Category: Uncategorized (Page 231 of 1086)

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‘Pedro Costa is a director who I can only describe as the Samuel Beckett of world cinema: and even that comparison doesn’t quite convey how severe and how uncompromisingly difficult his movies have latterly become. This is the Portugese film-maker Pedro Costa – a cult master, a figure who is widely considered on the festival circuit to be for hardcore auteur followers only. A Pedro Costa film does not get a “release”. It does not “do business” – any more than a piece by Edgar Varèse rules the iTunes chart. I myself have seen critics and writers at festivals gird their loins reasonably happily for a Béla Tarr film. But at the words “Pedro Costa”, they flinch. A haunted look comes into their eyes.

‘Now, I can understand this. But considering the arc represented by Costa’s major features O Sangue, or Blood (1989), Ossos, or Bones (1997), No Quarto Do Vanda, or In Vanda’s Room (2000) and Juventude Em Marcha, or Onward Youth (2007), I now believe that his career arc is one of the most fascinating in modern cinema. Following this career is not, however, easy and Costa does not make it easy, increasingly setting his films in the collapsing rubble of Fonthainas, Lisbon’s grimmest slum. He favours interminably long shots, long silences, long aimless semi-audible conversations between semi-comatose drug addicts: like watching a Big Brother live feed direct from some of the most poverty-stricken places in Europe. When Onward Youth was briefly shown in the UK last year, it appeared under the title Colossal Youth, and the trade press cheerfully dubbed it “Colossal Bore”. My colleague Cath Clarke wrote about this film last year with great insight.

‘This director increasingly contrives scenes in cramped rooms in semi-darkness, shot from below, with perhaps one light-source in the form of a window in the top right corner of the frame, which glows without illuminating the scene. His most recent film is Ne Change Rien, which applies this technique, eccentrically, to a film about the singing career of the French film star Jeanne Balibar, who is shown rehearsing, performing and recording in a weird crepuscular darkness.

‘Pedro Costa’s work has evolved from conventional dramatic movie-making into an experimental docu-installation form, which is something between a real-time “reportage” cinema and an exhibition of animated portrait images. However difficult and punishing his films are, I am becoming weirdly hooked on them. They deserve a hearing from people who are open-minded about cinema as an art form, and particularly as an experimental art form.

‘Blood (1989), is Costa’s first film, made in black-and-white, about the relation of two brothers and their father. It looks beautiful, and is clearly influenced by Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and I think also has something of Buñuel’s Los Olvidados. It could have been made 40 or even 50 years ago, and Costa contrives a Nouvelle Vague feel, along with a Hollywood-ised reference to Nicholas Ray and maybe Charles Laughton’s Night Of The Hunter.

‘Bones (1997) is, I think, Costa’s best film. Maybe it’s even some sort of masterpiece: a dark, mysterious and mesmeric movie, shot in colour and set in Lisbon, among the urban poor. The faces that Costa captures are compelling, and disquieting, the kind of faces you would see in an unsettling dream: particularly the young woman at the very beginning, and also the face of Tina, who has just had a baby, and whose partner, played by Nuno Vaz, takes it away to try to get rid of it, trying first to give it to the hospital nurse and then to a prostitute. They are like the faces of ghosts, or faces of the dead. The atmosphere of Bones is extraordinary, like a horror film without the horror, or like a social-realist version of David Lynch’s Eraserhead.

‘Like many of Costa’s films, it has been wearily or amiably dismissed as miserabilism – and yet this isn’t how I responded to it. The film is about poverty, yes, and this is a subject which some people in both the movie business or the journalism business think is bad taste, as if poverty doesn’t really exist all that much and to emphasise it is a callow pose or crass exaggeration of style. Costa’s film takes poor people seriously and does not apologise for the moral and even spiritual seriousness of what it is doing. Watching this, I remembered a resonant line from Dickens’s Bleak House: “What the poor are to the poor is known only to themselves and to God.”

‘With In Vanda’s Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2007), Costa’s work moves to a dauntingly austere mode, a mode in which traditional cinephilic references are much less useful. To continue the Beckett analogy, Blood represents his “Molloy/Watt” phase, the early phase in which his work is at its most traditional and accessible. Bones is the “Godot” phase, in which his identity becomes strongest and most distinctive, and yet still accessible in normal cinematic terms, and In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth are his opaque and difficult, later phase, his “Imagination Dead Imagine” phase.

‘In Vanda, we see the return of two personae from Bones. They are the sisters Zita and Vanda Duarte, now overtly playing themselves, and in fact the film now sheds the ostensible fictional mode of Bones, and now becomes far more of a documentary portrait. Zita – whose face in closeup was so haunting at the beginning of Bones – and Vanda are now fully paid-up heroin addicts. Long, long scenes show them in their dark, cramped, squalid room in the Fontainhas slums of Lisbon, doing smack and talking inconsequentially about nothing much. The movie itself, with its series of fixed camera positions, is closer in spirit to an exhibition of photography, a succession of cinematic tableaux. The vivid, ghostly close-ups of Bones do not feature.

‘The people, living fragmented and embattled lives, are shown in tenements which are in the very process of being torn down. Yet there is no positive spirit attached to this, no sense that the Portugese state is moving them to better quarters: just a grim feeling that these houses are awful and even these are being destroyed. In one scene, taking place in crepuscular gloom, one man complains of a fear of death, and another says to him: “The bad never die. It is the innocent who die” – a very Beckettian line, especially when you realise that it is meant to be reassuring, and that the speaker considers himself and his companion to be one of the “bad”.’ — Peter Bradshaw

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Pedro Costa @ IMDb
Pedro Costa’s 10 favorite films
Pedro Costa: Portuguese director who fashioned Gil Scott-Heron’s film prayer
Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa
Colossal Works: The Films of Pedro Costa
Interview: Pedro Costa @ Film Comment
Pedro Costa by Michael Guarneri @ BOMB
Pedro Costa page @ Facebook
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The Films of Pedro Costa
‘Films of the Future [on Pedro Costa]’, by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Adventure: An Essay on Pedro Costa
A Cinema of Refusal: On Pedro Costa
Standing on Opposite Sides of the Road: Pedro Costa on Horse Money
The Politics of Pedro Costa
Pedro Costa: The “Unknown” Auteur Deals Out Horse Money
Pedro Costa @ TSPDT
In the shadows of catacombs: a conversation with Pedro Costa
Past, Moving Forward: The Little Theater of Pedro Costa
PEDRO COSTA ON THE SECRETS OF WARHOL
A Desperate Utopian Dream – Pedro Costa: an Introduction
ON REVENGE AND TRAGEDY IN CINEMA AND LIFE

 

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Extras

HBO Directors Dialogues: Pedro Costa

Jeff Wall on Pedro Costa

Masterclass de PEDRO COSTA

Pedro Costa’s Ossos: Video Essay – The Seventh Art

 

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Interview

 

NOTEBOOK: What was the difference between making Ne change rien—which is about working to make music—and Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? , which is about making a movie?

PEDRO COSTA: I could answer it another way. For the film about Danièle [Huillet] and Jean-Marie [Straub], that began as a request from Cinéma, de notre temps, and that began as a 60 minute film for the TV series in a certain format that I should more or less respect. When I prepared myself to shoot the thing, we really prepared. There was a film [Sicilia! ], there was a declaration of film production, and I was a bit afraid because I had this idea that I couldn’t to shoot Danièle and Jean-Marie shooting their film or being on a set because you can’t see anything. We either had to see the work with the actors—you could probably see something there—or the editing. So I chose the editing, knowing it would be very difficult technically, just because it takes place in a dark room, and the concentration involved. And, above all, Jean-Marie and Danièle, who I knew a little bit before, but I had an image of what it could be. So I had sometimes two cameras, I had someone assisting me with the cameras; we were there always, always from 9-7, so we ended up with 100 hours or more of footage, just because I wanted to have it all. I was afraid of missing that moment.

