Frames and Bodies—Notes on Three Films by Pedro Costa: Ossos, No Quarto da Vanda, Juventude

em Marcha
Author(s): Jean-Louis Comolli
Source: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 24 (Summer 2010), pp. 62-70
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Central Saint Martins College of Art and
Design, University of the Arts London
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 Pedro Costa, Ossos (Bones), Frames and Bodies —
1997, colour 35mm film, Notes on Three Films by Pedro Costa:
94min, still, detail. Ossos, No Quarto da Vanda, Juventude em Marcha
© Pedro Costa — Jean-Louis Comolli

In a close analysis of the role of the frame in film, Jean-Louis Comolli highlights how
Pedro Costa's Fontainhas trilogy makes the invisible film frame visible: a political
gesture, a response to the confusion of the world with its spectacle.

The question of the body in cinema — of the filmed body — is inseparable from the
question of the frame. Like the visible body, the visible world is framed by cinema. 1 We
could say that everything that is cinema, good or bad, is framed and has always been
framed. The filmic image, the photogram, the shot are framed and cannot be otherwise.
This is not the case with visual events we can group together under the heading ‘specta-
cles’. A fireworks display, a circus act, a military parade, an airplane taking off, a tall
building exploding: all these appear to their initial viewers as unframed, meaning that
they are viewed within the same spatial field as normal human vision (180 degrees).
These events are only placed in a frame when they are filmed. In opera or the theatre,
the stage is framed on three sides, but the very nature of these dimensions — despite
the fact that they are fixed — keeps the stage’s wings from functioning like the off-screen
of cinema: one knows that the wings, backstage, are contiguous with the stage, that they
are its extension and do not amount to the otherness of an ‘outside’.
This is not the case in film. There the frame by definition restricts our normal field
of vision, which becomes limited, constrained, truncated. The viewer’s gaze is framed
at the same time as the space being observed. The film frame, therefore, is a direct
expression of the confinement of the scopic impulse. My desire to see has been framed:
limited and formatted by this rectangular opening which is not present in normal
perception and comes into play only when watching a film. The cinematic viewing
experience becomes radically different; it separates itself from any visual experience
encountered outside the darkened cinema. The frame distinguishes between nature and
art. It is artifice, and the value of this artifice is precisely that it is not natural. This is why
there is something desperate — an unease, a phantasm of normality — in the temptation
of a naturalist aesthetic to which so many films yield today. This naturalism is something
that the deliberately pictorial quality of Pedro Costa’s films rejects. The trilogy of films
Costa made about the Fontainhas neighbourhood in Lisbon, which today no longer
exists — Ossos (Bones, 1997), No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room, 2000), Juventude
em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006) — tells us forcefully that it is up to art to cast in relief
the world that has been lost. But the figuration and locating of this world must refuse to
re-naturalise the very thing that ruined the world: the present-day reign of merchandise.
The abasement of the weak and the ruination of the losers — the obsessive concerns of the
persecutory logic governing competition — are taken up by art as if they were an opening
onto grace and a direct path to beauty, beyond good and evil, the opposite of any form of
miserabilism: the grace of the weak, the beauty of those without any power, the angelical
forms of those who are ‘nothing’.
And yet this restriction of the visible brought about by framing is an opening,
a call to the non-visible. Taking a section of our normal field of vision, the frame cuts out
a portion of the visible and confines and encloses it. In this way the field, a portion of the

1 In this article the author makes full use of the range of a word’s meaning in the French, which is often
difficult to render in translation. In the original, the visible world is not merely ‘framed’ by cinema;
the verb used, encadrer, also means to regulate, monitor, control, legislate, etc., often in a repressive
and/or official sense. The noun form used in the previous sentence, cadre (frame), thus carries a sense of
repression and confinement. This term, for example, also designates workplace management personnel,
while workers lower on the ladder are encadrés: their work is regulated and subjected to disciplined
control. These sorts of meanings underlie the terms frame and framed throughout the text. —Trans.

