INTERVIEW WITH PEDRO COSTA

By Catarina Brites Soares

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– Javier Cordesal, curator of the exposition "Canción de Pedro Costa", tells us that it allows us to imagine the next steps of your work after "Vitalina Varela". What are these steps?

I don't know. All I know is that the films should always bear witness to the reason for their existence and their necessity. But I don't know anymore what kind of work this is supposed to be, what it means to make a film. Nobody believes that it's still necessary to make films or to see films. Nobody asks oneself if it's still worth it to make a film. I never believed in the social function of cinema, but now we've hit rock-bottom. Cinema survives at the cost of much mystification and injustice. And much betrayal. Words which come deep down from the cinema, from its basic vocabulary: betrayal, vengeance, love, work. When Ventura says to me "I worked", I believe him. If Vitalina says to me "I loved", I believe her. I believe in the power these words can engender, I believe in the people whom I work with, and I believe in the work we can do, together, with the means of the cinema. But when they ask me "Now what, how will our film go on? How will we manage it?", when there's no answer and yet an answer must be found... The first feeling is always terrifying, it's that the film will never end. And that we're not part of this cinema of today – an empty activity, a façade, a convention.

– The exposition, starting with its name, makes clear the importance of voice(s). They're heard everywhere in the various rooms. Are these voices more like an intent of making those who were silenced heard, and thus replace or rewrite history? And why the predominance of darkness?

Ever since I started watching films I realized the cinema is always very intimate. Despite the scale, the spectacle, the roaring sounds and the screams. Not just the melodramas or the noirs, but all films, adventure or horror. It's the living rooms, the offices, the hallways, the police stations, hospital rooms, prisons. It's all very interior, even in the forests and in the plains beneath great blue skies. Night is interior, the room is dark, a film is a room. I understood that the more enclosed we are, the more open we are. The more intimate and secret, the more public. In our work, the secret is a social bond. I always liked cinema because you could see people who tried to measure themselves up to their own lives, up to History, and up to the cinema.

– Your cinema is known for – and recognized as – being a committed cinema, where one gives his all. For years you've been working with the same actors, characters and stories. What drives you?

I took way too long to get rid of that which I don't need. And to learn to waste time. The people I've been working with don't have time, nor money, nor health. They're doomed: no house, no town, no country. They were never given the time to think or to imagine. They run towards death. And so does the cinema; somehow it made Time its archenemy. Our true enemy is urgency. We'll waste as much time as necessary in order to find the words, and the way of saying them and of making them seen. We film with leftovers. This isn't a metaphor, it's not just the ruins of houses, it's the leftovers of men and women. Leftovers of ourselves, who no longer know how to work wholly. But I have the luck of working with what I like, and above all with whom I like. I work with very serious and dignified people. I've said it many times: they are the best part of my country.

– Do you feel your work is appreciated in Portugal as it is in France, Spain and other countries?

I'd rather answer in a more materialistic way: it isn't rare that some of the so-called "comercial" Portuguese films are seen by six or seven thousand spectators in 60 or 70 movie theaters around the country. Six thousand people for 60 cinemas. It's true that few people can see my films in Portuguese cinemas. They are shown in three or four of them. They have around five thousand spectators. So, just make the math. I'd like to know what would happen if I could go into all these theaters, who knows, maybe something surprising. And I could say the same about other films by other filmmakers. But nobody cares, neither the public financiers, nor the distributors, nor the critics. They say there's no audience. Precisely, it would be necessary that the critics did not portray these films as if they were freaks, that they didn't call them "spectral" and elitists, among other things. But anyway, if you want to read an interesting text about a film, you won't find it in Portuguese newspapers.

It's true that I benefited greatly from internet dissemination: my films are seen and shared, they're available on pirate websites and on legal platforms, they have many DVD editions. I'm lucky because the films have travelled around a lot, and they've travelled good. And throughout the years, I've received very emotional testimonies, letters, messages, encounters. I know for example that they were important to some young filmmakers from South America, where more energy and guerrilla economics are necessary. This doesn't mean that I want to make movies for millions of people, for the entire world. This is the desire of culture ministers, cultural institutes and festival programmers: international auteur films.

I can assure you that this exhibition at the Virreina won't raise any interest here in Portugal. That was the case with the "Companhia" exhibition at Serralves [Porto] in 2018, or with another more recent one at the Centre Pompidou [Paris], with my comrades Paulo Nozolino and Rui Chafes. But also, that's not my world. If the milieu of the cinema is blind, deaf and mute, that of contemporary art is completely subservient to power, too messed up by money. And it is very ignorant in regard to cinema. North American colonization has been accomplished, Portuguese intellectuals gossip about the hyped up TV shows of the moment, about Roth and Rothko, they take pride in never having seen a film by Manoel de Oliveira. They are elegant, they call themselves "classics", if you take Senso away from them that's their whole cinema. The one thing they never saw is the cinema, they saw two stills of Potemkin in a magazine. They must be more relaxed now, Jean-Luc Godard just died. It's sad, for 40 years we've been withstanding a poorly educated and very incompetent ruling class. Puppets everywhere, ministers, institute directors, mayors, these morons who are now drooling at the honor of having Netflix and Amazon filming the beauties of Lisbon and Sintra – without even paying the fortunes they should – and who don't have the courage nor the ideas to improve living conditions in the city for the workers, for the poor. They're selling their country away, they have no spine.