For this project, it was a bit different, there was no film, and there is no film still.

NOTEBOOK: There is an album.

COSTA: There’s an album, but there’s never a moment I said to Jeanne [Balibar] or the musicians “I’m doing this to make a feature, I’m doing a documentary.” It began because I knew Jeanne, apart from the fact that she’s certainly the actress today I most admire. She kept inviting me to things, to a theater play, or “come see this, even if you don’t like theater,” that she was going to be in the studio and come spend some days; simple things. There was a moment when I said “yeah okay I’ll come;” probably I didn’t even say I’ll bring my camera, I just arrived with my friend who does the sound and the musicians weren’t surprised. And we were there as the other musicians were, the technicians. So there’s this formality with Danièle and Jean-Marie that was not here. I don’t want to say the work with Jeanne was lighter or more superficial, but it’s a bit different than the work done from the editing of the film and especially Jean-Marie and Danièle’s methods. First, in this film, there’s much more people around, even if you don’t see it on screen, there’s a lot of intrusion. You can feel it a bit in some moments, there’s guys testing, some rock sounds, even some dispersion.

NOTEBOOK: The way the soundtrack works, you are never quite sure what the audio source is, whether it’s coming from what’s live on camera, or if it’s a playback loop, or if it’s off-camera.

COSTA: Exactly, there’s friends visiting, there’s people just sitting around. If the shots were wider or if my camera moved like in One Plus One, you could see the same thing, guys sitting around in funny hats. Of course, Jeanne and Rodolphe [Burger]—the corpus of the thing—were as concentrated and anxious as Jean-Marie and Danièle were, and for me that felt familiar. I saw the same protection. What I like about this film, and what related to Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, is the generosity they share. “If you fail, I’ll fail”—very simple. Even if I don’t like the projection here [in Cannes], if you see the film with a good print and good sound in a smaller theater, you’ll see the eyes, which are very important. Small things in Rodolphe’s attention and protection, that’s very obvious. There’s a link, a bond between him and the other guy, the bass guy, that’s very close, almost an out-of-time bond. There’s something very touching about that.

NOTEBOOK: The interaction between Jean-Marie and Danièle in Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? is conversation. It’s about the making of Sicilia! , but it goes far beyond that, whereas in this film, all dialog is strictly about the sound and getting the right sound, finding that tenor in construction and repetition.

COSTA: I was present for all the moments when you see Jeanne practicing the Offenbach opera, and that is probably the part of the film where I have more rushes. There you can see the same thing as between Jean-Marie and Danièle, the same severity, strictness, some very funny light tones, some erudition, there’s more moments like “think of this Mozart piece,” but then building the film, putting the pieces together, one part I was afraid of was charging these scenes so much, too much. It’s a film about a form, I think, and it’s Jeanne’s form—tempo—and if I would put more of the opera or the rehearsals, it would just become…I don’t know if I had the material to be that kind of film. Jeanne says it’s more like Party Girl, but the gang, you know in They Live By Night when they go to the cabin in the forest and stay for four days? It’s Nick Ray, it’s [Robert] Siodmark. They’re runaways, one has a guitar…they are running from something. It could be called The Fugitives.

NOTEBOOK: Can you talk about your visual approach to the project? You shot it yourself on digital in color, and then printed it on film. I’ve seen digitally shot videos projected here in Cannes digitally, but I’ve never seen one of your digital films projected that way.

COSTA: I’ve done four or five films like this, and now I’m doing video, color—not HD, just regular digital—and then I do the transfer to 35mm. The problem with this film was that I wanted real 35mm, not color stock, but the real black and white negative, the silver nitrate. It’s pretty expensive; five years ago you had Agfa, Kodak, Fuji, now you only have Kodak. The lab in Paris told me that in two years you couldn’t do this, it’s over, it’s too expensive, it’s too dangerous.

NOTEBOOK: It’s a beautiful effect though, it reminds me of the black and white version of that high contrast digital in Godard’s In Praise of Love, the vibrancy of the highs and lows. Did you light it yourself?

COSTA: I did some things, but I brought no equipment, really. I just improvised again, more like I did in In Vanda’s Room, with some aluminum foil or light boards off-camera. That’s one funny thing, sometimes the light is sun, you think it’s a lamp but it’s the sun, it’s real, bright sun. That’s Hollywood; I mean the good Hollywood. And sometimes it’s night and you think it’s the sun…so I just helped a little bit. The shine in the eyes, things like that, very, very small things. I was worried, actually, because I often have the tendency to pull back…

NOTEBOOK: But some of the close-ups are incredible, the shot that’s also in the shorter version of this film, that profile of Jeanne that looks like Dietrich-Sternberg lighting…I don’t know if that was the lighting of the club she was singing at or if it was your lighting.

COSTA: That was the club lighting plus a little bit—maybe—of manipulation, but just little things, density, contrast. That’s a funny shot.

NOTEBOOK: Is it sync sound or was the soundtrack remixed?

COSTA: Everything’s direct. There’s only one shot—the one in Japan—where the sound is from elsewhere. The image is something I did in Japan, I went to a cafe in the morning where we shot the concert in Japan. I went with Nobuhiro Suwa to Naruse’s grave, and this cafe faces the cemetery. The door in this shot, you can see it in the window…there’s a moment where you can almost see the gate of the cemetery. I went there and saw the grave and then I went for coffee and these two women were there, and they looked at me and I looked at them. And I set the camera simply on the table, I had no tripod, they smiled, I smile—Japan! But I had to add sound in the end, so when I mixed the film, I added this very tiny, tender sound. Every time I see this shot it reminds me of Jacques Tati, I don’t know why. But there’s a lot to be said about this shot. I would like to do a whole film like that—not silent—but there’s something there.

NOTEBOOK: Naruse’s favorite actress, Hideko Takamine, once said that Naruse told her that his ideal film would be one where she stars against blank white backdrops. In a way, Ne change rien reminds me of this project, bodies hanging against a minimalist abstraction.

COSTA: We tried to find something that’s under the surface of this film, not even a story, there’s more than that, something about fear, the light and blackness. I’m sure it’s not a documentary in that sense, a documentary about work, it’s just about trying to get somewhere. But that comes from Jeanne’s fragility, she’s a bit misplaced at the opera, she’s a bit misplaced in tempo with the guys, the pros.

NOTEBOOK: Did you complete this film a while ago? Because I first saw footage from it two years ago.

COSTA: We shot it a long, long time ago. The first time was a concert in 2005, I believe. And then every year I shot more, in the way I told you, I came and went. The last time I shot was late 2007. I stopped for a while, I had a short film to do, and then I came back to this, sat down with the editor. From November until March I was editing and handling the lab things.

NOTEBOOK: Was Ne change rien the same as with In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth where you had to sift through hundreds of hours of footage?

COSTA: No, we had much less. I had something like 80 hours for this film, because all the concerts are just an hour and I did not want to make a concert film where you go backstage or in the bus. I just shot the moments. Even the tiny small things that are in the film when the practice is over and the team goes to prepare food or whatever, really the rush just ends there. It’s like Warhol, an experimental thing where you go to the end of the tape. I had much less material.

NOTEBOOK: Was there much interaction between you and the musicians? If I remember correctly, you talk to Jean-Marie in Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?.

