The work of Portuguese director Pedro Costa proceeds by slow, measured steps. Although each film enacts a formal departure from the previous one, taken as a whole, the trajectory displays an ever-distilled vision that brings into closer focus the everyday lives of Lisbon’s poor, while opening up immense historical vistas—the African diaspora, the slave trade—in which they might be set. Renowned among cinephiles for his stringent, monumental ‘Fontaínhas trilogy’, Costa remains largely unknown beyond that world. How and where should his oeuvre be situated? By what scale of values should his work be judged? Attempts to define his cinema in terms of conventional categories—geo-cultural context, subject matter and settings, cinematic modes, the personalized film language of the auteur—have a disconcerting tendency to destabilize the categories themselves.

Context, first of all. Costa’s work might initially be situated in the reflexive tradition of contemporary European cinema, grounded in the critical canon-making of the new wave and neo-realist theorist-practitioners. His early career benefited in a general sense from the plentiful eec funding that helped to sustain Portuguese film schools and support a rebirth of national cinema after the 1974 Carnation Revolution. Yet Portugal, as diagnosed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the country’s leading social philosopher, has long existed within two zones, or time-spaces: not just a European but a ‘colonial zone’, spanning the oceans; and occupying peripheral and backward positions within both. For Portugal, as for its former colonies, ‘lagging behind meant having a problematic past’—and ‘as a problem, the past became an inescapable part of the present.’footnote¹ Within the Lusophone world, post-colonial relations between Portugal and Brazil have patterned those of the uk and us—the former colony soaring above its one-time ruler in world importance and cultural production—though cast in a more disorderly, archaic and surprising register, within which Africa bears a decisive weight. Not just the European New Wave but the revolutionary aesthetics of Brazil’s cinema novo had a formative influence on the generation of Portuguese directors that immediately preceded Costa’s, including his gifted and idiosyncratic teacher, the ethnographic film-maker Antonio Reis.footnote²

The inescapable presence of the problematic colonial past, as de Sousa puts it, forms a subtext in much contemporary Portuguese cinema.footnote³ Yet Costa’s deliberate and sustained choice of Cape Verdean settings and subjects represents a different type of commitment. His Fontaínhas trilogy was set in the jerry-built homes and alleyways of Lisbon’s hidden ghetto. When the neighbourhood was torn down and its residents shipped out to bright and flimsy high-rises on the city’s edge, Costa filmed the destruction and followed his characters out, documenting the loss of a group made immigrants once again. This persistent and patient gaze on a particular locale and its inhabitants marks out his singular approach. Costa’s subjects are, as Jacques Rancière has noted, ‘workers without work’, without a working class or class struggle, seemingly trapped in the ahistorical time and space of the everyday.footnote⁴ In a recent essay, Emilie Bickerton has considered Costa’s work in the context of a new genre of post-industrial ‘proletkino’ cinema, discernible in the films of the Dardennes, Guédiguian and Loach.footnote⁵ As Costa himself has put it: ‘Most of mankind’s stories—I mean the stories of the lower classes—either have been told wrongly or haven’t been told at all. So cinema has to step in.’footnote⁶ Yet as Bickerton suggested, Costa’s formal experimentalism and use of multiple cinematic modes and genres—fiction, ethnography, documentary, realism and surrealism; noir, zombie, melodrama, quest—also made him an outlier in this company of naturalistic feature-makers.

‘All great fiction films tend toward documentary, just as all great documentaries tend towards fiction’, Godard proclaimed, on seeing Jean Rouch’s Moi, un Noir in 1958. Rouch’s innovation was to extend the radical ethnographic tradition pioneered by Robert Flaherty, in which the subject became an active participant in the film-making process, to introduce an improvised fictional element, forging a new mode between fiction and documentary. The ethnographic dimension of Costa’s work foregrounds the symbolic structures and institutions analysed by anthropology—the home, the hospital, the workplace, the state, the street—thus posing them also as questions for film criticism. Indeed for Costa, as he put it in a talk at the Tokyo Film School, these symbolic structures have been part of cinema’s repertoire of meanings from the start: ‘The Chaplin character in The Tramp, as soon as he enters a deluxe hotel or a bank, he’s immediately thrown out. You see that repeatedly in Chaplin’s films: as soon as he enters, he’s rejected, someone throws him out. It’s systematic.’ Chaplin’s lesson? ‘Cinema belongs to the street. It was born in the street and it stays in the street, with those who are powerless.’footnote⁷

