About Pedro Costa, 2007-2008 Regents’ Lecturer
Pedro Costa is an artist in residence at UC Berkeley - Department of Spanish & Portuguese, March 1 through 9, and presents the Regents’ Lecture at PFA on March 9.
Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa
“I think that Costa is genuinely great.”—Jacques Rivette
Acclaimed in Artforum, Cahiers du cinéma, Film Comment, and Cinema Scope, the Portuguese director Pedro Costa is possibly the most intriguing, relevant filmmaker at work today, captivating viewers with his spare, austere aesthetic, willful ambiguity, and combination of documentary, avant-garde, and fiction. While his slow-burn, trancelike style is wholly his own, Costa’s earthy portraits of the immigrant and marginalized communities of Lisbon’s slums have emerged from a recognizable, classic narrative background of Ford, Lang, Ozu, and Chaplin, touched with the more modernist palette of Straub-Huillet and Béla Tarr.
Born in Lisbon in 1959, the former rock guitarist Costa entered the then nascent Lisbon Film School in 1977, existing on a steady diet of cinema classics and contemporary criticism that were soon channeled into his astounding debut film, The Blood. His later features, especially his Fontaínhas neighborhood trilogy, abandoned the hectic cineaste’s dazzle of The Blood for a nuanced, intimate, rigorous aesthetic of observation and poetic interludes, marked by Vermeer-like domestic tableaux and a compassionate attention to his dispossessed, forgotten characters. Costa’s method, shooting over extended periods and working with non-actors “playing” fictional versions of themselves, adds an intimacy unprecedented in either fiction or documentary. “Few movies,” wrote Dennis Lim in the New York Times, “are as concretely rooted in physical reality or as profoundly attentive to their social context as Mr. Costa’s. Staking out a radical middle between documentary and fiction, he has invented a heroic and quite literal form of arte povera, a monumental cinema of humble means.”
Jason Sanders
Associate Film Notes Writer
The Pedro Costa retrospective was organized by Ricardo Matos Cabo, Lisbon, and is coordinated at PFA by Kathy Geritz. Pedro Costa’s Regents’ Lectureship at UC Berkeley is sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. We are grateful to the following institutions and individuals for making this series possible: Cinemateca Portuguesa-Museu do Cinema, Instituto do Cinema e Audiovisual (ICA), Ministério da Cultura; Instituto Camões - Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros; Portuguese Studies Program/Institute of European Studies, UC Berkeley;Lusomundo Audiovisuais, and Midas Filmes, Portugal; Thom Andersen; João Bénard da Costa; Haden Guest; and James Quandt.
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