COSTA: Yes, with Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? the beginning was difficult, I was a bit lost in how to do it, and I found the door very, very late. But in this one, no, sometimes I told Jeanne something, but she’s an actress so she knows what to do, she slightly turns a bit more to the light—but just for the light, not for the mise-en-scene like “let’s do a scene like this”—I just served the thing, just being there, like a public service. [laughs]

NOTEBOOK: Are you working on something now? The two shorts came after this was shot.

COSTA: The shorts came in between.

NOTEBOOK: I love those shorts especially because of their length. When you were in New York for your retrospective, you talked about wanting to set up a television station in Fontaínhas and these shorts felt like episodes in a potential television series.

COSTA: I would love to do that, but it’s impossible. Every day it’s more impossible. But to see this idea more and more contemplated from here in Cannes it makes so much sense. I’ll do another short, more a museum thing, and then I’ll go back to Japan to do another short film, I don’t know the idea, but it will be a film with other directors, probably Godard and Sokurov.

NOTEBOOK: From In Vanda’s Room to Colossal Youth there’s a move towards more…I want to say fictional elements, but not really fictional, just a move away from specific documentary that allowed for room of mystery. The two shorts definitely continued in this vein.

COSTA: The films with my gang in Fontaínhas—it’s not only me—they need that “fiction,” or what we call fiction, they need it badly. That’s very obvious and natural, this necessity, and it explains everything. We know each other very well now, it’s been a long time–Vanda, Ventura, all the boys…well they’re not boys anymore. At the beginning it was like “let’s do the cop,” and “let’s do the chase,” and “okay another boring one,” and finally they are proposing—as in Tarrafal. I said I have this money, what shall we do? The second day this guy came with this letter about being expelled from the country, so let’s do something around that, he said let’s do that story, his story. I said where should we do it and he said “not here,” “let’s find a place.” That was the first time they said let’s imagine something, let’s imagine our territory. The problem is they don’t have a territory; they are between the new neighborhood, a no-man’s-land, and a freeway.

NOTEBOOK: But there’s that amazing sequence in the forest in those two shorts, where is that?

COSTA: [Laughs] That forest is…[indicates a small square]

NOTEBOOK: Oh, so just outside the frame there’s nothing?

COSTA: It’s ridiculous! But they needed that, and they wanted that. So now I think I should work on that, hear them much more, and go that direction. I think it will get closer to something…”purer” is not the word, but something verbal I’m sure. They want to tell the story with four or five elements, I don’t know what they are…I don’t want to talk about abstraction or minimalism but we’ll probably go that way. So you are right; when I started, even with Ossos, I really wanted to see something, find out, put things in relation to find out about them. But now it’s free. We don’t care any more about a statement.

There used to be even a critique in what we were doing, and they say we should show a bit more, about how the other half live, and I said “no, this is just me looking at you.” Now I don’t care and they don’t care, and it’s about something else. It’s freer. I hope the form will be freer. The monster is that it relates much more to the past than the present. They don’t care much about the present, that’s just it. They don’t think a second about the future, they are completely numb, and violent, and much more violent than before. They are turning their backs and it’s all about the past. It’s all about missing people and missing the land. That’s why I want to go back now.

NOTEBOOK: That sounds like a much more integrated approach to collaboration than what you are doing in Ne change rien or the Straub-Huillet film.

COSTA: Yes, and it’s also much wider, more vast. In the beginning it was Vanda, it was a girl, then it was her sister and her friend. Now everybody is Vanda.

NOTEBOOK: Does that make Ne change rien, this kind of film, more manageable than your work in Fontaínhas?

COSTA: These are really prototypes, all of them, and this was unique in that it comes from no declaration of film, for the first time, not even a “let’s see” attitude. It was strange, every time I went to see Jeanne, coming with a camera. I just read a Variety critique of my film, it says it all—”Arty fans will be enchanted” or something, “normal people, run away!” It’s funny, because I know when “normal” people and Variety walk out of this film—it’s when people start working. It’s like Godard says, when people see a tiny bit of someone working in a film, it’s dead.

 

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14 of Pedro Costa’s 19 films

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Casa de Lava (1994)
‘The colonial histories of Cape Verde—and the lives many of that country’s displaced emigrants now lead in Lisbon—have taken a central role in many of Costa’s recent films, but his rarely seen second feature is the only one of his movies thus far to have actually been shot in the archipelago. Leão (Isaach de Bankolé), the comatose laborer whose removal to his home at Fogo jump-starts the film, is a clear precursor to Ventura, with whom he shares a profession and a past. But the revelation of watching the movie now is how much fierce, unblinking attention it gives to the colonists themselves: Edith Scob as an aging Portuguese woman who has made the island her ill-fitting home; Pedro Hestnes as her son; and Inês de Medeiros as the Lisbon nurse who accompanies Leão with a mixture of brashness and fear. Casa de Lava, for which Costa took inspiration from Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, is one of the director’s most direct reckonings with Portugal’s colonial legacy.’ — filmlinc

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Ossos (1997)
‘Today, we should be able to appreciate the film both on its own terms, putting aside the works that followed, and in relation to In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth, the distance traveled from it to them. In and of itself, it is one of the most beautiful films of the nineties, exemplifying a current of the era’s auteurist cinema yet already reaching beyond it. The last fires of a dying European aesthetic glow in Ossos: an elliptical plot, highly composed wide shots held for a long time, the generally unmoving and silent presence of characters who preserve their mysterious density until the end. But a new energy is blowing on the embers, that of a brutal reality that auteur cinema had always avoided confronting: that impossible but oh-so-real location, those desperate people, enraged and resisting, suddenly visible, radiating a dark light. What is striking, when we consider the films that came after, is the extent to which Costa is already taking flight, despite the weight of traditional filmmaking. The people of Fontainhas—Vanda, Zita, and the others—play characters, embody parts. But Costa is already filming their pure presence in space, their strength, their resistance, capturing what is beneath the actors, the truth of the individuals. The film was welcomed by moviegoers, given a prize at Venice, praised by the critics—and co-opted by the Portuguese political class and media, seemingly stunned to discover in their city of Lisbon such a level of poverty, of which they feigned ignorance. In the career of any European auteur, Ossos would be a great first peak; for Pedro Costa, it marked the realization that he had reached a dead end, the conclusion of a certain way of making films. He could have continued in the same vein and become one of the masters of European auteur film. Leaving that well-worn path, he ventured into unknown territory, territory that politicians and the media could no longer touch. (In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth were celebrated by critics and festivals the world over—the latter screened in competition at Cannes in 2006—but they did not have the box-office success of Ossos. Still, they had something better: in each viewer who felt the films looking at him or her, they sparked the certainty that an essential encounter—an expansion of life—had taken place, something far beyond admiration.)’ — Cyril Neyrat

Trailer

the entire film

 

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In Vanda’s Room (2000)
‘One look at the appalling slum where Pedro Costa has set In Vanda’s Room seems comment enough. It’s a filthy, crumbling, aesthetically-nil nightmare that one assumes can only oppress the lives of the junkies, laborers and other residents who live there. But there is life in this Lisbon hellhole, and it’s being encroached upon by the “enlightened” folks who have deigned to clear the place without thinking of where the residents can go. This displacement disguised as renewal sums up Costa’s tragic sense of irony. His film is about people who live painful, desperate lives and yet refuse to budge from the fates they may or may not have chosen but decide to play out either way—people poised on the brink of self-pity who never fall off into the abyss, and who carry on in the face of addiction, invisibility and a general ennui that mere social realism can’t contain.’ — Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Où gît votre sourire enfoui? (2001)
‘Pedro Costa shot this portrait of filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at work while they were re-editing the third version of Sicilia! at the Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Le Fresnoy. A work of friendship and dedication and one of the greatest lessons of cinema.’ — Courtisane

