Casa De Lava (1994)

Director: Pedro Costa

Screenplay: Pedro Costa

Cast: Inês de Medeiros as Mariana; Isaach De Bankolé as Leão; Edith Scob as Edite; Pedro Hestnes as Edite's Son; Cristiano Andrade Alves as Tano; António Andrade as Kilim; Daniel Andrade as Nhelas; Manuel Andrade as Tcheka; Raul Andrade as Bassoé

Abstract List Candidate

 

It's strange. No one comes back. Every day I see them leave, but they never return.

For his second feature film, Pedro Costa originally wanted to remake Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Likewise however, this is the film when you see the schism unfold from his debut Blood (1989), a good film but one with is very conventionally told, whilst Casa De Lava plants the seeds for his future career, immediately seen as the film progresses. On camera you can see this but even behind it, it was his interactions with the locals of the Cape Verde Islands that would eventually lead him to Fontainhas, the real life location back in Portugal where people he met in Cape Verde passed him gifts to take to the Lisbon based community. It is also in the film itself, as one of the major subplots has male musicians soon travelling to Portugal to become labourers, all in spite of Mariana (Inês de Medeiros) warning them there is no life there. This feels as a result like a prologue, the origin story, of his later films as it was for his career, beginning in the location where these figures originally came from.

Bluntly, Costa would jettison the white outsider character we have here as a protagonist, a nurse named Mariana who comes to the islands with a local Leão (Isaach De Bankolé), left in a deathless coma for two months after a fall at his work at a construction site as a labourer. She is like in so many films the white stand-in in films from the West meant to be our safety net and introduction to other peoples' worlds. This is harsh but a truthful comment to make, especially as Pedro Costa drastically shifted this film from its initial premise as a remake of a Val Lewton production, which was originally meant to have been his genre film with ghosts and the looming volcano the location is built upon. This would begin where his later films like Horse Money (2014) would come from, collaborations with their casts about their actual lives, and with no need for an outsider figure.

Even in Casa De Lava Mariana does not dominate the film though her character is of importance. She comes to the islands from Portugal, and begins to change. It is also explicit how she is an outsider, frankly out of custom to the world she has set herself up in. Her contrast is Edith, played by the legendary actress Edith Scob who has been there to the point she has forgotten Portuguese and only speaks Creole, part of the world fully as a local. Notably as well, whilst we follow the story of Mariana, waiting by Leão's side as he lays still in his bed, this film does not make the same decision to marginalise its local cast in their own story like other productions have, but enfolds their own narratives alongside Mariana's. Again, Costa would drastically change his cinema over a couple of decades, but the DNA of this change can be found here.

What was also clear was how much was distinct to this production. Beginning with grainy footage of a volcano erupting, in this community living under its presence and in places beneath their feet, this world comes off as an idyllic place even if under a still, contemplative eye by cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel, whose work includes Robert Bresson's final film L'Argent (1983). Mainly because, whilst the film shows this world to have many problems, the vibrancy of the community is seen in just how colourful the clothing is, in all the colours of the rainbow, or how mainly set in the day, there is a drastic shift in tone from the future films "chiaroscuro" cinematography with this one's light filled setting. Arguably, it is one of Pedro Costa's most colourful films for how the environment and creative decisions like Mariana's red dress, to aspects naturally of the locations like green painted houses with painted doors.

Likewise, there is more emphasis on brightness to these lives even as the film hints at far more troubling issues along the way. A lot more lightness is to be seen in spite of everything, alongside the greater emphasis on music but having characters being musicians. If darkness is still there, it is deliberately vague. Leão's coma is unexplained, and there are incidents like Mariana being attacked by a young boy on the beach which are startling, warning you not all is what it seems. There are forms hiding in the community, and where people are found injured or in a state of deathless sleep, it slowly burns to a point. That this region was a former Portuguese colony is felt as an undercurrent - Edith has immersed herself in this country as an outsider, conversing with the local women as one of their own and a close friend, secretly stronger than her initial appearance suggests. Her adult son looks out of place and is hostile to the locals like an outsider.

