* (restored)

 

‘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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13 of Pedro Costa’s 17 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

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

 

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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

 

_____________
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”

 

_____________
Vitalina Varela (2019)
‘My friends, before it leaves the big screen, rush to see Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela: this is very important. We can all agree: the cinema in its near totality has turned to shit, is soulless, has sold out to that hysterical movie-trailer factory which only produces images of our tolerance for junk. But a few filmmakers find unscathed images: images that, through their political dignity, through their poetic rectitude, cut themselves off from tawdry hell; among these filmmakers, there is Pedro Costa.’ — Yannick Haenel

Trailer

Pedro Costa on Vitalina Varela, Darkness, and His Filmmaking Process

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, from now on my teacups are going to be very stand-offish. I’m hoping Zac has made good contact with the new/other daughter possibility, but I’ll find out tonight. Oh, okay, end of March is the starting gate of the move, I guess? Plenty (?) of time to prepare, psychologically and otherwise. I hate having to move, even just across town, much less internationally, so I know your anxiety, at least to some degree, but, when the time comes, you’ll just do it, and once you’re in your refreshed new life, you’ll be inspired, I’m sure. Based on my experience. I agree with love and HH49HH, so that makes three. Love backtracking in time to just before whatever point it was that someone stole my wallet on the metro on Saturday and sewing my pocket shut, G. ** Tosh Berman, Thanks, Tosh. Tokyo! But for such a sad reason, I’m sorry. I hope you can dig around in your surroundings. I’ve never written on my phone. That sounds extremely daunting, but if anyone can crack that medium’s it’s you. Have huge fun! Check in here if you get the chance please. ** David Ehrenstein, Belated happy birthday, sir! It’s not impossible that you tricked with Bo depending on when your ‘back in the day’ was. ** NLK, Thank you kindly. I’m the exact same, i.e. revising is a perfect fit for my particular obsessive bent. It’s luxurious. Me too also on envying the speedy types. I used to do a lot of journalism and reviews, and it always took me 10+ times longer to write the simplest non-fictional screed than someone in that position should, which is a big reason why I swore off writing that kind of stuff. Ah, but Clementi spent ages editing his films, that’s the rub. The Pompidou has possibly the best film programming in Paris, and that’s saying something. Oh, god, an animated gif teeshirt, my longing is exploding. Sad about the sad ending though, but, hey, having invented the gif teeshirt easily makes up for the letdown, no? I might be like your dad if I could remember my always terrifying dreams. Other than the fact that they were terrifying. Cheers back from a chair whose back faces a windowsill where two pigeons are building a nest. ** Meg Gluth, Hi! 3/2 to 3/5, gotcha. I’m not sure what my schedule will be or how busy I’ll be yet, but we’ll find time for sure. Yes, I’m still at that pad in Los Feliz that you visited so many ages ago. Awesome! ** Bill, Hi. Yes, I’m so happy ‘The Dream Life’ is back. It’s such an extremely lovely novel. Did you ever meet Bo? He might’ve lived in SF before your time there, I’m not sure. I need to read that book on Jerome Caja. I keep forgetting to seek it. If you find what’s going on with the doc, let me know. ** Cody Goodnight, Hey, Cody! Other than having had my wallet and bank card stolen during the weekend and having live on borrowed euros and loose change until I get to LA, I’m ok. Gosh, growing up in LA, and living for a lot of that time in an area where a lot of famous people live, I’ve met or at least encountered quite a few biggies. Like I used to live on the same street as Leonardo Di Caprio, and we chatted on the street a bunch. I’ll have to fish through my memories and come up with a particularly interesting story later, I think. Deep Dish isn’t really like soup if it’s done right, or maybe it’s like a slightly soupier than normal pizza. But it’s solid, or solid-ish. I’ll start with ‘The Cremator’, thanks. Definitely sounds of interest. How’s your paper going. Ah, Nina Simone is such a genius. Unbelievable. I think my favorite of hers is ‘Live at Carnegie Hall’, but she’s insanely great. Enjoy, iow. My weekend sucked, but my week looks okay so far. Yours? ** Philip Hopbell, Hi. I agree about the Lindon books. And about the need for him to be more translated. He and I share a French publisher, Editions POL, and I’ve met him a few times, and he is just the loveliest guy. Well, you nailed Edmund in a sentence, yes, ha ha. Very nice reading list there. ‘The Cheap Eaters’ is one of the few Bernhards I haven’t read. Obviously, I will. What does your week look like? ** Katie Jean Shinkle, Katie, hi! I loved the book! I was so happy to have new work by you. It had been far too long for a big fan like myself. Thank you so much for coming in. Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yay about your wise buddy Len. Feedback, especially of the good type, makes all the difference. Weird, but it does. I’m glad you got to see your friend and her brood. If ‘Avatar 2’ doesn’t show up on a plane flight’s menu, I doubt I’ll ever see it either. ** Gick, Hi. No, I only had the destroyed laptop, well, until I got this new one. I only use my phone for texts and GPS and taking photos. It’s an older iPhone, and it’s really small. Most of the extras in our film don’t have to act, they just have to stand around or look like they’re walking somewhere believably. It’s more about the cut of their jib. I’m a workaholic too, and I’m sure I’d be depressed if, for instance, I didn’t have blog posts to make all the time. I’m feeling pretty good, kind of anxious to get everything done that needs to get done for the film shoot, which is a lot. So in a way maybe I’m too concentrated on that to feel a whole of anything, which is good, I suppose. I need to get to L. It’s been ages. I’m probably pretty easy to kidnap, but please don’t, ha ha. Have a very upbeat day by whatever means. ** Steve Erickson, The Lindon book about Guibert is really lovely. From what I’ve heard, yeah, something key seems to have drifted out of 100 gecs’ stuff, and that’s too bad. But I’ll try the LP to be sure. So sorry about your friend, but, yeah, peace of mind is ultimately more valuable than a friend if he can’t help provide that generally. Ugh. ** Dom Lyne, Hi, Dom. Yes, I’m enjoying my lack of jet lag until it returns full force on Friday when I’ll be in LA and 9 hours askew yet again. I’m learning to see the cloud as a pal. It takes some adjustment. That makes total sense about your friend. When I was writing ‘I Wished’ and thinking about George all the time by necessity, I too got very painfully close to him, and, pain notwithstanding, I really appreciated it. Love to you. ** NIT, Yay, what great news! I’ll finally get to meet you! I’ll try not to be too taxed and preoccupied with the film stuff. Great!!!! ** Nick., Hey, Nick.! What’s the new job? I’m glad it was worth partying about. Ha ha, yeah, I know exactly that effect you’re talking about, i.e. someone’s ultimateness making guys who might, in other circumstances, have been ultimate seem like interactable pieces of cake. Enjoy it while it lasts. I think my favorite birthday was either the time when I was a teen where someone arranged for me to get a ‘backstage’ tour of Disneyland and see all the behind-the-scenes stuff or back in the mid-80s when this guy I had been totally obsessed with for about 4 years and even wrote a whole novella about hoping to impress him finally gave me sex with him as a birthday present. What’s been your top birthday so far? Happy Monday. ** Right. I decided to restore this old Pedro Costa Day because it was a bit decimated by link expiration and other time-based ravages and, of course, because he’s great. See you tomorrow.