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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6 Bagatelas (2001)
‘Pedro Costa takes six unused scenes of Où gît votre sourire enfoui? and put them into a new context. These fragments are not only «bagatelles», but a special look at Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.’ — viennale.at

the entire film

 

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The End of a Love Affair (2007)
‘A man is standing at the window, holding a chair. There are wafts of street noise, and occasionally the curtain flutters. A dog is barking. Then, elegiac music sets in, a lavish string arrangement, joined by Billy Holidays love-torn, tragic voice. She is singing «The End of a Love Affair», and the entire agony of the end of her life resonates in it. The man at the window has meanwhile sat down on his chair, and the sad insistence of the song portrays his emotions. Is there something like the ghost of a smile flitting over his face? «And the smile on my face isnt really a smile at all», Holiday sings, and in the end all that is proven is the manipulative power of the combination of image and sound.’ — Viennale.at

the entire film

 

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Ne Change Rien (2005)
‘Ne Change Rien is a bold music documentary, which pulls us into Balibar’s world without conforming. Pedro Costa offers us a film that prosaically depicts in spellbinding, tedious detail the creative lives of his subjects in their connect, disconnect, beauty, and torture. As the title, taken from an expression in Godard’s L’Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-1998) conveys, this is a film that goes nowhere. It is not about change. It sits in a purgatory, in the static, and monotonous. Costa’s ingenuity as a filmmaker lies in his ability to so resonantly and courageously interpret this. One hopes Pedro Costa will find distribution for this film, or a means of showing it for a run in major cities—but, even if he doesn’t, this film exists in the every day, in ourselves.’ — Senses of Cinema

the entire film

 

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Colossal Youth (2006)
‘Many of the lost souls of Ossos and In Vanda’s Room return in the spectral landscape of Colossal Youth, which brings to Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas films a new theatrical, tragic grandeur. This time, Costa focuses on Ventura, an elderly immigrant from Cape Verde living in a low-cost housing complex in Lisbon, who has been abandoned by his wife and spends his days visiting his neighbors, whom he considers his “children.” What results is a form of ghost story, a tale of derelict, dispossessed people living in the past and present at the same time, filmed by Costa with empathy and startling radiance.’ — Criterion Collection

Trailer

Watch the film here

 

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Tarrafal (2007)
‘In the first half of “Tarrafal” we listen to a conversation between several ex-Fontainhas residents about the world of Cape Verde. The pair focuses on locations and what may still be around, but eventually the topic somehow turns to a vampire story from the area about a vampire who would give letters to people and then hunt down and suck the blood of their recipients at night, though never killing their victims. Their blood was gone, but not their lives. The second half of the short seems barely related until eventually we learn that one of the characters is going to be deported, having been sent a letter from the vampiric state of Portugal that won’t kill him but will suck out something of his life. This is matched with the film’s title, “Tarrafal,” which was the location of a concentration camp in Cape Verde also known as the “Camp of Slow Death.” The political slant of this short is obvious, but it’s only half of the project.’ — By Sean Gandert

the entire film

 

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The Rabbit Hunters (2007)
‘ “The Rabbit Hunters” focuses on Ventura from Colossal Youth, who was only briefly around in “Tarrafal,” and instead it is somewhat like a continuation of that earlier film. Again Ventura is wandering amongst his friends and spends his time playing cards and telling stories of the past, only now he’s joined by his friend Alfredo. The pair drift through the film together until with its last nine minutes the short converges with “Tarrafal,” with the same actions taking place and using similar takes. “The Rabbit Hunters” fills in details missing from “Tarrafal” and helps to give a complete story, but while there’s some definite narrative thrust in the deportation it’s really more of a commentary about the way we choose to tell stories. Costa’s statement here is that he can come upon this same material in multiple ways and tell in some sense the same narrative. There’s always an essential question in Costa’s work about what gets told and who gets to tell it. The Fontainhas trilogy moved from the filmmaker being at an advantage in telling their story to a level of equality with the subject and eventually the subject of a film in some ways overpowering the filmmaker, with Ventura completely taking over Colossal Youth. Costa’s methodology in these shorts suggest that all methods of storytelling and editing should be considered artistically valid, whether they arrive at their observations elliptically as in “The Rabbit Hunters” or more obviously with “Tarrafal.”’ — Sean Gandert

the entire film

 

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O nosso Homem (2010)
”Is there space for a green garden?’ ‘Not even for a house’. We revisit Fontainhas, thinking of Cape Verde, the country to which José Alberto Silva will be deported but which he’s never seen before. This is controlled, hypnotic cinema, moving between life and death, reality and fiction.’ — iffy.com

the entire film

 

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Horse Money (2015)
‘I think that each of these supposedly cutting-edge issues is handily nullified by the mesmeric power of the films themselves, far richer and more elusive than one might guess from the critical literature. Costa has long had a dream of adapting Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions album as a film, and it seems to me that he layers and structures and sequences his films like a musician in the studio. Every aesthetic choice is lovingly tuned, from the particular sound of a given space’s quiet to the precise durations of each and every interval of time to the exact shade of yellow in the windows dotting the crushed black nightscape behind the beautiful Vitalina’s exquisite three-quarter profile. Is Costa exploiting these people and places for their phantom beauty? You bet he is. Suppressing one’s own desires and attractions in the name of a hollow ideal of moral equivalency always has and always will make for lousy art. The point isn’t the attraction, but where you take it. Too much of the rhetoric around Costa is abstract, only beginning to approach the wondrous spells and haunted refrains of the new Horse Money. The artist himself reckons that he’s turned some kind of corner with this film, and so he has. Fleeter and more mobile than Colossal Youth, with a structure built on what Murnau eloquently described as “the most fleeting harmonies of atmosphere,” Horse Money finds its way into the centrifugal force that Charles Olson identified in Melville, the sense of the “inertial structure” of the revolving world itself. I could go on rhapsodizing about the wonders of Horse Money, which becomes more alluring and impressive with every viewing: the soundtrack, so lovingly layered, in which every voice is a character and nocturnal silence is the star; the sudden apparition of the boys in the trees, gazing down intently like warring gods; the great star-crossed Vitalina; and Ventura, alias José Tavares Borges, a broken man but, it seems, proudly so—proudly here. The moving force of this film originates with Ventura himself, and the spirit of fraternity from behind the camera.’ — Kent Jones

Trailer

Thom Andersen on Pedro Costa’s “Horse Money”

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Vitalina Varela (2019)
‘Costa’s cinema isn’t neorealist. He fixes his actors in square-framed shots lit to resemble Golden Age Hollywood noirs or westerns, so they come to look like paintings by Old Masters. He pays close attention to natural sound, a very present but not obtrusive aspect of his films. His screenplays are oblique, repetitive, and glacially poetic tales of misfortune and exploitation. Surrounded by darkness, faces emerge in medium close-up only to suddenly drop out of frame, the way a trembling priest does at his makeshift pulpit in Costa’s new film, Vitalina Varela. There is a reason there are not many films like this. Vitalina Varela is so uncompromising and so concentrated that it threatens to absorb the projector beam, as if the projectionist’s black cue mark could take over the whole frame from one corner.’ — A. S. Hamrah

