Portuguese Cinema on Criterion
Sunday, November 1, 2020 at 12:00PM ;)
It's not often that one gets the opportunity to promote Portuguese cinema in these parts of the internet. Despite good reviews and some acclaim across the festival circuit, it's rare to find films from Portugal being discussed internationally. Even though I love my country's pictures, I find it difficult to justify writing a piece about them for The Film Experience, especially considering plenty of readers don't have access to said films. When the opportunity strikes, one can't waste it.
Recently, the Criterion Channel has curated two collections focused on the works of Pedro Costa and João Pedro Rodrigues, some of Portugal's most important contemporary filmmakers [some NSFW images after the jump]...
Où en êtes-vous, João Pedro Rodrigues? (2017)
The history of Portuguese cinema is long and complicated, tracing back to the 19th century and the development of the art form in its primitive age. For our purposes today, it's important to have in mind that, like in many European countries, a new cinematic vanguard started to emerge in Portugal during the 1960s. Furthermore, in 1974, the Carnation Revolution overthrew the fascist dictatorship, enlivening the flames of change in the realm of cinema.
What this means is that, while the 80s might look like a stale decade of blockbuster consolidation in the history of American movies, the Portuguese perspective is quite different. Thanks to all the changes of the past two decades, the 1980s saw a new breed of artists appear in the panorama of Portugal's small film industry. For the first time, cinephiles who had studied the seventh art in an academic environment were making pictures themselves.
Two of those film students who were keen on changing the face of Portugal's cinema were Pedro Costa and João Pedro Rodrigues, the two directors celebrated by the Criterion Channel. For the sake of clarity, let's look at each of them separately, starting with Costa.
Pedro Costa with his Golden Leopard for Vitalina Varela
Having studied in the Lisbon Theatre and Film School (my alma mater!), Pedro Costa started working in cinema as an assistant director. In 1984, he signed his first short film, É Tudo Invenção Nossa, and, by 1989, he was completing his first feature, Blood. The black-and-white drama got quite a lot of attention, being selected to represent Portugal at the 64th Academy Awards and its Best Foreign Language Film race. As always, Portuguese cinema was ignored by AMPAS.
Neither of those projects is available on Criterion. What is streaming, however, is a selection of works that allow us to see how the neorealist aesthete who created Blood would become the poet behind last year's Golden Leopard winner Vitalina Varela. It all started in 1994, when the director went beyond Portugal's continental borders to shoot his sophomore feature, Casa de Lava aka Down to Earth.
Down to Earth (1994)
Starring known actors like Inês de Medeiros (Maria's sister), Isaach De Bankolé, and Édith Scob, and shot in Cape Verde, the film's a nightmare of post-colonial alienation. It's a slow experiment, deadly beautiful but sterile, just like the burned landscape of volcanic rock that fills the screen. In many ways, it's a piece well at home in the tradition of 90s arthouse Euro dramas, though its making would forever change Costa's career and artistic ethos.
During the shooting, Costa came into contact with many people whose families were living in Portugal. Upon his return to Europe, the director found himself in possession of many letters from those Cape Verdeans, acting as a mailman. The delivery of said letters brought Costa into the Fontainhas, a shantytown in Lisbon whose misery and community both aggrieved and enchanted the director. From that moment on, the Fontainhas neighborhood would consume and mutate his films.
Ossos (1997)
His next work, Ossos, was shot there and, just as before, Costa mostly employed professional actors. The picture caused a great ruckus at the time, promoting a public debate about the conditions in which the marginalized and the poor were living, even in the country's capital. However, it's a bit of a miraculous failure in the context of Costa's filmography, the bloody womb from which his new vision of cinema was birthed.
Filming inside the neighborhood made the director aware of how disruptive the whole apparatus of filmmaking was to the place's way of existing. The lights were especially out of place as was the imposition of a narrative plot over the raw reality. After Ossos's miscalculated contradictions, Costa would return to Fontainhas, but he'd leave the artifice of his old cinema behind. Equipped with a digital video recorder and a couple of mirrors, he set out to celebrate the lives of the community. He filmed the people to crystalize them in cinema, not to make them into symbols for social change. In some ways, his humanism and refusal of shouted propaganda made Costa's cinema even more caustically political than before.
In Vanda's Room (2000)
His following picture is, to my mind, his best. The three-hour-long In Vanda's Room was shot over many months throughout which Costa shot conversations between heroin addicts and despondent immigrants, letting their rhythms define what the film was about instead of the other way around. The result is an epic of observation that may test a lot of viewer's patience, but that contains a strange gloomy beauty. It's not misery porn, the fangs of exploitation having been pulled by force, leaving a more complicated beast of cinema, one that unrests instead of shocking, that hypnotizes and immerges.
At the same time he was shooting In Vanda's Room, Costa also recorded the demolition of Fontainhas, meshing it into the rest of the picture. The public outrage that Ossos had helped brought upon was the death sentence for the community, whose inhabitants were relocated to social housing. Those big white, inhuman, buildings were to become the set of Costa's next film, the colossus of Colossal Youth. Just like In Vanda's Room was shaped by the addict called Vanda, this new project was made in the image of its protagonist, an immigrant from Cape Verde called Ventura.
Colossal Youth (2006)
This new face became Costa's muse, a man whose words ring with portentous meaning and a shadow of lyricism, whose presence draws mysticism from the shadows. And what deep shadows they were. Since he shut the lights in Ossos, Costa's cinema had been plunged in darkness, looking more like the hallucinatory twin of Caravaggio's paintings rather than urban decay. His images are as beautiful as they are haunting. So are the faces of his cinema, be it Ventura or Vitalina Varela's titular figure. His cinema isn't for everyone, but I adore it.