______________

‘In the final years of his life—a cruel phrase, really, as he only lived to 33—the writer Bo Huston made several trips to Zurich for experimental AIDS treatments. In his downtime there, between appointments, he read Christopher Isherwood and Patricia Highsmith, slept, and went for walks to fill the days.

‘Huston wasn’t the first writer to hear he was unlikely to live long enough to finish his work. He wasn’t even the first writer of his generation, or his circle of friends. If he’d looked to the past for examples, there was the English writer Anthony Burgess, who famously received a brain-tumor diagnosis at forty and was told he had a year to live. Burgess set to writing, intent on leaving something to support his wife and children. The resulting manuscripts—five novels’ worth, including one entitled The Doctor Is Sick—formed the foundation of his career as a writer. But Burgess far outlived his doctor’s prognosis, dying at seventy-six. …

‘As for Huston, he wrote to the end, or as close as he could get to it. Thomas Avena recounts their final phone exchange in his introductory essay to Life Sentences. “I won’t be around much longer,” Huston tells him and says they should finish their edits. “I said that I had always admired him,” Avena writes, “that his last novel, The Dream Life, was a perfect work, seamless. We went carefully over the edits.”

‘The Dream Life remains in print. It’s the only one of Huston’s books that is, although there’s a viable case to be made for reprinting each of the three out-of-print titles. Yet Huston’s fondest wish has come true: his books are available in libraries in the US and abroad. It’s gratifying to think that, like Remember Me’s unnamed narrator writing his novel about togetherness, Huston can be together with readers more than a quarter-century after his death. Those who encounter his work today may be unable to remember him—much of his generation, sadly and unjustly, is already gone—but it’s not hard to imagine a young, hungry writer feasting on his books, wondering what might have been while savoring the writing Huston left behind.’ — John McIntyre

 

Remembering Bo Huston
Publication Studio @ instagram
Bo Huston @ goodreads
Bo Huston & Dan Carmell
Buy ‘The Dream Life’

