history, community and freedom

Many residents agree that while they’re happy to get away from the decaying buildings and the violence, their biggest losses are the invisible support systems that made their lives livable—favors exchanged in a kind of social bartering, shared child care, extended family within shouting distance, church pastors who had been there for 35 years, friendship. This loss, too, is part of the Plan’s legacy.
- Two Tales of One City (Good Magazine, March/April 2008)


"So, these may be the last days for Dharavi. If so, much that is wretched will be lost. And, who knows, maybe something better will arise. Most of the slum-dwellers doubt this. And a few high-rise blocks, scattered across the slum, do not inspire great hope. Many are half-built and slowly mildewing. Lots of their residents, it is said, have already sold up illegally, and moved back to the slums, seeking things that town-planners cannot provide: a sense of history, community and freedom. Dharavi has these, as well as many horrible problems. It is organic and miraculously harmonious. It is intensely human. Unlike the random tower-blocks, Dharavi makes sense."
- A flourishing slum (The Economist, Dec 19 2007)

Two or Three Things I Know About Fontainhas: No Quarto da Vanda

Assorted thoughts on Pedro Costa's No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda's Room):

The similarities to Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her are striking.
Costa, like Godard, spends a lot of time observing the physical infrastructure of the place, not as an existent reality, but as a process, laying bare the essential components of construction/destruction involved in the realization of physical structure. In these films, we mainly see the machines involved in these processes, revealing their impersonal, structural basis (as in: the structures of capitalist development). The negative effects of this 'development' are explored in greater depth in Colossal Youth.

One interesting architectural component of the neighborhood was the mixing of public and private space. The ad-hoc construction of the neighborhood's buildings created porous boundaries between these spaces; Vanda's room is separated, in lieu of a fourth wall, only by a blanket. The result is a community connected by more than location or history, but also by the everpresent publicness of even private space. [This architectural structuring of community is lost by the demolition of the neighborhood and the residents' re-placement in public housing. One flaw of the bourgeois individualism enforced by the government's housing policy is the forced loss of this intimate sense of community.] The fluid lines between inside and outside are especially present in Costa's sound design, which is nowhere near as 'realist' as it seems; much of the construction noise heard offscreen was recorded separately and added after the fact (Note: I recollect Costa saying this, but don't have this in my notes. If you can confirm or deny, please weigh in. Update: see comments). Costa emphasizes the liminality of space in part through this sound design, which lacks the dialectical opposition of Godard's Two or Three Things in favor of creating a porous boundary between interior and exterior. Costa's construction and emphasis of this porosity focuses our attention on the Fontainhas community being lost by the 'upgrades' given to their physical environment. This community is rooted in their shared familial-historical-linguisticultural-socio-economic situation, but also in the solidarity created by the physical facts of their liminal situation.

Costa's interest in doors/rooms/liminal spaces is just one extension of his interest in the mixture of public and private space. Streets, per Costa, "can be more secretive than houses." The residents feel connected to their homes, to their space - a connection lost by the time of Colossal Youth. The neighborhood itself is like a secret world, harder to see than to look at. Costa approaches this world like a student, seeing oppositions - Vanda and the women in one world, the boys in another - that both insiders and outsiders would miss. As someone who has integrated himself into the community, but who can never fully lose his 'outsider' status for reasons of education, socioeconomics and profession, Costa is uniquely positioned to see both forest and trees.



Costa shot for 2 years and spent another year editing the footage to make the film. The story developed over the course of shooting, based on things that happened (Costa: "I dont have ideas for films"). Then a scene would be performed once, though the first take was always, according to Costa, bad. A week later they would shoot the same scene again, and it would be funny, interesting. Costa never wrote anything down; it was instead a mental editing process, an effort at improving what had been done before. One scene details the reactions of Vanda and another character to the death of Geny, who lived in the neighborhood. The first take, shot on the day of the event, was too emotional, full of too many tears. The scene was shot many times, once every week or so. The take used in the film was shot 6 months after the event. (The take used was emotionally understated, and Vanda was unhappy with it; she preferred the more emotional first take.)

Costa is allowed these liberties because he has integrated himself into the community. The neighborhood is, in a way, his office, where he goes every day to work. Costa told us about his dream of starting a TV station in the neighborhood, one that caters to and produces content from Fontainhas itself. But the neighborhood itself is moving toward the point when it no longer exists (the end result of the 'development' we see in No Quarto da Vanda is the transplantation and resettlement so central to Colossal Youth). Costa hopes to "test this impossibility" of continuing to work in the neighborhood: "the main work, I think, is still to be done there for me."

