O Sangue, 1989
Perhaps the most overtly Bressonian of Pedro Costa's body of work (albeit suffused with the brooding shadows of a Jacques Tourneur film), Costa's first feature, O Sangue, nevertheless bears the characteristic imprint of what would prove to be his familiar preoccupations: absent parents, surrogate families, unreconciled ghosts, the trauma and violence of displacement, the ache (and isolation) of longing. The thematic convergence is insightfully revealed in an episode that occurs near the end of the film, when the older brother Vicente (Pedro Hestnes), having been held captive by his father's nefarious associates on New Year's Eve in a half-baked attempt to collect his father's unpaid debt from him, awakens in the darkness of an unfamiliar apartment to the sight of a restless silhouette on the balcony - the shadow cast by his father's mistress (Isabel de Castro) that has been made spectral and incandescent by the transient glow of exploding fireworks and the sweep of wind against translucent curtains (a sense of otherworldliness that also reinforces a captor's earlier idea of conducting a séance in order to contact Vincente's missing father). Costa establishes this sinister atmosphere of sudden, erupted violence in the film's opening sequence: the prefiguring sound of a slammed door and scurrying feet that subsequently reveals a frontal shot of Vicente on a muddy road as he is suddenly slapped by his wayward father while intentionally blocking his path, trying to prevent him for leaving by imploring him to show consideration towards his younger brother Nino (Nuno Ferreira) who has been left home alone in the middle of night in pursuit of him. Cutting to the image of Vicente riding his scooter through the empty streets at twilight, and subsequently, the schoolteacher, Clara's (Inês de Medeiros) realization that a student, Rosa (Sara Breia) has run away from school with Nino, the image of dislocation and fugue also becomes a resurfacing idea, a reflection of the characters' own desire to reinvent and transform in the aftermath of loss that is reflected in Nino's impulsive attempt to rearrange the furniture, and his subsequent request to similarly dress Vicente in his clothing while accompanying him to school after their father's disappearance (a longing for change that is also implied in Clara's selection of a new haircut for Nino). However, when Vicente and Nino's skeptical uncle (Luís Miguel Cintra) pays a visit and finds the brothers home alone on Christmas Eve with Clara, his heavy-handed, if well-intentioned decision to take Nino away from home and form a new family with his fragile son Pedro (Miguel Fernandes) would lead the brothers into their own journeys of self-discovery in their isolated quest to return to their broken home.
It is interesting to note that in illustrating the brothers' (as well as Clara's) subverted attempts at escapism (and figurative erasure) - the persistence of a haunted past (an apparent allusion to Tourneur) that is ingeniously reinforced in the discovery of a body on the lake near the fairgrounds where Vicente and Clara go on a date - Costa introduces the idea of an irrepressible, hidden history that continues to haunt present-day consciousness. Costa expounds on this theme of place as the eternal witness to a deracinated history in evoking Cape Verde's tragic legacy (as leprosarium and slave port) in the moral contamination of the forgotten residents in Casa de Lava, as well as the concentration camps of Tarrafal (in Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters) that perpetuate a sense of moribund captivity to a contaminated, dying land. Similarly, the contrast between the abandoned, rural family home and the sterile, anonymous apartment buildings where the brothers are held against their will in O Sangue may be seen as a prefiguration of the Fonthainas diaspora itself, from the transitory sanctuary embodied by dilapidated, condemned spaces (In Vanda's Room), to the soullessness of uprooted communities represented by impersonal, high density, public housing (Colossal Youth). In this respect, Vicente and Nino's instinctual struggle to escape also represents a moral captivity to a traumatic history, an elusive homecoming that paradoxically embodies both liberation and surrender to the will of fate.