Casa De Lava, whilst not what it was, arguably still has the tension of a horror story, particularly with the tone that is as much a veil over real life human complexity. Something is not right in this place, whilst still more idyllic than the slum community men from this community will move to another country. The environment has layers felt both from that night time attack on the beach and a beloved dog being found dead on the beach. Cape Verde is still a beautiful place but it has problems, where young boys are drinking and there has been a lot of men sleeping around for decades, as many of the women (even as teenagers) can have up to twenty children. Mariana is not exactly the knight here to help either, the film negative to the credulous idea of the white saviour. Built on volcanic land, the geography is itself an apt metaphor for the problems under the surface, that like an actual volcano no one person is able to fix by himself or herself.

As the prologue to the later Fontainhas films, you have a tale explaining why people migrated to Portugal, but then there is not necessarily the tonic to heal oneself either, leading to those future films having a theme of perseverance despite how bleak they can become. Even in terms of this film's plot, the sense of a greater existential pain is felt far before those later films. I mean, played by a young Isaach De Bankolé, we never know Leão ended up in the coma. He fell from a great height at a construction site but never why. As a result, Casa De Lava hides a lot, pretty much signposting the fissure between Costa's debut Blood, which was admirably subtle already in depicting its plot points, to fully rejecting commercial storytelling in the future. The actual ending, whilst with obvious points, is elusive and the only real point learnt is that Mariana finds herself having been manipulated. Edith's son is [Major Spoiler] snatched away, whilst his mother Edith lives in the community happy as ever, bonding with the women in feminist sisterhood. Life has to go on, as the men migrate to find paying work, and we never have any real answers, the horror origins of the production in that whatever force leaves children injured or collapsing in the wilderness in a daze is mysterious. Costa's story, in vast contrast, was clear and growing layers as this great film in his career was a catalyst for a drastic shift in his work too.

Abstract Spectrum: Elusive/Quiet

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Our Man (2010)

a.k.a. O Nosso Homem

Director: Pedro Costa

Screenplay: Pedro Costa

Cannon Fodder

[Cannon Fodder covers work by creators that have had entries on the Abstract List, or of immense worth for myself, to which we delve into this short film from Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa]

A hang out for rats and lizards.

Our Man begins with a mother and an adult son discussing about moving back to Cabo Verde. The mother is wrapped up and sat up in bed, the son with dreadlocks and wearing a red shirt and coat, and they end up on a discussion about a creature, a man who slips a letter into a person's pocket. They have to go with him then, to which he will bore a hole in their head and suck out their blood. This evokes M.R. James' Casting of Runes, an evocative short story from the English author, adapted as Night of the Demon (1957), in which a slip of symbolled paper slipped onto a person's being without them knowing will curse them to being pursued by a horrifying demon. Knowing Costa's love for classic Hollywood cinema, I would not be surprised he knows of the film adaptation at least, directed by Jacques Tourneur who also helmed I Walked with a Zombie (1943), a film he had planned to remake as Casa de Lava (1994) before it became his own creation.  

Suffice to say, jumping to the ending, he turns James' premise to a profound final image, an expulsion letter to leave Portugal, nailed to a pillar with a knife in a striking final shot. If Costa ever felt he could make an actual genre film, which he nearly did with Casa de Lava originally, he would make one now that would deal with the lives of the poverty class and migrant communities from this perspective of a world that acts aliens to them.

Our Man can be seen in itself an epilogue to a trilogy of films set at the Fontainhas quarter, an area in Lisbon slim that Costa came to and has to the modern day held in such respect. The opening, set in a small shack near the city in the distance, eventually cuts to the face of regular cast member Ventura, Costa's key figure here encountering a friend who has been kicked out the house and divorced because he lost his work, and cannot make any money. Desperate enough to bring home an old, wounded dove for dinner, the segment (and most of this short) is Ventura helping this friend, Our Man a snapshot of ordinary lives playing out.