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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As Filhas Do Fogo (2023)
‘In As Filhas Do Fogo (The Daughters of Fire) the Portuguese director focuses on three young sisters separated by the eruption of the great Fogo, the highest peak in Cape Verde. They are played by the singers Elizabeth Pinard, Alice Costa and Karyna Gomes. The film is the result of a multidisciplinary collaboration between Pedro Costa and Os Músicos do Tejo, a Portuguese early music group founded in 2005. The Portuguese filmmaker built up this short film from images of looks to camera by the daughters of fire from the Island of Fogo, taken in Cape Verde in 1984 during the filming of Casa da Lava, which was shown at Cannes that year, at Un Certain Regard.’ — Festival de Cannes

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Probably, male, Hi there! Good to see you. Oh, short stories … gosh, with the kind of classic stuff, Nathanael West’s ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ and James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, for instance, and more recently, probably a lot, I’d have to think, but the books Lucia Berlin’s ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’ and Joy Williams’ ‘The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories’ spring immediately to mind, but let me think once I’m post my p.s.-duties and I’ll try to get back to you about that. Thanks! How are you? ** Dee Kilroy, Hey, Dee. Cool about ‘Angst’. I’ll hunt it down. Nice date there, and the L.A. queer crime story reveal makes me curious. I kind of love the ‘Phantasm’ movies, although it’s been a while. They seem like they might still hold up in the present. Err, ‘Skinamarink’ is probably my favorite film of the year, so far at least. I really loved it. But I totally get why people don’t like it. I’m guessing you came through the ‘hurricane’ highly and dryly? I hope. ** Dominik, Hi!!! My total pleasure. If you ever see the new ‘Mission: Impossible’, and I’m not recommending that you do, there’s an absolutely insane train action sequence at the end that made me think of ‘Bullet Train’. I hear you about sadness making you grumpy. I hardly get sad, I think, weirdly. I think when I am I just sit and stare or something. The Rotterdam deadline is September 20, and we have so much to do to get it ready. I think we’re going to just do the best we can and hope the unfinished things in the film are things they can foresee/imagine. They do allow films to be submitted that aren’t completely finished. But, yeah, eek. I think I would for sure ask love to slow time down. The fact that time is running out for me is a great horror. What would you choose? Love making cigarette smoking the cure for everything, G. ** David Ehrenstein, It’s a great one. ** Jack Skelley, Good eyeballing you last night, pal. Ha. The Scorpions are still a big, popular band in France. Why, I haven’t the slightest clue. FOKA is like the Black Plague’s polar opposite. ** Tosh Berman, Hi. I had no religion whatsoever growing up too. I guess I see that stuff in his work as, I don’t know, just curious context or something? Oh, shit. That’s Breton? Weird, when I was building the post, I found that pic on three different sites that had it credited as a pic of Bataille. Foolish me. Maybe Bataille took the photo? Is that even possible? Anyway, I’ll swap it out for a probably less eye-catching real shot. Thanks! ** dooflow, Hey, dooflow! How’s it going? Awesome to see you! Ha ha, nice, or, well, yeah, nice will do, on your reading each other to … petit mort? What else is going on with you du jour? ** Steve Erickson, Huh. As a nightly melatonin taker, it’s hard for me imagine you could overdose on it since its effect is so invisible. Good to know. Yes, ‘Story of the Eye’ is #1, no surprise there. Everyone, Go read Steve’s thoughts on Armed’s album PERFECT SAVIORS here, and on Agnes Hranitsky and Bela Tarr’s extraordinarily great and re-released to American theaters film WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES here. Looking forward to your thoughts own the Tarr. ** _Black_Acrylic, Well, of course, my great pleasure, Ben. ** Misanthrope, ‘Blue of Noon’ isn’t much like ‘SotE’, but it’s great. But if you want to make stuff that lasts ‘an eternity’, you have to be talented too. That’s the rub. One thing is for sure and that’s that I will never join X/Twitter. If I add a platform, it will be Instagram. I might sort of have to when the film is out. Oh, Brian, if it’s the same Brian I’m thinking of, yeah, he’s great. Well, I guess David at least knows that having a conscience is good and that he should at least try to front that he has one whether he does not not? ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I’m … mmm … okay, sort of. Happy about the post’s happy timing. Huh, favorite silent era film. I’ll have to think about that. Nothing is coming to mind. The Dreyer is really great, that’s certainly true. I agree: the Buttholes were insanely great up through ‘Hairway to Steven’, and then it was pretty much gone. Oh, sure, I like the guinea pig films. I’ve had a few featured on the blog in different contexts. That’ll be fun. Today I’m going with a visiting friend to Cemeterie Montparnasse to look at the graves of all kinds of incredible dead French people. Should be cool. I hope your day is in the upper 5% of your days so far. ** Minet, Hi, Minet! It’s so very nice to see you! I’ve been okay, sort of half in hell and half doing just fine. Maybe like you? We’re very busily trying to get the film ready for festival submissions. But it’s intense. But I love the film and am very excited about it. How have you been amidst the mess and your happy seeming rise above it? Are you writing? Oh, yeah, Hisayasu Satō. He’s terrific. I did a post about him maybe a year or so ago. Let me find it. Here. You make me want to go watch him again or more of his stuff since I’ve only watched a handful all the way through. Thanks! Yeah, catch me up on you and yours if you feel like it. Big up to you! ** Right. Today I decided to restore and expand the blog’s old post about the extraordinary Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa. Know his work? His most recent film, ‘Vitalina Varela’, is one of the greatest films I have ever seen. See what y’all think. And see you tomorrow.

 

‘His non-conformist mind was marked by what it was not yet customary to call black humor. Somewhat thin, with a style both romantic and of his time, he possessed (in a more youthful form of course, and less discreetly) the elegance he would never loose. His close-set, darkened eyes, brimming with all the blue of noon, went with his teeth that oddly suggested a forest animal, often uncovered by a laugh that (perhaps wrongly) I judged to be sarcastic’. Neither ‘flamboyantly attired’ nor ‘extravagant’, elegant but conservatively dressed (‘I always knew Bataille dressed in a very Bourgeois way’; ‘there was nothing Bohemian about him’). There was nothing Bohemian about him, but, as photographs of the time show, he displayed an elegance that was close to dandyism, a cynical dandyism.’ — Michel Leiris

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Corpses are the things of nightmares, figures that vibrate perpetually with the deafening echo of the last breath of presence. Georges Bataille’s 1935 novel The Blue of Noon is inundated with literal and metaphorical descriptions of corpses, which are used to convey the narrator’s self-ravaging tides of fear and desire. Simultaneously, the novel is interjected with strangely removed (despite the narrator’s physical proximity) observations of the political events leading up to World War II. When viewed in the context of its author’s biography and the period in which it was written, the disjointed poetic narrative that it unfurls is both personal and prolific.

‘Like all of Bataille’s narrative works, The Blue of Noon is in part a self-mediated biography, told through the thinly veiled voice of his male narrator Henri Troppmann. Although the implications will not be thoroughly explored here, the question of what requisites lend momentum to societies transgressions looms darkly in the background. Death exposes a very particular, and perhaps a penultimate, chaos; to surpass tears with momentary satiation does not escape comprehension. I would like to use specific passages from The Blue of Noon to discuss Bataille’s personal and authorial transgression of the Impossible, and more precisely to study his use of corpses as signifiers for this exploration of threshold and how to implement language in describing this struggle. From his notions on expenditure, to the death of philosophy, Bataille waged a war on limits. Before aging into the figure we study here, Bataille was a young adult on the path to becoming a monk.

