COLOSSAL YOUTH (Pedro Costa, 2006)

Reminiscent of Elem Klimov’s Farewell (1981), Portuguese writer-director Pedro Costa’s Juventude Em Marcha completes his Fountaínhas trilogy. The Cape Verdean shantytown is being demolished, its inhabitants relocated northward to a housing project in a Lisbon suburb. The film begins with the voices of indeterminate people and ends with the sound of an infant’s contentment.
     Apparently, 75-year-old communal patriarch Ventura (Ventura, dignified, without false nobility, part of the nonprofessional casting) has lost one home but has yet to be deposited in another. Thus the somber film largely consists of his homeless wanderings and drop-ins here and there, including on a daughter or, possibly, surrogate daughter. One character may be a ghost; other ambiguous elements set reality on the border of memory and myth.
     This thoroughly absorbing work, besides providing an unwincing portrait of poverty, casts Ventura amidst the “new” environment; early on, a low camera finds the tall, gracious man “outgunned” by the sterile white buildings towering him. Their juxtaposition is correlative to the battle that the old man embodies. Uprooted, the Creole souls, having already suffered more than their historical share (colonization, slavery), now must face the lonely prospect of losing their culture; their memories and collective memory are being “whited out.”
     In some ways Costa made an unannounced, uncertified Dogme 95 film. (The purist movement had already run its course.) Certainly his (gorgeous) use of natural light—he and Leonardo Simões digitally videographed, transferring the result to 35mm—suggests this; his dim, luxuriantly dark interiors on occasion evoke Rembrandt. Costa fills much space with nothingness—a projection of both current feelings of the characters and their worried-after destiny.
     Costa may cut from one doorway to another or include in the same shot two doorways, one canceling the other. There’s no place to go.
     Staggering.

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BRUTALITY IN STONE (Alexander Kluge, Peter Schamoni, 1961)

Five years earlier than his feature debut, Parting from Yesterday—(Anita G.), which launched one of the most important film movements, the New German Cinema, writer-director Alexander Kluge, with Peter Schamoni, co-directed a 12-minute black-and-white documentary short anticipating the movement-to-come. Brutalität in Stein gathers historical testimony to puncture his nation’s attempt to overlook its recent Nazi history and just get on with its “economic miracle.” The year after this stark work, Kluge helped write and signed the Oberhausen Manifesto, which announced the need for the movement that would shortly arrive.
     Influenced by Alain Resnais, especially his Statues Also Die (1953), which Chris Marker co-directed, Night and Fog (1955) and Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Brutalität in Stein relies on our capacity to analyze tone. On drawings and images of German architecture at and around a Nazi rally area in Nuremberg, it superimposes recordings of speeches by Hitler, Hess and others to suggest that the buildings themselves have retained the memory of this Nazi history. An occasional zoom electrifies the film’s series of very briefly held stills, as does a sweeping camera up grandiose front steps. Hauntingly, by stately, silent forward movement—ghost steps—in symmetrical interiors, the film suggests a German crematorium and the connection among German political speech and spirit (as art embodies it), and the Holocaust. Discolorations on the outside of stone buildings double as reminders of spilt human blood. Another influence: Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (1947); but one must also note that Kluge and Schamoni’s film helped inspire Jürgen Böttcher’s tremendous The Wall (1990), where the Berlin Wall, while it is being dismantled, is transformed at night, by voice recordings and flickering film images from the past, into a sadly vanishing repository of a brace of German memory, history.

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YESTERDAY GIRL (Alexander Kluge, 1966)

With parentheses around her name suggesting (in addition to her imprisonment) how bereft of context Anita G., a Jewish East German migrant, is left by the “parting from yesterday” that she is constantly impressed to pursue, writer-director Alexander Kluge’s Abschied von gestern—(Anita G.) launched the New German Cinema, which confronted West Germany’s attempt to deny the past its due, including Germany’s recent Nazi past, in favor of starting afresh with the “miracle” of economic recovery. Important, astounding, exhilarating, Kluge’s first feature drew inspiration from the nouvelle vague, especially Jean-Luc Godard’s films starring Anna Karina, whom Kluge’s Anita G. is often shot to resemble.
     The film also contests the tyranny of linear narrative, proceeding by shots rather than novelistic scenes, and displaying (delightfully) tracking shots, jump-cuts, sound erasures and comebacks, cartoonish insert, a bit of war with toy soldiers, absurd banter, the time-condensation of romantic relationships through montage, etc. Perhaps casting his sister, Alexandra, in the lead role (which she enacts beautifully) helped Kluge to maintain the film’s human(e) focus in the midst of his dazzling technical devices.
     One of the principal events is the theft of a co-worker’s cardigan sweater, for which Anita G. stands trial. It is the judge who, after asking for Anita G.’s personal history, dismisses this (“the events of 1943-44”) for having no relevance to the course of her conduct. (Her Jewish family’s property, of course, had all been confiscated by the Nazis.) Why did she steal the sweater, the judge asks. “I was cold.” He reminds her it was summer. Anita G.: “I get cold even in summer.” The defendant thus enrobes (or ensweaters?) a pertinent joke in the appearance of courtroom responsiveness, for her remark implies the verboten past.
     Gorgeous black-and-white photography by Edgar Reitz and Thomas Mauch.