One where there is no major plot, just snippets. Where Suzete, the wife who got her husband to sign a divorce bill without him realising, is lamented over by her ex-husband slumped over a table whilst drunk with Ventura and another male friend who works in a school kitchen, not able to gave them anything else but soup as they only have enough food for the kids. Both stories do cross, as the son, Jose, meets these older men, all whilst witnessing the failed attempt to catch rabbits by hitting bushes with a stick whilst drunk. The banality of life is witnessed, that for these immigrants to Portugal they still have to live, even if anecdotes include being beaten by a group of white men, or being in an open prison when one's father had died, allowed out to help bury the body. Life must still go on regardless.

In fact, befitting the reference to M.R. James, it becomes apparent Ventura has been communicating to a ghost, conversing of not having his gold tooth used to pay for his funeral or joking a passing cat is a rabbit. Costa, as mentioned, has never made a genre film, but he has not either shied away from the unnatural and surreal, even describing the future film Horse Money (2014) as a horror film in its own right, even having Ventura trapped in a lift talking to a living statue alive with countless voices challenging him like a Legion demon.

Our Man offers in itself a fragment of Pedro Costa, these short films in danger of being marginalised in a creator's career but, especially in this case, as worthy to witness as this feels like a piece that interconnects to the others. Whilst not as evocative aesthetically, and with the surprise of how bright open environments stand out in his cinema from his usual nocturnal locations, this does show how Costa was moving in style. The film before this was Colossal Youth (2006), the first for the director with cinematographer Leonardo Simões.  The pair, alongside actors like Ventura who contribute to these films as much, would follow up with two films in the 2010s (Horse Money and Vitalina Varela (2019)) which took this film's empathetic worldview but also include an even greater sense of nocturnal atmosphere. Our Man as a result is able to exist as a chapter in this vast book known as Pedro Costa's entire filmography, as well as be the building blocks from a pre-existing veteran to work from for his new stage of work.

Horse Money (2014)

Director: Pedro Costa

Screenplay: Pedro Costa

Cast: Ventura, Vitalina Varela, Tito Furtado, Benvindo Tavares, Antonio Santos as the Living statue, Alberto 'Lento' Barros, Pedro Tavares, Isabel Cardoso, António Semedo Moreno, Luiz Mendonça, Arlindo Pina, José António Veiga, João Gomes, Maurício Fernandes, Joel Santos

 

We'll keep on being sliced by machines.

 

By the end of Horse Money, I had presumed that the desolate world that Ventura (playing a representation of him) has wandered through was purgatory. Arguably that is the right way to tackle this film on one level, though on further viewing it is a danger that Pedro Costa avoids that he never leaves his cast victimised, instead figures who survive and get on in life in spite of illness, injury, death and isolation. Also, if this be purgatory or the Asphodel Meadows, this one is specifically for the poverty class, as immigrants from the Cape Verde like Ventura's character here wander unstuck through time.  

At moments he claims he is nineteen and three months old, in the middle of March 11th 1975, and at others is he a retired bricklayer and labourer suffering from permanent injuries from a knife attack and possible a form of dementia or symptoms causing his memories to blur together. Whatever the case, he was a man who came to Portugal, gained and lost a job in bricklayer, and is both haunted by memories of a fight he had with another immigrant where he was stabbed, and that he was barely involved with the Carnation Revolution¹, a seismic event when he was there, jabbed about it eventually by a literal personification of it that he did not do enough.

Pedro Costa by the 2010s had fully cemented his reputation in the United Kingdom, because by the time of Vitalina Varela (1990), his follow up, his work (almost entirely through distributor Second Run in the United Kingdom, and more access in the United States) was available finally. Let it be known, his is a unique and "difficult" example of meditative cinema at first, a trajectory that morphed from Blood (1989), a more conventionally created if subtle and still great film, to something entirely alien. It was the second film in his career Casa de Lava (1994), which was meant to be a remake of I Walked With a Zombie (1943), as Costa has openly talked about his love of old American cinema including b-movies, only to have a drastic change of heart mid-production. What happened with Costa was that, getting to Costa Rica to film his remake, he saw the environment, felt a superior film was to be made documenting the environment, and in communicating to the locals, it led to him their migrated families in Fontaínhas, a community back home in Portugal in Lisbon.