‘Between the years 1920-1924, Georges Bataille’s belief system underwent a dramatic shift. A series of encounters during this period helped set into motion a dizzying struggle with paradox Bataille attempted to both define and destroy for the duration of his life. Small cracks had begun to destabilize the foundation of a devout Catholicism he had presumably taken up as a means of insulating himself from the madness of his childhood; but it wasn’t until his initial readings of Nietzsche that he felt deeply confounded by an intellectual choice in obsessive pursuits. His reaction to Nietzsche was in fact so provocative, that his first response was to reject the material. Reflecting years later on this moment, Bataille stated, “It is natural for a man encountering the destiny which belongs to him to experience an initial moment of recoil.” The terror of his adolescence crashed over him for a second (and certainly not the last) time, but unlike his self-enclosing escape into religion, he chose to pursue this new and unnerving opening before him.

‘By yielding to the Death of God and the laughing whilst peering into the void, transgression became his anti-idealistic ideal for living, signifying the end of an upright value system, in which all subjects are interchangeable and every structure is offered up for transmutable inversion. In his personal life, this allowed for his most debased desires to be structured accordingly; the brothel would become his church, and every person, from himself, to his mother, to his lovers (prostitutes, wives, and mistresses alike) was ultimately, a corpse. Bataille’s association of human flesh to an ever-present mortality may be a holdover from his years of monistic study, but it also stems from childhood memories of his blind, syphilitic father, who deteriorated progressively into madness until his death. Bataille claims to have been in love with his father until the age of fourteen. At the onset of the new self-consciousness of puberty this adoration shifted to a deep hate.’ — DISCURSIVE BODIES: The Corpses of Georges Bataille’s The Blue of Noon

 

 

Anus Solaire [Poem by Georges Bataille]

 

 

Translation: Journalist: What is the Evil you’re talking about? G. Bataille: There are, I believe, two sorts of Evil basically contrasting. On the one hand, one is linked to the necessity that everything goes right and succeed. On the other hand, the other one consists in positively breaking what is forbidden, like for instance, the ban on murder, or several sexual possibilities. J.: Does the title mean that Literature and Evil are inseparable? B.: I believe yes. Of course this isnt clear at first sight, but I think that if Literature goes away from Evil it becomes quickly boring. It is important to underline that Literature must deal with anguish, that this very anguish is based upon something that goes wrong, and eventually seriously bad. In leading the reader in some unpleasant perspective, I take the example of a novel, Literature avoids to get boring. J.: Thus a writer is always guilty of writing..? B.: Most of writers aren’t fully aware of this, but I do believe in that profound guilt. Writing is basically the opposite of working. It might not appear so logical, although every amusing books are efforts submited to work. J.: Could you name 1 or 2 writers that might have felt guilty of writing? B.: Well, two of them, which I named in my book, are clearly distinct in that matter. Baudelaire and Kafka, both felt guilty being in the common “wrong” side. It is obvious for Baudelaire who chose the very name “les Fleurs du Mal” to describe his deepest thoughts. Kafka expressed himself even more clearly, he thought that by writing he was disobeying to his fellows and put himself in a situation of guilt. […] J.: But being a writer and being guilty for Baudelaire or Kafka is because it’s not a serious occupation, that’s what their parents meant. They felt guilt being childish because they were writing. Do you think that Baudelaire and Kafka felt guilty by the very process of writing? B.: I think that expressly, even clearly pointed out by them a few times, they felt in the situation of a child towards his parents. The child disobeying to his parents and by then putting himself in a guitly conscience because he remember his affective parents who told him constantly what not to do, that it was bad ; in the strongest sense of the word. J.: If Literature is childish, you probably think that it is very puerile? B.: I Believe there is something essentially puerile within Literature. That may seem irreconcilable with one’s admiration for it, which I share. But I think it is fundamental, that one cannot fully understand what Literature is all about if we do not put it on the childhood side. Which doesn’t mean we put it on an inferior level. J.: You wrote a book about erotism, is erotism a childish behaviour in Literature? B.: I dont know if Literature distinguishes from erotism in general. But I think it is essential to underline the childish character of erotism as a whole. To be erotic is to be fascinated like a child with a game, a forbidden game. The man fascinated by erotism definitly is in the situation of a child towards his parents who is frightened of what might happen. He goes always far enough to be frightened. He doesn’t content himself with what wealthy adults do, he must be frightened, he must put himself in the same situation than when he was a child always threatened of being told off harshly ; in an unbearable, intolerable way. J.: We may have understood that you are condemning this puerility and childish behaviour, but I think we should go back to the title of your book, Literature and Evil. This is not a condemnation of Literature and Evil. I’d like you to give us the bottom line of this book. B.: It is obvious that it’s a warning, in this sense that we must warn against a danger, although it is possible that once we warned someone against a danger, we give him reasons to face it, and I think it is essential for us to face the danger which is Literature. I think it is a great and serious danger. But one is really a man only by facing this danger. Its within Literature that we aprehend human perspectives under their fullest shape, since Literature doesn’t let us live without aprehending human things through their most violent perspectives. Wether it be tragedy, Shakespeare and so on. It is mainly Literature that allows us to see the worst. And to know how to face it, how to overcome it. on the whole the man who play finds in the game the strength to overcome what the game leads of horror.

 

 

Anselm Kiefer ‘For Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon’, 2013

 

 

 

‘Narrative pathways through Le Bleu du ciel are never straightforward. Moving through the text involves negotiating one unstable, disorientating space after another, passing through an elaborate network of symbolic spaces – basements, recesses, cells, and tombs – whose borders touch each other and whose limits are continuously lacerated and transgressed. The text itself becomes labyrinthine and circuitous, subject to what Bataille himself refers to in the novel’s foreword as ‘monstrueuses anomalies’ [‘freakish anomalies’]. Through a study of the treatment of space in the Le Bleu du ciel – spaces constantly shifting between light and dark, openness and enclosure, form and the formless, this essay has examined some of the novel’s ‘anomalies’ and obsessions, looking at their place in relation to ideas explored in the broader corpus of Bataille’s thought. Seen in this context, what has become apparent is that such anomalies are not anomalies at all, but rather nodal points in a system of thought itself devoted to an interrogation of notions of impossibility and contradiction. Reference to the work of Blanchot, itself linked to the territory inhabited by Bataille through numerous biographical and textual connections, expands the scope of this interrogation, helping to show how the spaces of Le Bleu du ciel might be seen to relate to experiences outside the limits of that book, and ultimately to a broader understanding of the unstable, vertiginous experience of reading itself.’ — Michael Eades

 

 

 

Autopsia – Blue of Noon

David Sylvian – Blue of Noon

Guillaume Vallée – Blue of Noon

Krieg – Blue of Noon

Black Lake – Blue of Noon

 

 

 

 

 

‘Director André S. Labarthe, well-known as the co-founder and original developer of “Cinéma, de notre temps”, here portrays the French writer Georges Bataille (1897-1962), whose work ventures, at the same time, into the fields of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art. Initially broadcasted on 30 April 1997, the film contains interviews with Pierre Klossowski and Jacques Pimpanneau. The French title could be translated as As-Far-as-The-Eye-Can-See (At the Limit of Vision).