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BONES (Pedro Costa, 1997)

One of the finest American films of the 1940s, Gregory LaCava’s Primrose Path (1940), allows us to see how a shantytown environment draws by degrees the teenaged daughter of an aging prostitute into a facsimile of her mother’s fate; by the time a Hollywood-ending rescues Ellie May (Ginger Rogers, achingly good), our sense of damaged existence is unshakable. I thought of LaCava’s sensitive film, with its ancient Greek motto (“We live, not as we wish to, but as we can”), as I watched a film from Portugal, France and Denmark, Ossos, which launched Portuguese writer-director Pedro Costa’s Fountaínhas trilogy. Set outside Lisbon in Estrela d’Africa, a Creole shantytown in Cape Verde, Costa’s brilliant film evokes a tragic slum environment that is inextricable from the characters whose hopeless lives we glimpse and the actions they perform. A girl, Tina, enters her apartment with her newborn, direct from hospital, and immediately turns on the gas to end both their lives—a statement, a significant gesture since she knows that her unnamed boyfriend, the baby’s father, is close behind. The boy enters and turns off the gas; but (our) hope reverts to hopelessness as he puts the baby into a garbage bag and sets out for the purpose of street begging, eventually trying to sell the baby and eventually giving it away. Throughout, the impassive faces of these and other characters shut us out from understanding individual motivation, the better to take in the relationship between character and environment; it could be, finally, that the father is guided by an impulse to protect the baby from Trina, that Trina’s attempt to locate the baby is also to protect the baby, or to get back what little in the world she has, or to get back at her boyfriend in some sort of weird game in which the child, a bone of contention, performs the function of a soccer ball—much as her final act against the boyfriend may be committed either in the spirit of revenge or grim, ancient justice. It doesn’t matter; what matters here are the lost and losing lives, including that of the infant, that we watch.
     In a conversation about the film with Jean-Pierre Gorin included in the Criterion DVD edition of the entire trilogy, Costa likens Ossos to a documentary precisely because of the particular note it takes of the on-location environment in which actual people live and the impact this environment has on their lives. The individual motivation that we do not see, I have decided, doesn’t exist; it is our own self-indulgent safety-valve that we presume, even demand, that it exists. Swaddled in our lives, many of us bring animal instinct rather than Shakespearean complexity to what we do and how we behave. In the dim, dark nighttime exterior shots of this color film (a match for the underlit interiors), people move blindly, dumbly—amazingly, really, as though they had somewhere to go. The father, with his baby in a sack, implacably, unswervingly walks ahead on pavement in a sustained, bravura tracking shot; only in the most immediate present, such as here, does he have any idea of where he is going. And his baby has no idea at all.
     In ways, Costa’s film is Bressonian; at times it seems most like Mouchette (1966), that is, had Mouchette been homicidal as well as suicidal. It is also like L’argent (1983), with its hapless, driven young protagonist—and, like Mouchette and many other films by Bresson, with attention given to disorienting everyday sounds, bursts of clang, toot and door-shuts, that Costa also draws into the fabric of his portrait.
     Best foreign film prize at Entrevues Film Festival (Belfort, France); best cinematography at Venice, Emmanuel Machuel.*

*Along with Pasqualino de Santis, Machuel photographed Bresson’s L’argent.

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CAT’S PLAY (Károly Makk, 1972)

“Old age is hard to bear, especially when it masquerades as youth.”

“Bits of film create a haunting mosaic of existence”: I wrote this about Károly Makk’s great Love (Szerelem, 1971), and the description also applies to his Macskajáték. Both solemn and lightly satirical, this fine, sly Hungarian film—in distracting color that’s no match for Love’s beauteous black and white—is, according to different sources, based on István Örkény’s novella or play. (Of course, both may be correct; think John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.) There is restless humor in its epistolary course: after we see Erzsi, the protagonist, a retired schoolteacher and widow, read a letter from an old acquaintance, Paula, we hear as voiceover the letter that Erzsi writes to sister Giza about Paula and Paula’s letter, and then we see and hear both sides of a telephone conversation between the sisters about Paula and Paula’s letter and Erzsi’s letter, after which Erzsi writes another letter to Giza, this time in response to the phone conversation! It is a way of filling time, filling space (blank sheets of paper) and keeping a toehold in the present, although the past dominates as a subject or direction.
     Indeed, the film opens, pre-credits, with old sepia photographs of the two sisters—an indication of Erzsi’s backward look, which her ringing doorbell interrupts, announcing the arrival of Paula’s letter. Much of what we see in this film is a bit or shard of memory or something that is done to encourage memory’s appearance: Erzsi’s turning off a light; her lying down and closing her eyes. Moreover, the present is inextricable from the past: Erzsi’s jealousy will flare up when visitor Paula takes up with Viktor, a former opera singer with whom she has maintained a platonic relationship masking, apparently, livelier feelings.
     Erzsi has tried hard to maintain the illusion of a settled life, an image that society confers on the no-longer-young. Her life, though, is sensitive, volatile and at times chaotic. The Resnaisian mosaic of pieces of time, the fragmentation of the present into flashes of memory: it is an effort to keep all that is crumbling in some sort of place.

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