 

Bo Huston The Dream Life
Publication Studio

‘Three books by Bo Huston were published in the five years before his tragically early death in May, 1993, and a fourth was published soon after he passed, age thirty-three, a victim of AIDS. The Dream Life, his second novel, was, “Huston’s best work…one of the most startling and powerful novels to appear in years,” Michael Bronski wrote in 1992. The Fellow Travelers Series is honored to republish The Dream Life, posthumously claiming Bo as a fellow traveler, a status that he earned in life through his close friendship with Kevin Killian (an early FTS author) and the inspiration his books have given to the rest of us. Bo’s friend and colleague, the writer Rebecca Brown, has written an afterword for this new edition. The Dream Life is the thirteenth book in the Fellow Travelers Series.’ — Publication Studio

Excerpt

Extras

 

 

______________

‘I, Boombox is fashioned from my misreadings. In that sense, it’s an autobiography in which I dream on the page. It is my version of the modernist long poem: published in sections and interrupted only by the author’s death.’ — Robert Glück

‘Rimbaud infamously claimed that I is an other, but for Bob I is a flicker of error, or a wandering ear that invents. He has made a home for several decades of errant listening in this sinuous long poem, which light heartedly teases the modernist tradition it also subverts. In true mock-heroic manner, Bob reveals from his gay marble desk how God’s laughter glides in and out of garden festival, action film and sublet alike. I have been waiting for this book for years and it sweetly exceeds all of my hopes.’ — Lisa Robertson

‘In I, Boombox, Robert Glück makes it clear that dreams are as real as the spurts of sentences we use to discover them. Scoring the “umbilical/ indescribabilia” that accompanies unconscious feeling into a thin strip of thickly montaged verse, the “invisible speakers” that populate Glück’s poem—their misreadings and cant half-truths, their headlines and lies—turn dream’s content into poetic foam. In this mind’s eye—the “suburb” is blithely rendered into a thing “superb,” and “loneliness” roars with the face of a “lioness/and intimacy.” I, Boombox is a poem of frothy divinations tempered by the slapstick of speech. It suggests that desire without sense is desire nevertheless—and this is a delight to understand.’ — Shiv Kotecha

 

Robert Glück @ Wikipedia
Interview with Robert Gluck
‘Bona Nit, Estimat (An Ordinary Night)’
‘Writing Must Explore Its Relation To Power’
Buy ‘I, Boombox’

 

Robert Glück I, Boombox
Roof Books

‘Roof Books presents Robert Glück’s unmissable new work: I, Boombox. Glück is a seminal figure in the experimental landscape. In 1980s San Francisco, he co-founded the venerated New Narrative movement. His innovative prose has long made him an underground favorite, but lately he’s received wider attention through publication by New York Review Books. His contributions as a verse poet are equally exciting, but harder to come by. Fans have been hungrily anticipating I, Boombox, a jolting new provocation full of restless musical desire and “synchronies of/recognition.”

‘This is a sexy poem of bellicose minimalism with a sly sense of prosody. Instigative miscomprehension becomes the mode of discovery and generation: “I cast my net,/inattention.” The subconscious refracts reportage, fiction, poetry, decorative arts, et cetera into streams of meaning, daydreaming, and perverse nonsense. Death lurks in pleasure’s subtext. Glück implores: “Start a genital/uprising,” but “the rest is memory.”‘ — Roof Books

Excerpts

Clean blood and ass,
Caucasian, who
Really want a
Relationship and
Montgomery Libya’s
Lady Bird: the newest
Cross street is Haiti,
Vintage sofa deathbed,
The wide sand plains
Of commerce. The
Penny bounced with
Amazing freedom.
Absent-minded bakery,
A crass scramble
To put the snake
On the first thing
In sight. Education
Lite. In the movie
Sad nipples die.
The minuscule
Essential as will.
Blue room blue eyes
Tried to keep
Me there: Charmed
Steele frame.
The chilling
Potato of prison
Abuse videotaped
This wake of clay,
Political alerts
From the grave,
A scrubbed chicken
At Notre Dame,
Charwoman of the
Architectural Dept.,
Her methodical
Imprecision breaking
A random feast
With a family meal.
Outside the sun
Was straightening up,
And further disrespected
What went wrong,
A superbly scanned
Background. Murky
Ass. Semi
Circles call for
Attacks on Iraqis.
In the suburbs of Los Angeles straight
Rains are rage.
The emotions are
Great fun, who wants
To strobe, tease, such
And look?—a queer-
Sized bed, a
Panoramic intent.
Wet tongue and four
Holes to piss, a
Hint of bamboolary.
Good looking,
Lithe-bellied.
“Single and looking
For exasperation.”
A grinding spirit,
Her nipple meandered
Through grainy expanses
Out going get going
Ex-species wheel
Around a dazed
World looking
For a man to
Court and spank,
Powdered sugar
On abstract skin.
The remarkable
Timelessness of
This incident.
For a thorough fire
She pistols the
Dining room. The lickerish shed
Leans against the
White picket fence,

