edith Scob) in Casa de Lava (1994); Vitalina
(Vitalina Varela) reads the letter penned by Ventura in
Horse Money (2014) 138
7.4 Still from Horse Money (2014): Vitalina Varela’s off-screen
personal documents and objects are used as filmic props to
reinstate her identity on screen 140
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Acknowledgements
This book initially took shape as a PhD dissertation started in 2011, a
research project reworked and extensively rewritten over the following
years. My debts, therefore, go back a long way. I would like first to express my
sincere gratitude to my former supervisors at the University of Nottingham,
Mark Gallagher and Julian Stringer, who not only guided me through the entire
doctoral process but also generously provided me with motivation, advice and
inspiration during the writing of this volume. Thanks also to Lúcia Nagib, who
pointed out to me the potential of my initial study and encouraged me to carry
it further. I am also particularly grateful to Catherine Attwood for the lively
conversations, patience and meticulous copy-editing.
I am also pleased to acknowledge the support and advice offered by the staff
and postgraduate community at Nottingham. I am truly grateful to my col-
leagues at the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies, particularly
to Roberta Pearson who has been, over the years, truly supportive of the long-
term endeavour of which this book is now the result. Special thanks also go to
James Mansell, Ian Brookes and Andrew Goffey. I also thank my former PhD
colleagues Daniel King, Juyeon Bae, Sriparna Ray, Aaron Calbreath-Frasieur,
Melissa Shani Brown, Mag Yung-Wen and Yu-Peng Lin. My gratitude also
extends to Iain Robert Smith, Caroline Edwards, Emma Crawford, Pedro Sobral
Pombo, Alec Millward and Filipe Francisco. Their support at different stages of
this project provided me with confidence and emotional backing.
I wish to express my gratitude to Pedro Costa, for the information provided
during two interviews in 2012 and 2013 and during several email exchanges
over the years. I am also thankful to Francisco Villa-Lobos for providing me
with information about the production of In Vanda’s Room, Colossal Youth and
Change Nothing. Likewise, this book also benefited greatly from information
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
provided by many film professionals whom I met or conversed with via email
over the years. I wish to thank Abel Ribeiro Chaves (OPTEC Filmes), Patrícia
Saramago, Cláudia Tomaz, Jörg Schneider (Das Kleine Fernsehspiel, ZDF),
Daniel del-Negro, Cláudia Rita Oliveira, Chris Barwick (Second Run), Craig
Keller (Masters of Cinema), Pedro Borges (Midas Filmes), Ji-Hoon Jo (JIFF),
Yano Kazuyuki (Cinematrix) and Teresa Villaverde. Many thanks also to
Valérie Massadian and Richard Dumas for their generosity in allowing me to
reproduce their photographs on the cover of the book and in Chapter 4, respec-
tively. I am also grateful for the information and resources offered by Teresa
Barreto Borges (Cinemateca Portuguesa), Mariana Pimentel (Instituto do
Cinema e do Audiovisual), Isabel de Carvalho (RTP), Francisco Ferreira, the
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the library staff at the Glasgow School
of Art. Thanks are also due to the School of Modern Languages and Cultures
and the Graduate School at Nottingham, whose research travel grants in 2012
and 2013, respectively, allowed me to carry out research in Lisbon during the
initial stages of this project.
Special thanks also go to everyone at Edinburgh University Press, espe-
cially to Gillian Leslie, Richard Strachan and the ReFocus: The International
Directors Series team, Robert Singer, Stefanie Van de Peer and Gary D. Rhodes.
Thank you for your patience, generous guidance and constant encouragement.
My gratitude is extended to the anonymous EUP readers for their comments
and suggestions regarding the book’s initial proposal.
Portions of this book have been previously published as an article and as
book chapters. A section of Chapter 2 appeared in a different form as ‘Pedro
Costa on the Island of the Dead: Distant Referencing and the Making of Casa
de Lava’ in Adaptation, vol. 7, issue 3 (2014). I would like to thank the editors
and anonymous reviewers from Oxford University Press for their invaluable
comments. Two sections of Chapter 5 appeared initially in a chapter included
in Slow Cinema (2016, Edinburgh University Press), edited by Tiago de Luca
and myself, and in a chapter included in Portugal’s Global Cinema, edited by
Mariana Liz (2018, I. B. Tauris, used with the permission of Bloomsbury
Publishing Plc). I am extremely grateful to Tiago and Mariana for their pro-
ductive comments.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Maria Manuela Marinho de Castro,
for her dedicated and unconditional support over the years, and to Jaime, for
bringing light to my life. This work is dedicated to you both.
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