Posted by acquarello on Jan 27, 2008 | Permalink | Filed under 2008, Pedro Costa
Part social realism in its searing depiction of the plight of the underprivileged against the transforming economy of an increasingly modernized Turkey, and part poetic essentialism in its psychological portrait of a desperate man succumbing to the mania of a delusive, blind faith, Yilmaz Güney and Serif Gören's Umut (Hope) captures the precarious atmosphere of a nation at a political and economic crossroads. The cultural climate of transformation and renewal is prefigured in the film's opening montage - an impromptu city symphony created by the early morning rituals of road washing trucks, sidewalk sweepers, street vendors, billboard gazers (not coincidentally, all advertising banking institutions), and waiting taxicabs that play out against a dozing Cabbar (Yilmaz Güney), an uneducated cart driver waiting in the wings of a station for commuters to arrive at the terminal. Immediately, the passengers' selected mode of transportation reveals an intrinsically bifurcated society, as people wearing modern, Western attire make their way towards a row of idling taxis, while people dressed in traditional clothing invariably board horse-drawn carriages lining the front of the station...that is, all except for Cabbar's shabby and woefully old-fashioned cart. Already leading a hardscrabble existence as the family's sole provider - one that includes five children whose financial demands for school expenses and playful whims are often weighed against the more fundamental needs of having enough food to eat and proper health care for an elderly parent - and plagued by compounding debts that have accumulated in the course of establishing (and maintaining) his out of fashion livelihood, his situation takes a further turn for the worse when a roadside accident delivers a tragic, final blow to his already struggling enterprise. Left without a means of earning a living, Cabbar follows the advice of his unemployed friend, Hasan (Tuncel Kurtiz) and seeks guidance from Hüseyin Hodja (Osman Alyanak), a mystical imam and village faith healer who would soon lead him away from his family in search of an elusive, ever-shifting panacea amidst the desolation and rubble of a parched, forgotten land.
This is a quick note that Nicolas Klotz's La Blessure will be 
"One should remember", reflects a somber, elderly Carlos Galván (José Sacristán) at the beginning of Voyage to Nowhere as he listens to an old recording by popular folk musicians, the Trío Calaveras. Commenting on the melancholic lyrics of denial and abandonment of a shared history in the aftermath of lost love, Carlos, too, seems to betray traces of his own uncertain memory in his tentative identification of the song's title. Alternating between past and present, Carlos recounts his former career as a comedian in the family's road theater variety show in 1950s Spain, a difficult, but beloved vocation that even briefly held the possibility of becoming a family tradition when Carlos's estranged teenaged son, Carlito (Gabino Diego) unexpectedly arrives to stay with him for an extended visit, much to the consternation of Carlos's lover and fellow performer, Juanita (Laura del Sol). But Carlito's introduction into the life of itinerant actors would prove to be far removed from the workings of divine providence. Showing little interest in the flamboyant costumes and spectacle of variety theater (calling their exaggerated performance "ridiculous") in favor of the austerity of neorealism that infused the New Spanish Cinema of the 1950s, Carlito also proves to be unsuited for a career as a stage actor with his awkward poise, poor memorization skills, and self-consciousness over his Galician accent. Faced with an uncertain future of continued government censorship, non-committal, short-term contracts, and last minute cancelled engagements (including one unwittingly sparked by Carlito's flirtation with an impresario's daughter), the troupe's manager, Maldonado (Juan Diego) convinces the actors to follow the advice of an erstwhile rival turned successful filmmaker Solís (Simón Andreu) and capitalize on a film crew's forthcoming location shooting in the village to solicit work as extras in order to make ends meet. However, when family patriarch and veteran stage actor, Don Arturo (Fernando Fernán Gómez) is fired from the set after repeatedly delivering his lines with the conscious theatricality and emotive gestures all too familiar in his old-fashioned craft, the troupe is forced to confront its own continued viability in a livelihood that is quickly becoming a cultural relic in the reality of ever-dwindling audiences, separation, and insolvency.
While not as overtly political as contemporary filmmaker Mrinal Sen, Satyajit Ray's early 1970s films similarly capture the volatile climate of geopolitical unrest, profound social transformation, and domestic crisis stemming from the introduction of Naxalism into an increasingly radicalized Calcutta student movement. In a way, The Adversary represents this fomenting cultural revolution in its bracing idealism and cruel desperation. The film prefigures this atmosphere of destabilization and turbulence in its disorienting opening sequence: a high contrast, monochromatic negative image that follows a group of pall bearers making their way through the hallway and down the stairs of an apartment building, as a newly widowed woman, her face made unrecognizable by the transposition of black and white, laments her uncertain fate in the aftermath of her husband's death. Rapidly tracking towards a lone, seemingly luminescent figure made even more ethereal by the wafting of smoke, the image then reverses to reveal a somber Siddhartha (Dhritiman Chatterjee), the widow's son, standing near the edge of a smoldering funeral pyre. Siddartha's figurative embodiment of the commutation between darkness and light, life and death, individual and doppelgänger becomes a reflection of Calcutta's - and more broadly, the country's - bifurcated, postcolonial society as well.