Fontaínhas has long disappeared from the form he found it, yet he has kept the place long after its vanishing alive in a form of cinematic spiritualism. Fontaínhas was a slum and whilst there is an inherent danger of a white filmmaker tackling a subject about poverty especially for its black migrant community, a form of poverty pornography, his interactions as been documented led to him actually being challenged for making fabricated stories and changing his work onwards, to singnificantly smaller crews filming the productions and a more intimate collaboration with his casts of non-actors. From Ossos (1997) onwards, the fact he has been in this world for the decades onwards shows this is no longer accusable as a glib vacation for him but a real empathetic art, transcribing a world in work here and elsewhere that is dictated from figures within the community onwards like Ventura, the star of this film, or Vitalina Varela, who plays the female character (her namesake) found for the film and would get her own film in the lead in Vitalina Varela.

Costa is a chronicler of these peoples' lives, this set up with incredibly old monochrome photographs, of people not in Fontaínhas or Portugal but born in turn-of-the-century New York City, images taken by Jacob Riis, a Danish-American social reformer, journalist and social documentary photographer whose work shown here presents the exact tone of the film the viewer will see. Of tenements and shacks with people of various ethnicities together, tiny cramped worlds of labourers with filthy stripped walls and ruffled clothes, even one image of a body cover and being taken away on a stretcher.

Costa's eye to the world is large, by using these images, where poverty is still there in Portugal a century later, where menial work whose payment varies is everywhere, and an unavoidable amount of discrimination is, unfortunately, still in existence of centuries. Here is the thing though, Costa has no interest in stepping on a soap box and grandstanding about the inhumanity of this as is usually the case in one note political films which succeed in no change. Instead, with figures like Ventura and the others here, they are allowed to blur the lines between their lives and this imagined world, telling of the lives of these figures with greater meaning once you discern what is being spoken of, as Ventura of the protagonist wanders between nocturnal urban environments and septic white hospital environments, coming across the ghosts of his life and even having to finally confront the man he was nearly stabbed to death by and he left unable to work, personified in a red shirt that stands out in this mostly nocturnal and white world. This is not "political" in that it reduces these people to mere examples for rhetoric, but a pluralistic attitude of one's everyday life being examined and learning empathy for those figures and their plights as individual human beings, including all the times when society also plays unfair and loose to people just trying to survive.

A plot thread does not make sense to elaborate on Horse Money, instead a work a series of interconnecting events. That of these migrant workers one man, the lead's godson, is found still waiting in the office of a long gone business, waiting just for his salary and having been there for over twenty years, or of the man in the red shirt who looms over Ventura through until the final scene, where with his arm in a cast, they finally confide and mend their past as Ventura feds the other man soup in a gesture of pure kindness in a hospital dining hall so vast yet entirely empty in the darkness baring those two. And so much where their world is involves merely surviving, as a song briefly heard over tableaux of apartment complexes and peoples' lives talks of people selling their land to go to Lisbon, and working in the rain and wind as cheap labour. A scene of Venture's character and another black African being pursued by two white soldiers in the woodland has uncomfortable connotations as well

Yet again, Costa is not interested in just rhetoric or making an unsubtle comment that this is wrong, when sane people should already realise this. Instead these figures have nobility as the film itself shows an almost monotony of these evils, as these human beings, not just perceived as victims, have to get on with their lives with their own complexities in emotions and how they live. Vitalina Varela's introduction, not an actress either when she was found and cast in the film, is a perfect and sobering example of this. For her monologue, explaining her having to travel to Portugal to attend her husband's funeral, she is not played as a one dimensional victim, but a woman like the viewer, only in the position of needing a Visa to be able to stay in Portugal, and being shoved on an airplane sedated and to the point of soiling herself, all in the context of extreme emotional stress. The monologue, one of the most poignant sequences in the room, does not demean the real life Varela or her character by merely playing her as a victim. She is a human being, but the monologue is even more painful seeing her, this noble figure, express an anecdote of the worst that any person could experience.