Phantom (2000)
If Costa represents political unrest through minimalism, shadows, and quiet observation, João Pedro Rodrigues' cinematic universe is an explosion of horny revolt. Unashamedly queer, coursing with desire and kitschy fury, this director's projects are as memorable as those of Costa, though much less punishing in their pace. 2000'sPhantom, Rodrigues' first feature, is an example of that, moving swiftly through a nocturnal reverie of fetishism and humiliation, cum and urine, flesh, and garbage.
He studied in the same school as Costa, having completed his thesis film in 1988. It would take a while before he'd make a name for himself, but, by the beginning of the 21st century, this director was starting to get the recognition he deserved. Phantom hit the Venice Film Festival with a bang, prompting controversy due to its graphic non-simulated sex scenes and scatological episodes. Some even asked for the festival director's resignation.
Two Drifters (2005)
That didn't stop Rodrigues from taking his second feature, 2005's Odete aka Two Drifters, to Cannes. While I don't think this is the director's best work, I must confess that it's my favorite of his films, existing in the strange middle ground between a reinvented Persona and gay porn, between All About My Mother and an exorcism. It's often ridiculous, even funny in its macabre lunacy where death, fecundity, and sexuality are like soluble masses colliding and melding into each other. Pardon my lack of clarity, but one doesn't want to spoil this delightful film's insane plot and premise. You have to see it to believe it.
Nest on the Criterion Channel's selection, there's To Die Like a Man, Portugal's failed Oscar submission, and an abrasive character study about an aging drag queen contemplating a crisis of gender identity. Sadly, none of Rodrigues' documentary dreams directed alongside João Rui Guerra Mata are available to stream, but, at least, viewers can take delight in the meta-cinematic profanity of The Ornithologist, for which Rodrigues won the Best Director prize at Locarno.
The Ornithologist (2016)
A gospel of bird-watching and lewd erotica where the Holy Ghost is an intrusive bird and golden showers turn into baptisms of piss, this picture would scandalize if it weren't so purposefully ethereal, almost immaterial. By far, Rodrigues' most abstract picture, The Ornithologist acts as a self-portrait and twisted biography, a dream and a confession where hunky Paul Hamy plays the puppet through which the director's voice comes out. Pagan, Christian, Buddhist, and Olympian, this is the sort of picture that makes one believe in the divinity of cinema itself. At least, I'm a convert.
The Criterion Channel collection of João Pedro Rodrigues' projects also includes a short whose more explicit self-reflection can help decipher The Ornithologist's ideas. In any case, it's a wonderful taste of the director in a more free-forming sort of expression, unmoored by the grandiosity of feature-length storytelling. It's also very horny, but so are all of the pictures in his blissful filmography.
Are you enticed by these films from Portuguese auteurs?
Reader Comments (12)
I'm surprised by your introduction, because it seems that Costa and Miguel Gomes are probably two of the most celebrated contemporary auteurs, well seen and known by international audiences.
Anyway, I just recently watched O FANTASMA for the first time. It definitely stayed with me.
Jonathan -- I probably have a skewed opinion on the subject, thinking they deserve even more attention than they get. Every time I see a piece on Costa, Gomes, Rodrigues, and others in international publications I get giddy. Thanks for your feedback and different perspective.
I just haven't been able to get into Costa much. I get the feeling his are the kind of films that work best via a theater screening, but João Pedro Rodrigues has been a major new find for me. THE ORNITHOLOGIST may be the most interesting queer film of the last half decade.
I'm intrigued.
Obrigado por divulgar o cinema português. Sua escrita é linda e seu amor pelo cinema transborda a cada palavra.
I have Costa's trilogy as a wishlist that I hope to have real soon. I know they're challenging but I want to give them a shot.
Love your writing. Great addition to the site.
And as a Portuguese, it's great to see our cinema spotlighted here ..
I've seen Casa de Lava, The Ornithologist, and O Fantasma and was spellbound by all of them. Hopefully I'll get to check out some of these other films now that Criterion has made them available.
Dan Humphrey -- His cinema is very challenging and I completely understand why some people aren't into it. I've even read some very valid arguments against his methodology. That being said, I'm a fan and indeed his films take on another power on the big screen. VITALINA VARELA looked gorgeous and the sudden sunny tableaux near the end were even more jarring on the big screen.
Alguém -- Obrigado pelas palavras amáveis. Fico feliz queue tenhas apreciado o texto.
thevoid99 -- If you do end up watching them, I hope you like them. At the very least, they are aesthetically intriguing.
Xavier -- I love Portuguese cinema, so it's a pleasure to promote when the chance presents itself.
thefilmjunkie -- Hope you like the other pictures of those directors too. The Ornithologist is spellbinding indeed and one of my favorite queer films of the last decade.
Thank you all for the feedback. I'm always grateful for your comments.
From these I have seen Phantom and Ornithologist. Still not sure how to feel about Phantom, but Ornithologist is fascinating.
I always wanted to ask you for a list of non-Oliveira portuguese movies to watch, so this is great. Aren't you into Miguel Gomes? Also kudos to your country for how well is handling the pandemic compared to Spain.
VITALINA VARELA is one of the movie shortlisted by the Portuguese Academy of Cinema to be submitted for the Oscar of Best International Film
#TeamVV
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LISTEN, MOSQUITO and PATRICK are the other ones shortlisted