Pedro Costa | 63

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visible determines part of the non-visible — what is leftover or outside that, unframed
by definition, can be surmised to be without boundaries in time or space. Inseparable
from the screen, the off-screen is cloaked in indeterminate shadow.
II
The cinema frame acts like a scalpel in its division of the filmed world into the visible and
non-visible. This operation is a form of violence against the all-powerful imagination
of human sight, in the first place, and secondly against the field of vision itself, rendered
artificial and unnatural. To frame is to inflict violence — a virtual violence, naturally,
but a highly visible violence that is especially apparent when its victim is the filmed body.
The frame constrains the body; the amputation is seen, visual in nature.
Once the filmed world and the filmed body are grasped in their very movement,
the task of the cinematic frame is to cut, in time as well as space, in duration as well
as movement. The full meaning of this term ‘cut’ must be appreciated. The frame cuts
and cuts up the visible. The presence of a knife with a gleaming blade in the hand of the
mutinous woman in the pre-credit sequence of Colossal Youth indicates that something
is about to be cut — to be framed.
Cut what? What we see from what we don’t see. André Bazin said simply that ‘the
frame is a mask’. 2 The portion of the visible obscured by the framing, no matter what the
focal length of the lens but in proportion to it, is quantitatively greater than the framed
portion of the visible. In other words, what is made visible by framing and in the frame
obscures everything that the ordinary eye would see beyond this frame.
In Ossos, the first film in Pedro Costa’s trilogy, there is a shot in the first five minutes
that poses the entire question of the frame and the mask. In the frame we see a young
man, played by Nuno Vaz, prostrate in a chair in a vaguely well-appointed living room.
The frame, rather broad for the purpose of taking in Nuno’s body alone, is immediately
filled with the noise of a motor (a vacuum cleaner) off-screen. After a few seconds, during
which the young man looks towards the right edge of the frame, part of this vacuum
cleaner appears, cut by the edge of the frame, along with Vanda Duarte, who is pushing
it back and forth. Vanda’s body thus enters the frame only in synch with the vacuum
cleaner, and this is how she crosses and exits the frame, when she is cut off, this time,
by its left edge. In the space of a few seconds, what comes to pass is this passage, Vanda’s
body appearing and disappearing as if off-screen space is preferable: she is out of
sight for a period of time equal to or greater than the amount of time she is in the frame.
Her temporary ‘disappearance’ is not without dramatic or narrative effect. The time
is that of the automatic repetition of gestures and movements. Nuno, the young father,
looks at the ground; the young woman, often filmed in splendid close-ups of gentle
violence, looks vaguely off-screen towards a place that is no more than an emptiness
taking the place of the viewer. We are informed that there will be absence, want and lack.
That the characters will only be intermittences. That the sounds beginning off-screen
at all times threaten to take over the frame. This will also be the system governing the
second film in the trilogy, In Vanda’s Room. The rigidity of the frame, the way it cuts
space, only increases its exposure to ambient noises and sounds. The immobile frame
is run through in every direction with the unassigned mobility of sound.
More than anything else, the edge of the photogram, of the series of photograms that
make up what we call a shot, is cutting, sharp and distinct like a razor’s edge. As such,
it alone carries out a kind of violence with and against the real or potential mobility of
the filmed bodies entering and exiting the frame. And these bodies or objects, cut by the
frame edge, which exist on the boundary between the on-screen and the off-screen, which
flirt with the fine line between the visible and the non-visible, are pleasantly described
by film theorists as eroticising the edge of the frame. The combination of contrary
forces and desires — the necessary rigidity of the edge of the frame and the irrepressible
mobility of the filmed bodies — gives rise to a vibration, a palpitation, invisible and yet
sensible, with the effect, precisely, of being hewn from living beings. A cutting caress
of the edges. This caress recurs throughout Ossos, which is made up of immobile
shots framed with distressing rigidity, which is to say cuttingly. (With at least one
extraordinary exception: the long lateral tracking shot that accompanies and supports
the young hero’s race to the hospital, which does not leave him short of breath.)
2 André Bazin, ‘Peinture et cinéma’, Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1999, p.188.
64 | Afterall
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III
The cut-off part of the body, that is to say, the hidden part of the filmed body, can be
presumed to be eroticised, precisely because it is hidden. Hidden by what? By the frame
itself, which has the boundary of the screen in its power (and thus the boundary of the
off-screen)? As a result, it has the power to piece back together the body chopped up by
the frame — just as, beyond that, it can piece together what comes next in the story. For
what is hidden by the rectangle cut out by the frame is, we might say, every next thing,
near and distant, of what is actually framed. The off-screen is the site of what remains:
what remains to be shown, to be acted out, to be experienced. A reserve, a surplus,
a beyond. An emptiness that the fullness of the frame empties and fills to measure.
This is how Ossos progresses, in a cut-up of filmed bodies, through the breaking up
that the frames subject them to and which do not thwart their inertia and slowness — on
the contrary. In a swelling of sounds which is also on this side of language or its partial
disappearance. Thus the system of frames, aided by that of shadows, works to ensure
that we never know much about the characters, apart from the fact that they wait and