The most distinct change to Pedro Costa's career was when he met cinematographer Leonardo Simões, something I will learn the more I see Costa's cinematograpry. I am amazed, whilst it is noticible when you learn this, that the film looks the way it does due to celluloid or a HD digital camera but through a DVX100, a digital camera made available in 2002 and more known for being used by independent filmmakers for work like the documentary Murderball (2005). It works but it feels like the collaborating duo pushes their chosen format to its furthest here. "Chiaroscuro" has been the phrase used to describe Costa's films, an atmospheric look where shadows are deep, and the few scenes in light are stark in how septic they are. Probably the most idiosyncratic touch to realise is that, as already mentioned, Costa is influenced by classic Hollywood cinema.

Whilst Costa's cinema is the utter antithesis of most classic Hollywood productions, closer to Japanese filmmakers like Yasujirō Ozu in keeping his camera still, and that the moguls behind those American films probably had polar opposite ideologies, you can feel however both the same sense of grandeur in the aesthetic and also the mood. Just in how Ventura and the cast is depicted, never weak even when his career is bedridden or just wandering the streets at night in underwear and socks, but a striking wanderer and our eyes to the world, seen in how striking the use of minimal light is and how shadows like in old Hollywood movies were used. Likewise, Costa's interest in b-movies has a practical aspiration, as like those films needing to create worlds that sucked their viewers in with minimal budgets, likewise Horse Money feels meticulously crafted from the lights and camera but with mind to being a small budgeted production itself, something he deliberately went to with ideological concerns and he is clearly comfortable with.

It is not necessarily a bleak film either. It feels too relaxed to feel oppressive, closer to melancholy with the world and its suffering. The film also fully embraces the surreal in the scene which won me over, when Ventura finds himself stuck in a lift with a talking statue. It existed in some form before as a separate short, part of an anthology film Centro Histórico (2012), the sequence following an endless moving elevator which feels closer to a nightmare than anything before whilst the statue, a male actor in army fatigues and painted head to toe, is like Legion in that he is many voices speaking from one body. Between talk of fighting for the people, to Ventura keeping behind him as the soldier can still move and has a loaded rifle. Like the title in that short version's form "Sweet Exorcism", this figure forms the ultimate ghost for Venture's character to deal with, having to vanish it from mind to move onwards. Far from a thing of joy, the Carnation Revolution as represented here comes off as an event which would have no assistance for someone like Ventura in real life in the slightest once it has ended in terms of a better life for him, as for all the other black immigrants in the country at the time in the seventies when suddenly the status quo was abruptly overthrown and suddenly work for one day is halted due to a revolution...and life still has to go on, probably still in poverty and isolated still into the modern day. The entire film, which begins with underground medical environments closer to a gothic horror story to leaving them once again at the ending, is to be imagined as a stream-of-consciousness experience and, once embraced for this, is utterly compelling and with meaning as a result, something which desires not a thesis but an analysis of ideas which build emotions instead with greater meaning.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Dreamlike/Methodical

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

 

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1) A 25 April 1974 military coup against the authoritarian Estado Novo regime by a civil resistance campaign, one which was almost entirely bloodless (as the name stems from carnation flowers being placed in soldiers' guns), and had significance in its impact on Portugal losing its African colonies completely and the independence of those countries.

Blood (1989)

Director: Pedro Costa

Screenplay: Pedro Costa

Cast: Pedro Hestnes as Vicente; Nuno Ferreira as Nino; Inês de Medeiros as Clara; Luís Miguel Cintra as the Uncle; Canto e Castro as the Father; Isabel de Castro as the Woman; Henrique Viana as the 1st Creditor; Luís Santos as the 2nd Creditor; Manuel João Vieira as Zeca; Sara Breia as Rosa

Cannon Fodder

[Cannon Fodder: Covering the work from directors/stars/movements that have appeared on the Abstract Canon list, will eventually will, or are personal favourites, or all three at once. Those works which would not qualify for said list.]

You're growing up too fast.

