“Ventura. Cavalo Dinheiro”, the ghosts of the carnation revolution in the chiaroscuro of Pedro Costa

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MASTERPIECE

Any young director dreaming of making films should, all things cease, immerse himself in the work of Pedro Costa, which is the subject of a complete retrospective at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, from June 14 to 26. He or she could then understand how the Portuguese filmmaker, born in 1959, searched for his style and his place for a long time, until he discovered, on his return from filming, at the end of the 1990s, the inhabitants cap -Verdians from the poor neighborhoods of Lisbon (such as Fontainhas, now destroyed), which he has been filming ever since.

With them, Costa fabricates experimental narratives, weaves a story from the margins, with its drug-addicted characters, its masons from the former colony, having spent their lives on scaffolding, housed in slums then losing their bearings in the rehousing in new, but dehumanized habitats.

Quasi-mythological tale

Each film is a slap, political and aesthetic: to name only the feature films shot in the neighborhoods, In Vanda’s room (2000), Forward youth! (2006), Vitalina Varela (2022), masterpiece of chiaroscuro awarded the Golden Leopard at Locarno, and finally Ventura. Cavalo Dinheiro (2014), which is released in theaters on June 15, eight years after its selection at Locarno. Thanks to Vanda, Ventura, Vitalina, etc., and his small video camera, which saves him the cost of film, the filmmaker has found his autonomy, refusing short shoots, freeing himself from the “weight” of cinephilia, while assuming the influence of artists he has always revered – filmmakers John Ford, Yasujiro Ozu, Chantal Akerman, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, photographers Walker Evans, Jacob Riis, etc.

Pedro Costa does not seek so much to magnify his characters as to reveal them in their own story

With Costa, everything is true from the point of view of the lived experience of the characters, but everything is fabricated, the image and the staging. In the neighborhood and its dilapidated houses, which act as a studio, the filmmaker sculpts faces, captures threads of light using mirrors, abolishing the border between day and night, obscuring exterior scenes, delivering to the spectator visual flashes, indelible – even if the director rejects the idea of ​​producing masterpieces.

Pedro Costa does not seek so much to magnify his characters as to reveal them in their own story. Ventura. Cavalo Dinheiro is thus traversed by memories of the “Carnation Revolution”, the coup launched by young left-wing officers on April 25, 1974, which ended in overthrowing the Salazar dictatorship, but failed to give power to the people and to the workers, despite the chanted slogans. Pedro Costa himself participated in the demonstrations, populated almost exclusively by whites, he recalls. Like many other migrants, Ventura, then in his twenties, holed up in the corners of the capital, fearing being arrested or killed by soldiers, a trauma inherited from the colonial experience.

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