Pedro Costa: destruction, science fiction and reality

Abstract

This paper intends to identify, analyse and discuss the concepts of anti-cinema, cinema without characters, politics without politics and the fiction-science in the filmography of the Portuguese director Pedro Costa.Pedro Costa works can be viewed as anti-cinema because it denies the traditional text, the actors, the production, and the argument and lays in the hands of viewers a sequence of images that are not a traditional narrative or materialize a worldview. All this aspects show that his movies present a specific sensibility that one must understand. One can say that his cinematography is about negation and that negation is the main force in his method. A good example of this negation principle is present in the spaces where Costa makes his movies. Spaces that aren’t sets, but mainly spaces for thinking. The slum where he has placed his more recent movies doesn’t appear as a tool to illustrate a socio-political scene and story, but, as Ranciére points out, he renounces scenario in order to be able to tell stories and, has the director puts it, that slum is the ideal space for thinking (Pedro Costa in interview to Neyrat). And all his cinematography makes present the transformation on a thought into space: thinking becomes the walls that build the places of his movies.