Pedro Costa's debut is completely alien to his later work. A lot changed in his filmmaking attitude, Blood still structured as a narratively paced production which instead shows the subtle little concepts that would eventually transfer to his non-narrative, abstract films like Horse Money (2014). Following two brothers, one a young adult/older teen Vincente (Pedro Hestnes) and his younger brother Nine (Nuno Ferreira), still a kid, the plot is conventionally structured but Costa does not signpost key plot points even with his debut. What is told subtly is that, living just with their father who is slowly succumbing to disease; this reaches a breaking point where it is very much implied Vincente has killed him, having to ask a close friend and potential love interest Clara (Inês de Medeiros) to help him bury the body in the middle of the night. Once the paternal figure is lost, the only possible income being assisting in a shady team of people shifting boxed goods, they with Clara have to fend for themselves. There is, however, the issue of two creditors appear after their late father's debts, and that their uncle appears, feeling the younger brother is not being cared for.

Blood is fascinating in the sense that, before he would evolve to a unique voice, he started on a project that is traditionally structured and created, but that a lot is here already that I was in danger of dismissing by forgetting details. Such as the fact, when watched, that even at his beginning, Costa was obsessed with saturation and shadows in his cinema. Shot in black and white, it is sumptuous to look at and Blood also exhibits the obsession Costa has talked of with classic Hollywood and American b-pictures, their aesthetic proving influence even decades later on the more experimental films. The influence clearly comes from their sense of environment, pulling a viewer into their worlds which would comes further in a film like Horse Money when cinematographer Leonardo Simões               started working on Costa's productions. Costa clearly, undeniably, is fascinated with Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955). Any body of water seen in the film, at night on a river, or involving a boat, is indebted to that film, and whilst his influences may seem paradoxical to his ideals in thought, the aesthetic richness is consistent to a later film like Horse Money, arguably becoming more atmospheric when he got to the later film and jettisoned the necessity of a narrative template.

Blood is a good debut - a drama which would be good in another person's career, but in mind to his career gains greater meaning knowing this was a debut he would build from greatly. There are quirks, such as the moments of levity, a God eye's view camera shot as those lovable if shifty merchandise sellers have to flee with boxes into vans and drive off, or that you even get instrumental synth pop in the soundtrack. It is still undeniably a bleak film at times though, where technically since it is set at Christmas it is a Christmas film, with even Santa Claus is Comin to Town in instrumental form sounding depressed. But, and this is a huge point to his work, he is still concerned for these characters, and neither is any of the trio of leads viewed with sympathy because they are poor or merely outsiders. In mind of how he would change, the changes in his films entirely comes from his introduction to the community of Fontainhas, in the mid nineties, where he was challenged for his storytelling and started working directly with the occupants of this community even long after it had vanished.

Even here with a more "commercial" film, the air quotes still needed, there is still the desire here to have a far more empathetic and deeper view of these characters. The two gangsters after money are revealed to be of a much complicated narrative, at least in terms of who they are with, the other major female figure that is as sympathetic as Clara, and even the uncle wants to do something meaningful in providing for the younger brother a better home. The probably with the later is that, even as someone who we should emphasis with for caring for a disabled infant son, he shows an obvious class bias, middle class to the lower class, in feeling he can make Nino "his son", to dine in restaurants now and watch cartoons on television when he was happier with a cheap pocket calculator for a Christmas gift. It does not help he kidnaps Nino too, nor shows contempt to Vicente and especially Clara, making cruel presumptions including calling her, a person who see work with and care for young children, a whore after money. The complexity offers sympathy for him, but also has this character's flaws are shown and very naturally.

In context, even if you had not seen many films by Costa, Blood is a minor film in his career even as someone who has so much more of his worlds to learn from. On his follow up Casa de Lava (1994), he reconsidered his work mid production and, between scrapping the original premise for a more unconventional structure, and eventually encountering the people of the Fontainhas on his return back to Portugal from Cape Verde, he would change to the future filmmaker he became.  I can already tell, compared to one later film, that this film still had to struggle against its own plotting when its creator will find a greater depth later. But that is not to dismiss the film entirely, as Blood still is admirable. Instead, view it that merely he showed a capability to make a sincere film of great worth but that he evolved drastically to something of a unique voice. Here, making for himself a conventional film, he showed his talent and it would flourish.