If these are common themes across his work, however, the reflexive character of Costa’s cinema also ensures that each film represents a critical development from the one that went before. What follows, then, will proceed heuristically, examining the use of modes and genres, settings and structures, cinematic language and social meaning, in an attempt to provide some provisional answers for our framing questions.

Costa’s biographical and cinematic formation was inextricably bound up with the 1974 Portuguese Revolution and the dynamics of cultural liberation that were its initial legacy. Born in 1958, he was a teenager when the 25 April movement erupted—‘a kid’, in his own words, ‘yelling in the streets’, taking part in school and factory occupations, discovering ‘music, politics, films and girls’ all at the same time. footnote⁸ In 1979, by way of the Lisbon punk scene and a half-completed history degree, he enrolled in the pioneering Film School at the National Conservatoire. Initially a rebellious presence at the back of the class, he recognized in António Reis a teacher to whom he had to listen: ‘He made “direct cinema” and he himself was direct.’footnote⁹ Together with his wife, the psychologist Margarida Cordeiro, Reis had made a trio of films that integrated documentary and fiction, ethnography and poetry. Filmed in Cordeiro’s native north-east, Trás-os-Montes (1976) documented the historical and psychological time of the eponymous province ‘beyond-the-mountains’: a landscape of rolling hills giving way to communities of stone houses without electricity, where rituals of labour and leisure had been passed down for generations—a living rebuke to the grandiose claims of the Estado Novo regime. The couple and their small crew travelled from village to village on foot—the region was unreachable by paved roads at the time—befriending the people who became the subjects of the film. Jean Rouch saw in Trás-os-Montes the revelation of ‘a new cinematic language’, ‘disquieting objects’ born from the stubbornness of the directors’ commitment to give expression to the difficult communion between villagers, landscapes and seasons.footnote¹⁰ No less than with Bresson or Straub-Huillet, the guiding principle was the search for what Cordeiro, in an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, termed ‘literal images, images of an immediate and adequate vision’.footnote¹¹

For Costa, discovery of the films of Reis and Cordeiro, as well as works like Paulo Rocha’s Os Verdes Anos and Mudar de Vida (1966), meant understanding that what he wanted to do already had a past in Portuguese cinema—‘I wasn’t starting from scratch anymore.’ Like the Film School itself, Reis was steeped in the cinephile canon and taught on the basis of a dozen or so films, including Eisenstein, Murnau, Welles, Tati, Hitchcock, Rossellini, Straub, Ozu, Godard and Bresson—‘Bresson most of all’, whose Notes on the Cinematograph echoed Reis’s own mode of injunction to his students: ‘You must go see Velázquez in the Prado’; ‘You must go to the Lascaux caves’; ‘You must go to Iran to see the rug motifs. Save up the money to travel, and go alone.’ Reis helped to impart not only new ways to see and hear—‘Don’t be afraid of filming what surrounds you. If it’s cars, it’s cars. If it’s rocks, it’s rocks’—but also patience and discipline. Costa recalled learning ‘the pleasure of obsessive control over the different shades of everything, from the first word to the last second of the film.’ At the same time, Reis and Cordeiro’s work involved a commitment to ‘a certain field of action, of combat, of work’, that Costa would call ‘the field of the humble’, referring both to their choice of subject—spending a great deal of time with people in impoverished communities—and to a cinematic method that depended upon ‘capture’, not invention. ‘Good movies don’t have to invent anything, they only have to watch and reproduce. But reproduce in a different order.’ In this sense, Reis and Cordeira’s films were ‘supernatural’, because ordered in a way that had never before been seen.footnote¹²