pass by, caught in a game of hide-and-seek with everything that could feed a plotline:
the story itself is off-screen.
A part of the filmed body is cut off, and thus hidden by the frame. The framed
fragment continues off-screen. Every viewer realises without seeing them that there are
bodies attached to filmed heads, arms at the end of filmed shoulders, two legs beneath
the cut boundaries of medium close-ups. Just as viewers see their own bodies as whole,
the actors’ bodies are imagined by viewers’ bodies as whole, even though they appear
partial. The breaking up of the filmed body into pieces suggests an off-screen space
where the entire body can be found. This is how the amputation of the filmed body by
the frame remains virtual, like the body pieced back together off-screen. In film, what
we see is what we believe.
The often immobile and tight frames of Ossos convey this constriction of filmed
bodies that occupy the frame, filling and thus overwhelming it, as they in turn are
overwhelmed by what happens to them. Ossos is a film made off-screen. The on-screen,
through the power of its immobile frames, its restricted space framed by tight shots
and the severe constraints placed by these frames on the actors’ bodies and their very
faces and gazes, is haunted by its off-screen. A part of the acting space, a part of the
situation playing out, a part of the action underway, and so forth, is off-screen. But it
is not only the portion of the space framing the frame that is hidden; in fact this space
is not even space: it is time.
The off-screen is temporal: there is a before to entering the frame, a during the
movement through the frame and an after exiting the frame. This before, during and
after define the off-screen as a temporal sequence: the memory of the action, the action
and the promise of future action. This is the sense in which the off-screen, in its classical
conception, is said to bear a threat or promise: what is not there can happen, must
happen, must be avoided, etc., not only because this indefinite action can be believed
to be to the side of the frame, but because it is always already imminent (desire, which
is to say Eros). This possible of the off-screen functions, of course, as a narrative and/
or dramatic reserve. But when this reserve is shown to be empty, as it is in Ossos, and
not just once but every time, the off-screen acts as a threat to the film itself, to the very
figuration of the filmed bodies. What is present in the frame is threatened at every
moment with being thrust into this essential off-screen space of emptiness or nothing-
ness. The shadow cast by death on life becomes the film’s work, running counter to
the (mythological) classic function of film, which is to constantly project life onto death.
This cinematic frame poses the question of the body in its entirety and the body
broken into pieces, more extensively than photography and painting do, even though
both these also frame their images. The film camera’s ability to faithfully record and
reproduce the movements of things and bodies (animal and human) is undoubtedly
the source of its singularity: the film frame is capable of containing bodies in movement
without stopping them, without freezing them in time. It is also capable of accompanying
them, of following or preceding their movements, and this combination of the movement
of the camera and the movement of filmed bodies heightens the frequency of the cuts,
which thereby disappear into the movement itself.
Pedro Costa | 65
 IV
Cinema thus adds a frame to the visible world, presiding over the way apparatuses
like advertising and the police frame the world. And because cinema is not the only
way this happens — it also occurs in television, photography, posters, magazines and
advertisements — the visible world has become almost entirely a frame, the frame that
is everywhere but which we see nowhere. We see it without seeing it as a frame and
which, because it is not seen as such, shapes our way of looking. In fact all the screens we
watch also watch us and are frames formatting us. And because it is the human gaze that
is being framed alongside the world itself, the frame becomes increasingly natural.
This is a triumph of the ideology of transparency. The awareness that the world is
framed by machines of the visible has not yet taken place. Will it ever? This is a political
question. We call — I call — for the definition of a critical viewer for whom the screen will
not be transparent and the frame not invisible. The industry of visual reproduction, the
commercial empire of the visible, from Hollywood to Tokyo and from Seoul to Cupertino,
has achieved the tour de force of bringing together fabricated and necessarily artful and
artificial images with so-called ‘natural’ images, the images our eyes ordinarily perceive.
What is always framed (screens of all kinds: films, computers, televisions, games, mobile
phones) produces images which appear to resemble (all things considered) what in the
world is not framed. These imperceptible frames fabricate framed images that overlay
our unframed gaze and perhaps take its place. In other words, we increasingly see
through frames and the optical adjustments of machines for seeing. All of cinema’s
striving for ‘technological’ development (the transition from black-and-white to colour,
from the almost-square frame of early cinema to the excessively wide screens of today,
from silent to sound and then talking cinema and now to 3-D) has been a way of natural-
ising the film image, of domesticating it and making it familiar. Art has become a family
affair. Goodbye to troubling strangeness, goodbye to irrecoverable otherness, goodbye
to a reality that cannot yet be framed. Every mutation requires that we be aware of what
is changing, of what is won and lost. It is quite apparent that the entire vast and ancient
effort to compute the world is receding into a scarcely less ancient effort to commercialise
it, and into another parallel but accelerating effort to convey visually every thing and
every dimension, as if selfishness and the market needed to move en masse into the visual.
What is targeted and destroyed here is the possibility of the off-screen, meaning the
possibility of a place that eludes the inquisition of all by all. The invisible is also political.
