In the wake
After watching Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela, I found it quite strange that critics tend to discuss his later films (not “late” - the late of “late style”, “late capitalism”, “belatedness”) in terms of subtraction, of things being “stripped down” or stripped away. Plot, dialogue, levity, a recognisable world, we’re usually told by the denizens of middlebrow arts sections, are so absent as to make these long crepuscules “hard work”. As if narrative were a matter of addition: events, concrete details of setting or objects, subjects of identification, causality and significance emerging out of such an aggregate of things for the viewer to hold on to. Even if Costa’s characters - a very odd and unstable category - are destitute, they aren’t defined by absence or lack. This curiosity is even more stark in the case of Vitalina Varela, focused, as the title suggests, around a Cape Verdean woman who has lost the husband who abandoned her years before. Mourning, as Freud saw it, was the continued cathexis of an external object in its absence, until the absence itself can be internalised in the way presence once was.
Costa’s films are, rather, filled with a peculiar kind of presence: like the major works of Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson, they are primarily portraits of objects and figures, that don’t make the world fuller but are merely there in their facticity. (Think of the shaded interiors and resting clothes of Tokyo Story, or the pocketbooks of Pickpocket.) They’re exemplified by Vitalina and the house her husband left behind: as Costa said in a Film Comment interview, while it seems at first that some residue of the past is haunting the house - mourning made spatial, as in the opening figment of the Ghost in Hamlet - it’s Vitalina herself who is doing the haunting. The strange nature of the film’s portraits of presence align it with what Fred Moten describes in the essay ‘The Case of Blackness’, that “black social life”, such as it is, is marked by its position between phenomenology (“the lived experience of the black”) and objecthood, the historical fact of being a commodity to be sold on the auction-block. It’s poetic that, as he recalled in a conversation with Laura Mulvey, the film that inadvertantly set off the Fontainhas sequence, 1994’s Casa de Lava, was originally intended as a remake of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943) in Cape Verde. The story of the living object, the black worker reanimated by witchcraft, becomes a tale of postcolonial subjects who inhabit something that white ontology doesn’t precisely recognise as ‘life’.
This political conception of subjects and objects is bound up with the films’ other immediately striking feature, their gorgeous and deeply artificial composition. When people call the films “painterly”, as with Kubrick in Barry Lyndon (1974), they’re thinking of specific painters, primarily of the Italian and Spanish Baroque: Caravaggio, Velásquez, Salvator Rosa and Rembrandt’s history paintings. Spatially distinct planes marking out the receding space of the shot are marked out by violently clashing uprights and diagonals picked out in contrasting chiaroscuro. (In this they form a sort of negative of Michael Powell’s compositions in Black Narcissus or The Red Shoes.) Their colours tend to run through a narrow spectrum of fairly muted shades, off-white to mud-brown and the dun red of Ventura’s striped pyjamas in Horse Money (2014). By contrast, light and shade are pushed to extremes: black becomes an immaterial mass, outlining areas of space with only a partial regard for the objects casting shadow, while high light - the strong, localised yellow light of late afternoon, the red light of evening, the burning white light of exterior overhead lamps - settles onto unintuitive places, covering the bottom half of a face or sidelighting someone at just too sharp an angle to provide a good three-quarters profile. The camera placement, particularly in Horse Money and Vitalina Varela, tends to be low and static, as in Ozu’s mature films, so that the frame fills with the expanse of rooms and bodies up to the ceiling or, as in one striking shot towards the end of Vitalina…, a night sky unnaturally bloody with light pollution and ground-level lamps. The stasis isn’t a continuation of the “painterly”, but a way of opening an aperture onto immediacy, the sheer intolerable and untouchable presence of wind moving the trees. Lighting is (political) being in these films. It reveals, in its dreamy horror, the structure of the world. It operates as an inversion of the odd lighting conventions in the Dark Souls games: in them, a dim spotlight follows your character as you walk through otherwise pitch-dark dungeons or castles, a localised reflection of the “ember” of individual consciousness, illuminating the surfaces around. In Costa, darkness and its distribution outlines space; if subjects are picked out, it’s only as crags and fissures of the combined and uneven mise-en-scéne of poverty. The title of 2006’s Colossal Youth, the first of these later Fontainhas films, suggests some of the melancholy difficulty of the matter of people in space. It refers to the free-standing kouros statues of nude male youths found throughout archaic and classical Greece, whose upright posture marks them out as particularly human, levered up from the horizontal of animality. (The original Portuguese title, Juventude Em Marcha, translates roughly as “youth on the march”, conjuring the memory of the Carnation Revolution of 1974 and Cape Verde’s independence struggle.) Although Costa’s characters repeatedly assert their vertical dignity - particularly Ventura, tall and walking with the monumental unconcern of Robert Mitchum or Ward Bond - they just as often find themselves succumbing to gravity, slumped in chairs, reclining in bed or, late in Colossal Youth, lying on the floor of a newbuild flat as they’re moved out of the slums.
Jonathan Romney notes that, in Horse Money in particular, even Costa’s exteriors look like interiors. Like the recurrent gesture in the films of Daniéle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub of bringing the camera outside - the hilltop shot overlooking Rome in Othon (1969), togaed actors in the foreground and lush greenery and honking traffic in the background, or the overhead shot of a choked road on the banks of the Tiber at the end of Fortini/Cani (1976) - Costa turns to the fresh hit of actuality, but there’s nothing fresh about it anymore. I was thinking about this in relation to another film I watched, a month and a half before lockdown began to end in the UK, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962). Monica Vitti and Alain Delon’s lovers meet in the new residential neighbourhoods of Rome, brushing hands as they walk across freshly tarmaced roads, lying in the waste ground cleared for development, agreeing to their final rendezvous at the corner of a building site. Coronavirus has charged every such space and mutual gesture with terror, one that compounds as the government continues to mishandle the easing of lockdown. But the built environment of L’Eclisse is also the world of post-war welfare states: Monica Vitti’s palatial estate flat is unthinkable now after 40 years of neoliberalism, separated from the “economic miracle” of Italy in the 1950s. Both the residual beauty and neurasthenic discomfort of their lives can’t be ours; they’re the object of a nostalgia that the film itself, in the empty and unhuman glide through architecture of its final shots, refuses. In Costa, this bounty of the exterior, that was in any case always founded on the exploitation of European colonies and their migrant labourers, has vanished. What remains is the shell of Vitalina’s house, where she shelters and feeds fellow Cape Verdeans, sitting a few feet apart, who leave to go back to sleeping in the train station, and the roof lets in the rain and black of night.