‘André Labarthe: “How to grasp with naked hands the most fiery thinking of the century? How to approach through film that which shies away whenever approached? How can the cinema – “the art of image” as we say – welcome and let live the intolerable images woven in stories such as Madame Edwarda and Blue of Noon? In short, how to talk about Georges Bataille in a film when we know that film to be impossible?”‘ — Amip-France 3

 

 

 

Blue of Noon (Marion Boyars)
translated by Harry Mathews

‘Blue of Noon is a novel that is as driven as a car whose driver has lost control. Troppmann the protagonist drinks to severe excess, womanises and is on the verge of despair. His wife Dirty who is introduced in the first chapter thoroughly drunk in the Savoy hotel in London is in an even more disgusting state than Troppmann and together they are driving each other to the brink. His wife separates from him and moves to Brighton leaving Troppmann to lead a dishevelled life of depravity and alcoholic excess in Paris. He visits Lazare a young communist whose ideology he finds as repugnant as her looks. Visiting friends in a nightclub he seduces Xenie by stabbing her in the thigh with a fork. He calls upon Xenie to visit him when he falls ill and scares her half to death whilst trying to seduce her. He visits Barcelona just as the General Strike is called and summons Xenie to him as well as his wife. Xenie gets caught up in the shooting and is terrified. Troppmann is reunited with his wife and together they make mad passionate love in the earth above a graveyard.’ — John Marcel, Resident Scholar

‘There’s at least one great missing film: the adaptation of Bataille’s Blue of Noon that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was planning to direct at the time of his death. I will always regret that this film never got made, for doubtless it would have shed a new and harsh light on the interplay of politics and sexuality and on the historical links between the fascist terror that Bataille confronted in the 1930s and the more diffuse and disguised forms of oppression and deprivation we continue to face today.’ — Steven Shaviro, Artforum

 

Excerpt

In London, in a cellar, in a neighborhood dive — the most squalid of unlikely places — Dirty was drunk. Utterly so. I was next to her (my hand was still bandaged from being cut by a broken glass.) Dirty that day was wearing a sumptuous evening gown (I was unshaven and unkempt.) As she stretched her long legs, she went into a violent convulsion. The place was crowded with men, and their eyes were getting ominous; the eyes of these perplexed men recalled spent cigars. Dirty clasped her naked thighs with both hands. She moaned as she bit into a grubby curtain. She was as drunk as she was beautiful. Staring at a gaslamp, she rolled round, irate eyes.

“What’s going on?” she shouted.

In the same instant, like a cannon going off in a cloud of dust, she jumped. From eyes that bulged like a scarecrow’s came a stream of tears.

She shouted again: “Troppmann!”

As she looked at me her eyes opened wider. With long dirty hands she stroked my sick head. My forehead was damp from fever. She was crying, with wild entreaty, the way one vomits. She was sobbing so hard her hair was drenched with tears.

The scene that preceded this nauseous carnival — afterwards, rats must have come crawling over the floor round the two sprawled bodies — was in every way worthy of Dostoevsky.

 

Drunkenness had committed us to dereliction, in pursuit of some grim response to the grimmest of compulsions. Before being wholly affected by drink, we had managed to retreat to a room at the Savoy. Dirty had noticed that the elevator attendant was very ugly (in spite of his handsome uniform, you might have taken him for a gravedigger.)

She pointed this out to me with a distracted laugh. Her speech was already awry — she spoke like a drunk woman.

“You know — “, racked as she was by hiccups, she kept stopping short, “when I was a kid . . . I remember . . . I came here with my mother. Here. About ten years ago. So I must have been twelve . . . . My mother was a faded old lady, sort of like the Queen of England . . . So, as it happened, coming out of the elevator, the elevator man — we just saw him —”

“Who — him?”

“Yes. The same one as today. He didn’t stop it level — the elevator went up too far — she fell flat on her face. She came tumbling down — my mother —”

Dirty burst out laughing, like some lunatic. She couldn’t stop.

Struggling to find my words, I said to her, “Don’t laugh any more. You’ll never get through your story.”

She stopped laughing and began shouting: “Oh, my, I’m getting silly — I’ll have to . . . No, no, I’ll finish my story. My mother. Not stirring, with her skirt over her head, that enormous skirt of hers. Like someone dead. Not another stir out of her. They picked her up and began putting her to bed. She started to puke — she was stewed to the eyebrows, except that one second earlier you couldn’t tell — that woman . . . She was like a mastiff. She was scary. ”

I said to Dirty, abjectly: “I’d like to fall down in front of you, just the way she did. . .”

“Would you throw up?” Dirty asked me, without even a smile. She kissed me inside the mouth.

“Maybe.”

 

I went into the bathroom. I was very pale. For no reason at all I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time; I was horribly unkempt, almost coarse, with swollen features that were not even ugly, and the rank look of a man just out of bed.

Dirty was alone in the bedroom. It was a huge room lighted by a multitude of ceiling lamps. She wandered around, walking straight ahead, as though she would never stop. She seemed literally crazy.

Her shoulders were bare to the point of indecency. In that light I found the glitter of her blond hair unbearable. She gave me a feeling of purity nonetheless. Even in her debauchery, there was such candor in her that I sometimes wanted to grovel at her feet. I was afraid of her. I saw that she was worn out. She was on the point of falling down. She began gasping for breath, panting like an animal; she was suffocating. Her mean, hunted look was driving me insane. She stopped — I think her legs were squirming under her dress. There was no doubt she was about to start raving. She rang the bell for the maid.

 

After a few moments, a redhaired, fresh-complexioned, and rather pretty maid came in. She seemed to gag on the smell. It was a highly unusual smell for so opulent a place: that of a lowdown brothel. Dirty had given up trying to stand on her feet unless she had a wall to lean on. She seemed to be in horrible pain. I don’t know at what point in the day she had smothered herself in cheap perfumes, but in addition to the indescribable state she had gotten herself into, she gave off a sour smell of armpit and crotch which, mingling with the perfume, recalled the stench of an infirmary. She also reeked of whisky, and she was belching…

The English girl was aghast.

“You’re just the person I need,” Dirty announced, “but first you have to get the elevator man. There’s something I want to tell him.”

The maid vanished; Dirty, now staggering, went and sat on a chair. With great difficulty she managed to set down a bottle and a glass on the floor beside her. Her eyes were growing heavy.

Her eyes tried to find me. I was no longer there. She lost her head. In a desperate voice she called out, “Troppmann!”

There was no reply.

She got up and several times nearly fell. She made it to the bathroom door; she saw me slumped on a bench, haggard and white. In my drunkenness I had just reopened the cut in my right hand. The bleeding, which I was trying to stanch with a towel, was dribbling rapidly onto the floor. Dirty, in front of me, was staring at me with eyes like an animal’s. I wiped my face, thus smearing blood over my forehead and nose. The electric light was getting blindingly bright. It was unbearable, this light that wore out the eyes.

There was a knock at the door. The maid came in, followed by the elevator attendant.

Dirty slumped onto the chair. After what seemed to me like a very long time, her eyes lowered and unseeing, she asked the elevator attendant, “You were here in 1924?”

The attendant answered yes.

“I want to ask you — the tall old lady . . . The one who fell down getting out of the elevator and vomited on the floor . . . You remember?”

Dirty was articulating through dead lips, seeing nothing.

In fearful embarrassment the two servants cast sidelong glances, questioning and observing one another.

“I do remember,” the attendant admitted. “It’s true.”

(This man, who was in his forties, may have had the face of a thieving gravedigger, but it was of such an unctuosity that it seemed to have been pickled in oil.)

“A glass of whisky?” Dirty asked.

No one answered. The two characters stood there in deferential, painful expectancy.

 

Dirty asked to be given her purse. Her gestures were so sluggish it took a long minute for her hand to reach the bottom of the purse; as soon as she found the stack of banknotes, she tossed it on the floor, saying merely, “Go shares.”

The gravedigger had found something to do. He picked up the precious stack and began
counting out the pounds aloud. There were twenty in all. He handed ten to the maid.

“We may leave?” he asked after a while. “Oh, no, not yet. Please, sit down.”

She seemed to be suffocating; blood was rushing to her face. Showing great deference, the two servants had remained standing; but they too became red and anxious, partly because of the staggering size of the tip, partly because of the implausible, incomprehensible situation.