This is exactly the way in which I see, as a political gesture, the concern in Ossos for
severe framing, sharp spatial and temporal cuts and the continuation of the off-screen.
66 | Afterall
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Pedro Costa, Ossos (Bones),
1997, colour 35mm
film, 94min, still.
© Pedro Costa
Not only to assert that the visible world is framed, but to make this framing, finally,
noticeable, perceptible, sensible; to bring the off-screen into play as if responding to
a need to join the invisible and the visible, but at the same time to make it appear like
a dramatic or narrative remission — so many ways of proceeding which, in their stray
beauty, are decisive and even violent responses to the general alienation that merges and
confuses the world with its spectacle. Put another way, the mutilation of filmed bodies
by the frame is evident in this film, while it is so often denied in other films in which the
off-screen does not function as a boundary of the visible, as a cutting edge which keeps
us on the side of emptiness. In which every part of the entire body that is not shown is
supposed, on the contrary, to be on the other side of the frame. On the other side the same
can be found. That is reassuring. But the visual and narrative obscurity of Ossos is troubling.
V
In Ossos the frame stands out because the sharpness or assertiveness of the framing
is often emphasised by the play of a mise en abyme. When there exists a frame within
the frame, as there has been in cinema for a long time (for example, in Charlie Chaplin
and Buster Keaton), it is because film wishes to be seen as a frame, which is to say as
artifice, even if it means that the visible world in the frame within the frame takes on
a more natural aspect (in Abbas Kiarostami’s films And Life Goes On… [1992] and
Through the Olive Trees [1994], for example). In Ossos, it is more a case of increasing
the frame’s constraint or, better yet, of carrying it in two directions: to the gaze of the
characters and to that of the viewer. The characters’ bodies are in fact doubly enclosed
in the frame within the frame. Their room to manoeuvre is reduced accordingly. At the
same time, however, the viewer’s gaze is faced with a part of the frame which, in this
instance, functions explicitly like a mask. What is constrained is my own gaze, inside
a frame that I may not see as a constraint but which deprives me of the part of the visible
to which I would normally have access. The frame within the frame thus both restricts
the actor’s performance and frustrates the scopic impulse still active in the viewer.
Five minutes into Ossos, for example, we see a rectangular window in a closed door:
a frame within a frame as two silhouettes approach, poorly defined at first and then
more sharply, but always framed by this fixed rectangle. The two hazy figures take shape:
they are two women, one behind the other. The second one carries a baby in her arms.
They come closer still, and the face of the first woman finally becomes distinguishable
(it is the face of Maria Lipkina, Vanda’s fictional sister). Her face is framed ever-more
tightly by the rectangular window. In the end we see only her eyes, once again lost in
a void that extends off-screen, in front of them. This gradual sharpening of her features
is accompanied by powerful reframing that comes from the actress’s body itself:
as we come to distinguish the young mother’s features, her body is reduced to her face,
her face to her eyes. Her framed gaze is directed not far from the centre of the lens —
a little lower, a little to the left — and is met in the subsequent shot, strangely enough,
against all expectations of verisimilitude, by Vanda’s identically framed gaze, as if she
were exactly on the other side, symmetrically, of the rectangular window and had come
to occupy exactly the same place as Maria in this frame within the frame.
The frame within the frame lends itself to shot/counter-shot of their eyes in extreme
close-up. But this creates a slight degree of unease. The extreme proximity of the two
shots, that of the frame and the counter-frame on each side of the window, barely
leaves viewers space to insert themselves, for them to become the imaginary third party
who wants the gazes (the desires) of the characters looking at each other in the frame-
counter-frame to pass through their own. No, these two gazes do not express the desire
to pass through the gaze of the viewer. They are the gaze of death or paralysis. Between
the shot and the counter-shot there is neither air nor space; between the two frames
within the frame is the obstacle of the closed door: the mask.
To continue, the young father rummages through the garbage in a market. Bars and
grates multiply the number of frames within the frame, which are increased further by
the oblique line of the high-angle shot. His body and face are unmasked/masked by these
obstacles. A window marks the space between the kitchen and the counter of a canteen
or restaurant. Bordered on the left by a pile of dishes and on the right by a few glasses,
the frame is closed above and below by the edges of this window. Here, in the frame
Pedro Costa | 67
within the frame, the torsos and faces of the two cooks are framed in turn as they pass VII
dishes to an off-screen waiter. What is staged by this new mise en abyme, once again,
is the fact that seeing is problematic. We want to see, we try to see, and doing so makes The final film in the trilogy, Colossal Youth, is perhaps more distressing still. (This
contortions and restrictive framings necessary, bending and moulding our body. In this distress, of course, is that of the age in which we live.) With the exception of the few
way the viewer’s gaze is framed in turn by the frame that constrains the actor’s body. very scenes in which we hear Ventura’s letter to his wife, almost every shot in the film
This, once again, is the project of a subversive mise en scène, which thwarts the ease is shot with a short focal lens, with considerable empty space at the top of the frame.
or even the obligation of seeing found in Western society (the question of the veil). As if The characters’ bodies instead no longer occupy the centre of the frame but are cast to
