Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part 1 Chantal Akerman: Cloistered Nomadism
- Part 2 The House as a Place of Declarations and Meditations
- Part 3 The Forest: From Sensory Environment to Economic Site
- Part 4 The Banlieue: Off-centred, Isolated
- Part 5 The Strangeness of Places and the Solitude of Men
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
11 - Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth: From the Slums to the Sanitised Apartment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part 1 Chantal Akerman: Cloistered Nomadism
- Part 2 The House as a Place of Declarations and Meditations
- Part 3 The Forest: From Sensory Environment to Economic Site
- Part 4 The Banlieue: Off-centred, Isolated
- Part 5 The Strangeness of Places and the Solitude of Men
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Cape Verdean slums of Fontainhas, north-west of Lisbon, are the setting of Pedro Costa’s trilogy, Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006). Most of the residents of the neighbourhood are outcasts, drop-outs and labourers, who were forced to build a dwelling in this uninhabitable place. They moved into these vacant, abandoned areas and transformed a place of exile into an inclusive home. These ‘places for the displaced’ are indeed interstices, narrow openings, in whose gaps are told the stories of brutalised humans and upended temporalities.
In 1999, when Pedro Costa was about to shoot In Vanda’s Room, the destruction of Fontainhas had already begun. He set his film up around two mutually exclusive, yet contiguous spaces: the inside, which mostly means Vanda’s room, where she and her sister use heroin, and the outside, about to be demolished, where dark, narrow streets are lined with tiny shacks that disappear, day by day, torn down by excavators.
The Dilapidated Fragility of Fontainhas
By the time shooting began for Colossal Youth in 2006, Fontainhas had been completely demolished and rebuilt. Pedro Costa had decided to return and revisit the ghostly traces of the old neighbourhood, scattered across the new constructions, when he met a Cape Verdean immigrant, Ventura.
I had seen Ventura many times while shooting the other films. He was a true outcast, a solitary outlaw, an outsider. He always fascinated me. I talked to him and learned he had been one of the first to build a house in the neighbourhood. He had arrived in Lisbon by himself, with no family. Slowly, from to 1975 to 1980, Ventura’s life and the history of the neighbourhood became completely intertwined. He told me about his problems, about his romantic life. From that came the idea that Ventura was a sort of archetypal figure of this past.
Colossal Youth is constructed around a ‘fictional framework’ based on Ventura’s life, but it was constantly modified while the film was being shot, partly because of the working method that was used, based on repetition and improvisation. Costa summed it up in these terms:
The idea was to do a scene, then forget it, and then do it again three months, six months later. It wasn’t the same any more, the actors remembered it, but something else had developed.
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- Information
- The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema , pp. 124 - 133Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022