The hold of the world

Re-enactment and survivance in Pedro Costa

Abstract

Composing a different kind of trilogy that revisits and revises the one preceding it –the “letters from Fontaínhas”—, Juventude em Marcha (2006), Cavalo Dinheiro (2014) and Vitalina Varela (2019) by Pedro Costa expand their focus from the marginal neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon towards the experiences of the Cape Verdean diaspora in Portugal and towards their spatio-temporally fractured existence, marked by forced emigration, discrimination and abandonment. But instead of working on these denied lives only as narrative material, Costa also incorporates lived experience into the compositional form of his films. The non-consecutive nature of the shots, the use of chiaroscuro and of thresholds that make the invisible a constitutive part of the frame, and the rarefaction of speech (almost always in the form of monologues) are just some of the ways in which Costa’s cinema echoes the life experience of his characters in the filmic structure itself. In this article I propose that this compositional matrix also refers (although in a non-referential way) to the historical and geopolitical dimension of the Portuguese Atlantic as the origin of the colonial-modern Plantationocene and its contemporary correlate, the “becoming-Black of the world” (Mbembe, 2014).