one needed only to desire in order to see. As if there were only seeing. As if there were its edges, like light in which only a small part of the image is illuminated. There is a clear
only the visible, voyeurs, exhibitors and exhibitionists. As if the world could be reduced mismatch between the scale of the characters and that of the frame. Here we are even
to its spectacle. Not only does the frame asserted indicate the fact of seeing and the role farther from frames that cut off or mutilate, from bodies that spill over the edges of
of the viewer, not only does the frame within the frame heighten this effect of watching, tight frames, than we were in the film In Vanda’s Room. Ventura’s entire body moves
and in so doing lead it to awareness, but because the function of the frame’s mask is spaciously through the images. It is as if the entire filmed space were visible in each
present within the frame itself in the form of obstacles or filmed screens, what is shown shot. The frame, in other words, no longer functions as a mask. The regular use of lenses
is nothing less than the limits of seeing. with short focal lengths opens up the screen and makes the actors’ bodies float in a frame
much too large for them. Many compositions, in order to frame even more space and
VI no doubt to destabilise the filmed bodies, are not only shot at a low-angle but also from
the side. The world depicted no longer has the equilibrium to which cinema had long
With In Vanda’s Room, the second film in the Fontainhas trilogy, off-screen space
becomes more precise and settled. The film is made up of two sections, or branches,
which intertwine. Vanda’s room, the first space, is connected to her mother’s home but
without our understanding exactly how. The second space is the neighbourhood, which
surrounds the home and within it Vanda’s room, and which is in the process of being
demolished. This neighbourhood is filmed like a character — not only when Vanda enters
it to sell cabbage or lettuce but with its clandestine passers-by, the furtive silhouettes
who haunt it day and night. The two ‘sets’, one closed and the other open, are not treated
in exactly the same manner. The light in the bedroom is less mysterious than the shadows
in the abandoned houses taken over by squatters. Here again, anti-naturalism takes
the form of compositions of frames and colours which distance the neighbourhood’s
ruins from any form of miserabilism. The light of grace mingles with the shadows of
the world. This, however, is true especially outside of Vanda’s room. In her room, in a
hardly-flattering light — not at all clinical but suggestive of the domestic light sometimes
found in Edgar Degas — the bodies of Vanda and her sister Zita are framed as freely
as possible, given the cramped dimensions of the room. The framing is wide because
the question here perhaps is no longer about the mutilation of bodies but rather the
destruction of the neighbourhood, matched by Vanda’s fiercely willed self-destruction.
Off-screen space is thus not what the frame cuts off, not what it conceals: it is what is
outside the house, outside the bedroom — a whole series of other nearby and contiguous
places, but which are not connected to on-screen space as its invisible extension. Here
off-screen space is positioned — we might almost say surveyed — even as the bulldozers
lay it to waste. The bedroom functions as the on-screen and the neighbourhood as the
off-screen. It has a face, a form, a design, a destiny; this is why I spoke of it as a character.
The off-screen space of the bedroom loses any dimension of invisibility, apart from
the shadows filling it. I would say, without fear of ridicule, that here the off-screen
becomes visible.
The film’s cleavage into two scenes, the neighbourhood and the bedroom, turns
each into the other’s off-screen space. Yes, but isn’t the off-screen merely the nightmare
of the on-screen? Its inevitable fate? If this is the case, the film contrasts in a subtly Pedro Costa, No Quarto da accustomed us. Everything has become topsy-turvy. A kind of programme we might
mechanical way two phases or aspects of the same reality: the interior and the exterior, Vanda (In Vanda's Room), comically call ‘Cubist’ has broken space up. Viewers are no longer in their customary
neither one of which has an outside reality because they are each other’s outside 2000, colour 35mm film, position, good or bad. This position no longer exists, only an open chasm.
reality. It seems to me that the possibility of remission is here being closed off, that 178min, still. The film is both strangely beautiful, like expressionism beyond any form of
any compassion or charity is being done away with. The pitiless passage of the present © Pedro Costa expression, and frightening. In the immense frames in which bodies lose themselves
becomes the very form of the film. There is only Vanda’s fierce pride; refusing to yield there is a single hope: that a zone of shadow, a ring, an aureole will encircle the spot
to her better feelings, she rebels in a more determined way than we do, perhaps, but this of light that isolates the filmed bodies. This shadow in the frame brings the bodies,
rebellion is as deprived as ours of any horizon. This film, with its matching of on-screen somewhat, within the grasp of desire. And this shadow, omnipresent in what remains
and off-screen space (the two complicit faces of the same reality) and their interaction of Fontainhas — the sections of walls, ruins, piles of stone, holes in the wall, little mazes,
(outside sounds are heard all through the inside) makes it impossible to imagine any cracks in the façade just large enough for a body to pass through — appears more rarely,
kind of vanishing point which might be a line of escape. Here the viewer is someone in a less marked fashion, in the new neighbourhood where Ventura’s apartment is
who must concede that his or her desire to arrange the world using sounds and images located. The neighbourhood, most often an immaculate white, is practically deserted.
(cinema) is destined to fail. If there is no more off-screen space, there is no more freedom. We are reminded of the contrast described by Tanizaki Junichiro in his book In Praise