Dirty remained mutely perched on the chair. There was a long silence: you could have heard our hearts inside their bodies. I walked over to the door, pale and sick, my face smeared with blood; I was hiccupping and on the point of vomiting. In terror the servants saw that water was trickling across the chair and down the legs of their beautiful guest. While the urine was gathering into a puddle that spread over the carpet, a noise of slackening bowels made itself ponderously evident beneath the young woman’s dress — beet-red, her eyes twisted upwards, she was squirming on her chair like a pig under the knife.

 

The trembling, nauseated maid had to wash Dirty, who seemed calm and content once again. She let herself be wiped and soaped. The elevator man aired the room until the smell had completely disappeared. He then bandaged my cut to stop the bleeding. Things were all back in their proper place. The maid was putting away the last articles of clothing. Washed, perfumed, more beautiful than ever, Dirty was stretched out on the bed, still drinking. She made the attendant sit down. He sat next to her in an armchair. At this point, drunkenness gave her the forsaken candor of a child, of a little girl. Even when she remained silent, she seemed forsaken. Occasionally she would laugh to herself.

“Tell me,” she at last said to the elevator attendant, “during all the years you’ve been at the Savoy, you must have had lots of repulsive experiences.”

“Oh, not all that many, “he replied, although not before finishing his whisky, which seemed to give him a boost and restore his composure. “The guests here are
well-behaved, as a rule.”

“Oh, well-behaved — that’s a whole way of life isn’t it? Just like my departed mother when she took a tumble in front of you and puked all over your sleeves…”

And Dirty burst into dissonant laughter, to which, in that emptiness, there was no response.

She went on: “And do you know why they’re all well-behaved? They’re scared, do you understand? Their teeth are chattering — that’s why they never dare let anything show. I can sense that because I’m scared myself — yes, my good man, I am. Can’t you tell? Even of you. Scared to death.”

“Wouldn’t Madame like a glass of water?” the maid asked fearfully.

“Shit!” Dirty curtly answered, sticking out her tongue at her, “I happen to be sick, don’t forget that. I also happen to have a few brains in my head. “Then: “You don’t give a fuck, but things like that make me want to vomit, do you hear?”

With a mild gesture I managed to interrupt her. As I made her take another swallow of Scotch, I said to the attendant, “Admit that if it was up to you, you’d strangle her.”

“You’re right,’ Dirty yelped, “look at those huge paws, those gorilla’s paws of his. They’re hairy as balls.”

“But, Madame,” the attendant protested “you know I’m here to oblige you.”

“What an idea! No, you idiot, I don’t need your balls. I’m feeling sick to my stomach.”

As she chortled, she belched.

 

The maid dashed out and came back with a basin. She seemed all servility, and utterly decent. I sat there pale and listless. I kept drinking more and more.

“And as for you — you, the nice girl, ” Dirty began, this time addressing the maid, “you masturbate, and you look at the teapots in shopwindows for when you’ll set up housekeeping. If I had a fanny like yours I’d let everybody see it. Otherwise, one day you’ll happen to find the hole while you’re scratching and die of shame.”

Appalled I abruptly told the maid, “Sprinkle some water on her face — can’t you see she’s getting all hot?”

The maid immediately started bustling about. She put a wet towel on Dirty’s forehead. Dirty dragged herself over to the window. Beneath her she saw the Thames and, in the background, some of the most hideous buildings in London, now magnified in the darkness. She quickly vomited in the open air. In her relief she called for me, and, as I held her forehead I stared at that foul sewer of a landscape: the river and the warehouses. In the vicinity of the hotel the lights of luxury apartments loomed insolently.

Gazing out at London, I almost wept, I was so distraught with anxiety. As I breathed in the cool air, childhood memories — of little girls, for instance, with whom I used to play at telephone and diabolo — merged with the vision of the elevator attendant’s apelike paws.

What was happening, moreover, seemed to me trivial and somehow ludicrous. I myself was empty. I was scarcely even capable of inventing new horrors to fill the emptiness. I felt powerless and degraded. It was in this uncompliant and indifferent frame of mind that I followed Dirty outside. Dirty kept me going; nevertheless, I could not conceive of any human creature being more derelict and adrift.

This anxiety that never for a moment let the body slacken provided the only explanation for a wonderful ability: we managed, with no respect for conventional pigeonholes, to eliminate every possible urge, in the room at the Savoy as well as in the dive, wherever we had to.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Oh, does Scotland encourage sugar teeth? Interesting. Of course now I must hunt down Tangfastics. Yes, the murdering natal nurse has been news here too. That sweetly smiling photo that the news uses of her is seriously scary. ** Misanthrope, Maybe gummies are the key to a long life? Weirder things have been discovered and proven. It’s true: time management and confidence are the #s 1 & 2 of writerly success. Talent is probably #8 or 9. Well, that’s something of a positive report on David relative to his ‘will he wake up tomorrow?’ phase. And the online journalism thing is pretty cool. Yeah, that’s something. Almost but not quite enough to make me finally break down and do Instagram. ** Cody Goodnight, I’m a bit frantic, but I’m okay, I guess. ‘Sexy Beast’ is worth it for the performances. Especially Kingsley’s, which is kind of jaw dropping. And it’s stylish and holds the eye. How did ‘Angst’ sit with you? I almost went to see that film that won Cannes this year, but then the absence of English subtitles made me think twice. I hereby declare Monday is yours. ** Dominik, Hi!! Ha ha, that’s hilarious about your dog. I’m going to think of gummys as not food from now on. Yes, the shit one is real apparently. Maybe that would be the one to change your dog’s mind, ha ha? I’m positive your sequel to ‘Bullet Train’ would fix all the could-be-better moments in it. And I’m sure you can think up a genius mastermind character who could restart Aaron’s character. I’m trying to think of what the proper behavior would be for a sad person. Huh. I’m sure love can figure that out. Love making me have checked on the terrifyingly soon deadline for submissions for the Rotterdam Film Festival a month ago instead of yesterday, G. ** Armando, Hey, big A! Dude, so nice to see you, it’s been ages. I’m alright basically. The film itself goes really well, but the funding to finish it and everything to do with the administrative aspect is hell on earth. We need to have a watchable if unfinished version ready by our first festival deadline on September 20, and then I think we’ll have it totally finished by the end of the year. I like the gummys that have the, like, a smear of marshmallow on one side of them. I can’t remember what they’re called. There are probably a bunch of ones that qualify. How are you? What are you up to? Are you writing? What’s going on? Love, me. ** Steve Erickson, Rozz could definitely make for an interesting doc. Here’s hoping. I talked to friends in LA yesterday. They seemed both prepared but pretty nonchalant. And from what I’ve heard so far, it’s just been a little rainier than usual. Yes, apparently the desert area where we shot the film is in the direct line of the tropical storm. It’s gonna very messy, if so. I don’t what the deal is about the gummy Melatonin, etc. thing. France is very strict and old fashioned about that kind of stuff, so I’m pretty positive that such things aren’t in the stores here. ** Montse, Hi!!! I’ve had Haribo addiction periods. Zac and I went to a Haribo factory in southern France. Except it wasn’t much of a factory, but they did have a store that sold every kind of Haribo candies in the entire world and 6 foot tall gummy bears and so on, and that was heavenly. Gare de Nord, that’s easy. Just hit me up when you’re here and settled, and we’ll sort it out. I’m ok until I need to be home at 6 pm today. Wow, see you ultra-soon. Love, me. ** Right. How about a spotlight on Georges Bataille’s second best (in my opinion) novel as your daily DC’s reckoning? Because that’s what you’re saddled with. See you tomorrow.