Youth on the March: The Politics of Colossal Youth

"The past is fraternal, utopian, romantic... The present is resigned, unfortunate, mediocre." - Pedro Costa


Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth / Juventude em Marcha has been rightly praised by English-language cinephiles as a work of uncommon poetic spirit. Costa's mix of documentary and fiction storytelling - going back at least as far as 1997's Ossos - places people in the actual settings of their (marginalized, poverty-stricken) lives, performing a fictional version of their lives. His static camera creates a near-oppressive frame; his actors/nonactors are at once more naturalistic and less expressive than those of Bresson. Costa elides action in favor of repercussion, and uses duration to focus attention; what could be boring forces one to look closer, asking the viewer's eyes to do the work of Bresson's montage and the viewer's thoughts to decode what's been left unsaid.

"[S]ometimes in the cinema, it's just as important not to see, to hide, as it is to show. The cinema is perhaps more a question of concentrating our gaze, our vision of things."¹

Most of what I've read on Costa in English focuses on these formal aspects. Some writers have alluded to Colossal Youth as a political film, but they see it as a politics of stasis and of social oppression, a social-realist portrait of the Portuguese immigrant underclass. This is certainly one aspect of Costa's work, but there is a much deeper level of politics to this film.

BACKGROUND:
Portugal's Estado Novo was an authoritarian regime based on Italian fascism and the heir to the Ditadura Nacional, the product of a conservative military coup in 1926. Beginning in the early 1960's, Portugal's African colonies began their battles for independence. The Portuguese Colonial War began in 1961 with the struggle for Angola, and within 3 years included Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Mozambique - all of Portugal's colonies in Africa. "War," singular, because these national liberation movements were fought by Marxist political parties who linked their struggle (see: Conference of Nationalist Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies). The Cape Verdean revolutionary group, PAIGC, was founded by Amílcar Cabral.²

By the late 60's the Estado Novo faced resistance at home as well as abroad. As the war continued, student unrest provided the ideological underpinning for acts of sabotage: Armed Revolutionary Action (a branch of the Portuguese Communist Party) and the Revolutionary Brigades bombed and sabotaged military targets. Discontent within the army surged as they found themselves attacked by guerrillas in a desperate, unwinnable war. On April 25, 1974, a leftist military coup led by the Movimento das Forças Armadas brought down the Estado Novo. Thousands joined the insurgent soldiers in the streets of Lisbon offering them flowers to place in their guns - this was the Carnation Revolution. The MFA promised 3 D's: Democratisation, Decolonisation and Development.³

Two songs were used to code orders for revolutionary action at the launch of the coup. The first, "E depois do adeus" by Paulo de Carvalho, alerted the rebel captains and soldiers to begin the coup. The second was Zeca Afonso's "Grândola, Vila Morena," a song forbidden on Portuguese radio at the time, which signalled the start of the MFA's takeover and announced the start of the revolution.

FORGOTTEN HISTORIES:
At first glance, Colossal Youth gives the appearance of being almost atemporal, with no clearly delineated narrative, a series of scenes that take place in ambiguously defined present. Though there is some blurring of memory and past/present, the setting of the film is both specific and specifically political. As Costa himself said, "there are two parts to this film, a past and a present of the Fontaínhas, that coincide also with the before and the afterwards of the 25 of April."⁴ The "before" scenes are those of Ventura and Lento in the work shed. They fearfully shut themselves in the shed during the April 25th Revolution. Why would they be afraid of a coup that ends the military dictatorship? Costa:

"I realized that the 25 of April, which for me was an enthusiasm, had been for Ventura a nightmare. He arrives to Portugal in 1972, finds well-paid work, gets a contract. Thinks that he is going to escape. Afterwards comes the Revolution and he tells me the secret history of the Cape Verdean immigrants in Lisbon after April 25th, the history that nobody has yet told. They had a lot fear of being expelled or of ending up in prison. They barricaded themselves. At that time I was in the street, I was an adolescent. During shooting, we found an album of pictures of the demonstrations of the 1st of May with thousands of people celebrating, and it’s incredible: you don’t see one black person. Where were they? Ventura told me that they were all together, paralyzed by fear, hidden in the Jardim da Estrela, afraid for the future. He told me that the military police, in full euphoria, went off at night to the shantytowns to "hunt blacks". It seems that they tied them to the trees to amuse themselves."⁵

The present-day scenes - during and after the destruction of Fontainhas - make up the bulk of the film. The neighborhood's destruction leads Ventura to a new apartment, with room for his children (in spite of the fact that there's no mention of children in his file). Does he ever find them? The "children" of Ventura's never seem to materialize, though some accept their role as surrogate children. Costa has said that Ventura's (missing) children are the "children" of April 25th:

Juventude em marcha is also a film about the failure of the 25 of April, because if the Revolution had succeeded, neither Ventura nor the others would have continued in the same abandonment and in the same unhappiness for the last 30 years. I am not going to bring up the irony of the film’s title, but neither is it possible for me to forget that all the "children" of Ventura are children of April 25th. Filming these things the way I did does not put much faith in democracy. People like Ventura built the museums, the theaters, the condominiums of the middle-class. The banks and the schools. As still happens today. And that which they helped to build was what defeated them. There are two parts to this film, a past and a present of the Fontaínhas, that coincide also with the before and the afterwards of the 25 of April. The past is fraternal, utopian, romantic. In this time is the story of the love-letter that Ventura repeats. The present is resigned, unfortunate, mediocre."⁶

COLOSSAL YOUTH vs JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA:
"Colossal Youth" comments on the passage of time and the weight of memory. "Juventude em marcha" carries this meaning as well, but also implies the failure of past radicalism. "Juventude em marcha," literally "Youth on the march," is a revolutionary slogan implying the change of the old order. Ventura is an old man, though, long since left behind by this march. This is a story of the aftermath of revolution as well as the aftermath of youth, and the way we are haunted by ghosts of our past. Ventura spends much of the film looking for his children, but cannot find them. He also asks after Vanda's mother. She responds: "Ventura, my mother's buried in Amadora Cemetery." Ventura's memory is misdirected, his memories shuffled; his head bandage implies as much. To explain his head wound, he says "I slipped and fell off the scaffold." As we learn later, it was not Ventura that slipped and fell, but Lento - and the fall was fatal. Seeing Lento in the 'present' of the film, Ventura himself is literally haunted by the loss of his younger self's hopes for the future. Also in the film's present, Vanda (a recovering drug addict, supplied with methadone by the state) speaks to Ventura about the problems of drugs and poverty: "When they give us white rooms, we'll stop seeing these things." Whether this is genuinely hopeful or fatalistically resigned because it is so plainly untrue, we can recognize this as a call for revolution.
Ventura's hopes as a young man certainly involved such a revolution. In the film's past, he plays a record for Lento, Labanta Braço by Os Tubarões:

Labanta Braço - Os Tubarões

The lyrics are as follows:

Labanta braço se bô grita bô liberdade (x4)

Grita povo independanti
Grita povo liberdado

Cinco di Julho sinonimo di liberdadi
Cinco di Julho caminho aberta pa flicidadi

Grita "viva Cabral"
Honra combatentes di nos terra

[my English translation:]
Raise your arms up to shout for freedom (x4)

Cry out independent people
Cry out liberated people

The 5th of July, synonym for liberation
The 5th of July, open path to happiness

Cry out "Long live Cabral”
Honor the fighters of our land

As Rui Gardnier pointed out, this is a liberation song, but again the political context is more specific; it is a Cape Verdean liberation song, celebrating newfound independence (the 'Cabral' mentioned is Amílcar Cabral; Cape Verde earned its independence from Portugal on July 5, 1975). That is to say, it's an anti-colonial anthem, being listened to by immigrants from the colonies living in the capital of the (former) Empire. Ventura's unreliable memory adds an even more poignant political dimension to this song at the film's end, when he sings "Grita, grita Cabral." Instead of a celebration of a successful revolution, he cries for change, replacing the 'long live' with another cry. For Ventura as well as for Costa, the film chronicles the need for change, and itself cries out for a revolution that lives up to its ideals. The revolution misremembered itself and left Ventura - and all his children - forgotten.


NOTES ON THE PIECE ABOVE:
Special thanks to André Dias at Ainda não começámos a pensar for excerpting that invaluable interview with Pedro Costa, that I wouldn't have otherwise discovered (anyone know where I can get it in full?).
All translations are my own; anyone with a better knowledge of Portuguese than mine is encouraged to offer suggested corrections (especially for the song lyrics, which are in a Cape Verdean criole). I would love to expand this into an article for publication, if there's a venue for it, so any feedback is appreciated. [I'd also like to do an in-depth analysis of the way memory works in the film, but that's a project for another day.]
If you've made it this far, you should watch this trailer for the film:





¹ from Pedro Costa's lectures on film at the Tokyo Film School in March of 2004, collected and published in Rouge as A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing.
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² Amilcar Cabral's political thought and role in the liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde is discussed at some length in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil.
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³ For more, see Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (Robert Kramer and Philip Spinelli, 1977).
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^{4, 5, 6} My translation of 2 sections of an interview excerpted at Ainda não começámos a pensar, from an original interview with Pedro Costa entitled "Guarda a minha fala para sempre." Interview conducted by Francisco Ferreira, published in the Nov 25, 2006 edition of Expresso-Actual.
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