68 | Afterall Pedro Costa | 69

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of Shadows (1933) between the traditional world, in which shadows have a fragile and
mannered depth, and the modern world, bursting with neon signs in which everything
must be visible. In the old world shadows are still in the frame, but are in the process
71
Kerry James Marshall
of disappearing. Light is in the new world; shadows still float there, in a visible and
unliveable clarity.
Low-angle shots always present the world the way a child sees it. But this world
in the film, which is our world, was not made for childhood. It is too big, too empty,
too white. Nothing happens from one shot to the next apart from this emptiness.
There is no off-screen: everything is the same from one frame to the next, persistent
and monotonous.
What has become of the off-screen in the ruins of Fontainhas? Hasn’t it passed
completely into the image, the frame, the zone of shadow that obscures part of the visible
in on-screen space itself? But this obscuring is in no way equivalent to that of the frame
as mask. What is hidden here is a part of what is framed. Shadows are a part of the
frame. They are a part of the programme, not what catches it out. The force of the off-
screen derives precisely from the fact that it is not framed. Shadows in the frame are 73
not the same as the off-screen in shadow; in this film, the off-screen is deliberately out Kerry James Marshall’s
Tempting Painting
— Terry R. Myers
81
Kerry James Marshall:
The Painter of Afro-Modern Life
— Kobena Mercer

of the picture. It took three films to arrive at this shelving of an old accessory of classical Pedro Costa, Juventude
cinematic dramaturgy. Goodbye Jacques Tourneur, goodbye Nicholas Ray, goodbye em Marcha (Colossal
Fritz Lang! And even Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, goodbye! Here Ventura Youth), 2006, colour
can only repeat and reread the same letter, begin the same gestures and gazes over again. 35mm film, 155min,
Here the characters no longer have any freedom. And the viewer? Hardly any more. still. © Pedro Costa
We can take this poorly, become alarmed that the system of frames prevents and even
forbids any escape into the off-screen. We might (we should) suppose that the world
bears within it a piece of reality which coincides with the non-visible and which might
thereby elude the domination of the spectacle. That is not the gamble this film takes.
But there will be other films by the same film-maker that won’t take the same approach.
The last film in the trilogy speaks to us about today; it obliges us to see this visible version
of the world that we do not wish to see. And therein lies all its grandeur.

Translated by Timothy Barnard.

70 | Afterall

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