*

A great rictus
can be heard.
Nakedness came
out of my mother’s
womb ASAP
to see what the
ideal is:
sacred competence
paving down the
cost of redoing
the dawn. Or to
compile data,
she led him to
the corridor
room. Typical
ice cream maker,
Julia helped
cap negatively,
strode into a
gingham Talbots
dress, seized up her
kissing breasts, joy
infallible,
poem concerto.
Having quite a
dinner, brioche
seems superfluous
reproach. Powdery
casseroles. The
largest glazed doughnuts.
Continually
she feels her furry
compress the leper
exit after
closing the universe:
the hymen trick:
Inside Outlet.
As the call to
fight Israel
have bravely shot
dead groups, has been
encoded or
amplified, an
impala’s eye
view of Hemmingway
history. Their
wedding is sodomized,
like Patty Duke
plays Matt Saunders
as a nymph named
Sorry, but please
don’t obligate
to respond. His
author’s brio
says works in his
father’s brothels.
Continuous
moron, in it
for the denial
coverage with
some nonchalant
options like “up
the bridle path.”
The back door to
resentment slams.
The art houses
of Utrecht made
17 wines
in a minute.
It’s not an animal
but an an. She
gave these distilled
instructions: serve
Hawaiian
Mitsubishi
various with
missing agents,
gaze captors and
managers to
stun on every
page. Cultural
dependence has
a dominant
build, latched closed by
complicated
wire wrists. You
my tiredness,
my empty hands.
Bugger nonprofits.
Cricket-greasy
fingers speak to
be unlonely.
My father spoke
the old lexicon,
shoots zebra in
the erogenous
with his buttery
powdered razor.
I yearn to die
under his knees
watching the rusty
crowds on the vast
night of the drive,
his chest coming
in faster clouds.
Shopping the cock
could look at each
other with so
much sin in our
eyes. A blond sort
of scene unfolded.
I licked my feet
back and forth at
the other end
of the scrotum.
Death suddenly
showed up on the
roses, welcomed
them to the State
Capital of
the World.

Extras

Segue Reading Series:Robert Glück & Ted Rees

About Ed: a reading and conversation with Robert Glück, Alla Efimova, and Daniel Ostrow

 

 

______________

‘“I write a lot about being a trans woman. I do this because I believe there needs to be more literature in a wider variety of forms and styles about transness, and the lives, experiences, emotions, and culture of trans people. The hardest part of writing is, at a certain point, knowing what you actually want to say, or having an actual idea for the things you’re writing. You can only say ‘trans liberation now’ in so many ways before you start to feel like you’re unproductively repeating yourself.”

‘When approaching the creation of her poetry, this repetition of trying the same thing over and over again has forced Hofmann to consider any implementation of her work: “This [repetition] problem is what prompts me to find weird new ways of writing things, or to devote myself to poetry inspired by research projects […] When you do have an idea, oftentimes the writing will take you alongside with it. […] And because with the type of poetry I do, I can’t really rely on mainstays of poetic technique, I often have to invent a new poetics of tactics of language in order to create something that works.”

‘When asked about what the most joyful part of writing is, she replies “[t]he best part of writing is the part where you actually write. When I’m not writing, I get itchy, anxious. I start to loathe myself for not doing this thing which has basically rescued my life from contexts which go out of their way to squash trans self-realization. I become convinced I’ll never write again. But when I actually sit down to write with a good idea and coherent goals, however, it all comes back. Even if writing is hard work, it’s one of the most fun and engaging kinds of work that I can do.”

‘Having to create a new language and process for poetry is no small undertaking, and a method that encompasses both visual and written components the way Hofmann’s pieces do requires a blending of multiple influences. “The biggest influences on my writing have been visual/experimental poets like Hannah Weiner, Douglas Kearney, M. NourbeSe Phillip, Never Angeline North, Jos Charles, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, and Susan Howe” says Hofmann. “These writers all pushed my ideas of what I thought writing could be further than before.”’ — Shae Sackman

 

Ava Hoffman Site
ava september hofmann @ Twitter
Podcast: ‘Rejoinder: Love Poems/Smallness Studies with Ava Hofmann and Persephone Erin Hudson
RE: […] BY AVA HOFMANN
Buy ‘Love Poems / Smallness Studies’

 

Ava Hofmann Love Poems / Smallness Studies
Inside the Castle

‘Ava Hofmann’s harsh noise poem comic is finally here!

