Between the Black Box and the White Cube

Chapter 5 looks at Pedro Costa’s commissioned works by discussing numerous video installations created and displayed within the international art gallery circuit. The chapter contextualizes the approximation of the art gallery to cinema, a medium which increasingly overlaps aesthetic and production processes with contemporary artistic practices. As this chapter argues, the analysis of Costa’s video installations offers a further context to the intertwinement between aesthetics, production and consumption observed elsewhere in his filmic output. These works for the ‘white cube’ rely on aesthetic, authorial and production characteristics that bond them to those exclusively produced for the ‘black box’. This chapter provides comparisons between these works and short films directed by Pedro Costa between 2007 and 2012, such as The Rabbit Hunters, Tarrafal (also produced in 2007), O Nosso Homem (Our Man, 2010) and Lamento da Vida Jovem (Sweet Exorcism, 2012).

Digital Filmmaking at the Interstices

This chapter offers a comprehensive discussion of the making of In Vanda’s Room (2000). It contextualises Pedro Costa’s use of digital video to sustain a low-budget shooting process that merges personal and professional agency. This filmcan surely be considered the filmmaker’s most radical approach to filmmaking, particularly with regards to its shooting process. Unsurprisingly, it is commonly analysed as the result of a personal endeavour which privileges creative independence and artisanal practices steering away from film industry norms. As this chapter explains, however, the film is as much a result of a low scale digital video artisanal practice as it is of production negotiations commonly observed in European film co-productions. Examining this interstitial quality, this chapter offers a fresh insight into the making of In Vanda’s Room by also scrutinising its finance and post-production processes, overlooked in previous academic and non-academic literature about the film.

Negotiating Filmmaking: Adaptation, Location and Docufiction

Chapter 2 contextualises Pedro Costa’s transition from a young director working within the constraints of Portuguese national cinema to an emergent European filmmaker enjoying a more efficient and substantial co-production framework. It traces Costa’s authorship and production processes of Casa de Lava (1994) and Bones (1997). It highlights two main aspects that became present inCosta’s oeuvre. The first is the evolution from an authorial process shaped bycinephilia-informed influences to a form of creative practice which, while stillconsidering these influences, becomes increasingly attentive to the social andpolitical contexts present at the shooting locations of both films. Reflecting thischaracteristic, the second aspect concerns the increasingly tense relationship between creative practice and the means of production sustaining the making of these two films.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter of this volume provides further clues about Pedro Costa’s creative and technical competence by discussing other of his professional activities, such as curator and “recuperation agent” of the work of other filmmakers. It also discusses how Costa’s cinema provides both an aesthetic and a filmmaking blueprint for international young filmmakers working with low budgets and using digital video.

A ‘Document of Documents’: Authorship, Intertextuality and Politics in Horse Money (2014)

This chapter examines Pedro Costa’s evolving authorial process, centring its attention on 2014 feature film Horse Money. This chapter considers the different levels of intertextuality animating Costa’s cinema, particularly with regards to the inclusion of different documents and the reworking of personal stories lived by some of his non-professional collaborators. As regards this latter aspect, the chapter sheds light on the ambiguous nature of authorship, understanding it as a creation process that is as much dependent on individual authority as it is indebted to collaborative practices. Both textually and contextually, Horse Money is the result of creative relationships with non-professional actors Ventura and Vitalina Varela. The intertextual and collaborative practices informing Horse Money, moreover, come to reflect possible political aspects transmitted by Costa’s filmic universe. Returning to the discussions initially opened in Chapter 2, this final chapter concludes by looking at some of the critical debates around Horse Money, which are particularly animated by possible political readings transmitted by Costa’s films.

Renegotiating Circulation: Retrospectives and DVD Releases

Chapter 6 examines Pedro Costa’s effort to expand the circulation of his films outside the international film festival and arthouse circuits by looking into production and distribution practices conducted by the filmmaker since the mid-2000s. As regards production, the chapter contextualizes the making of Change Nothing, initially a short film released in 2005 and later reworked as a feature film in 2009. Concerning distribution this, the chapter looks at international film retrospectives and numerous DVD and Blu-ray releases from the mid-2000s onwards. It examines the implications of a creative agency which is not confined to authorial practices but also visibly impacts upon consumption. Thus, the chapter explains how Costa maintains a close dialogue between professional endeavour and commercial demand. This is particularly observed in Costa’s participation in special screenings and retrospectives, and in his close supervision of materials for the home video market.

Critical Reception and the International Film Festival

This chapter investigates symbolic and economic value formations surrounding Pedro Costa and his films Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001) and Colossal Youth (2005). It assesses nuanced and, at times, dissonant statuses of artistic consecration taking place on the international film festival circuit, and conferred through film criticism. Such analysis considers various forms of prestige generated at the reception level, particularly with regard to the role of film criticism in situating Costa’s work under particular filmic and cinephile-related taste and cultural categories. This chapter also offers further readings of different forms of capital at stake in the international film festival by examining the economic and symbolic value synergies which made possible the production of A Caça ao Coelho com Pau (The Rabbit Hunters), a 2007 short film commissioned by the Jeonju Digital Project.

Cinema’s ‘Primitive Beauty’: Pedro Costa’s Artistic Formation and the Making of Blood (1989)

This chapter discusses Pedro Costa’s personal and professional development during the 1970s and 1980s. The discussion offered here concerns how formative experiences came to inform aesthetic preoccupations displayed in his directorial debut, Blood (1989), as well as to reflect industrial, social and cultural contexts of the film’s production. Costa’s personal and professional development was shaped by Lisbon’s youth cultures enjoying political freedoms and cultural openness resulting from the Revolution of 25 April 1974. The making of Blood reflects such historical characteristics, while also exemplifying the constraints shaping Portuguese cinema at the time. This first chapter also examines the initial domestic reception of the film, providing further context to Costa’s role as an emerging filmmaker.

Introduction

The introductory chapter of this volume maps some of the main discussions around Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, as well as providing context to his work. It also argues for the strategic competence that Pedro Costa refined over the years. The approach followed here is to organise the understanding of such competence as an evolving working process or, in other words, as a narrative of production. The term narrative of production offers a possible definition of the constantly negotiated artistic and labour practices carried on by Costa within a variety of contexts – authorial, industrial, economic, cultural and social – which often merge between professional and personal spheres.