‘“starting in 2020, i have been gripped with the desire to write or paint on any and all surfaces. notebooks, my computer, random cardboard scraps. if not for the deposit on my apartment, i would very much like to write all over the walls of my office, to be overtaken by the frantic gesture of writing. this book is an extension of that desire to write, and i would like to extend this desire to you.”’ — Inside the Castle

Excerpt

Extras

lkdsfjlsdfjlsdjfklsdfl hi by Ava Hofmann but it’s Dancing Queen

The September Trilogy | Line Rider

 

 

______________

‘From 1988 to 1990, the French writers Hervé Guibert and Mathieu Lindon lived together in Rome at the artists residency of the Villa Médicis. They’d been friends for almost a decade by then, having met in the late 1970s in the living room of a famous philosopher. Guibert was standing alone in a corner; Lindon asked him, “Are you in time-out, Hervé Guibert?” — and their friendship began. They were both young, gay, and fixated on writing. Guibert went on to publish 18 books during his lifetime, including the groundbreaking novel about his struggle with AIDS, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990), a bestseller that shifted French attitudes towards the disease. He died in 1991, 15 months after his return to Paris.

‘“[A]s close as we might be,” Lindon writes in his new memoir about those years in Rome, “why are we so far from one another when one of us dies? And how can that distance change, grow and shrink over the years after?” Published three decades after Guibert’s death — and available today in an English translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman through Semiotext(e) — Hervelino is less a portrait of a friend than of a friendship. The title is an Italian-sounding nickname Lindon gave Guibert, one that made him “think not so much of Hervé as of us both, together in Rome.” In delicate, self-aware, and at times circular prose, Lindon delineates both the contours of their relationship and his struggle to write about it.

‘Loosely structured around their time in Rome, the book oscillates between details of life at the Villa, musings on the ethics of writing about others, and the present-day narrator, trying to remember Guibert. Most of the text focuses on the mundane interactions that shape a friendship — the lunches and dinners, the inside jokes, the testy comments, the shared friends, the rumors started and deflated, the petty jealousies, the mutual admiration. And beneath all this, an undercurrent of dread. Guibert learned he was seropositive just before he left for Rome, at a time when no effective treatment was available for HIV/AIDS. His diagnosis was unknown to most people at the Villa except Lindon, until Guibert published To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Then everyone knew.’ — Edmée Lepercq

 

Mathieu Lindon @ Wikipedia
When One of Us Dies: On Mathieu Lindon’s “Hervelino”
Mathieu Lindon’s Archives of Love and Friendship
Mathieu Lindon @ goodreads
Buy ‘Hervalino’

 

Mathieu Lindon Hervelino
Semiotext(e)

“Soon that was my nickname for Hervé, what with my habit of italianizing the names of my nearest and dearest … Hervelino: that didn’t make me think so much of Hervé as of us both. The word might not seem like much but it was him and it was me, he took it for himself.”

‘Mathieu Lindon met the writer and photographer Hervé Guibert in 1978. The nickname Hervelino marked the start of their friendship, which was cemented a decade later by the years they both spent in Rome. Guibert was a pensionnaire at the Villa Médicis starting in 1987; Lindon became a fellow pensionnaire the next year, and the two would stay in Italy until 1990. These Roman years are at the heart of this autobiographie à deux that alternates between humor and melancholy. Guibert had just learned that he was HIV-positive and would die not long after returning to France and rising to fame with his searing masterpiece To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life—in which Lindon himself was a character.

‘Hervelino is a book about the difficulty of writing and speaking about someone beloved and revered. In recounting their time in Italy, Lindon contends with the impossibility of writing about Guibert: “To write about Rome is to skip over everything I don’t dare to write because it’s so hard to make sense of Hervé.” Hervelino is a story of a singular friendship, and of the books read and shared by the friend who was loved and lost. As it closes with each inscription Guibert wrote for his friend Mathieu and with Lindon’s present-day commentary below it, what remains are shards and fragments of a friendship sealed by illness and death, enshrined by literature and love.’ — Semiotext(e)

Excerpt
from BOMB

Le Seul visage, 1984.

I’m the most lamentable model because I’m incapable of posing for a photo, it makes me uncomfortable straight away, I fidget and I don’t know how to hold my body.

The photo below, titled “Berlin-Est,” was taken under the following circumstances. We were both on assignment in Berlin for the film festival, Hervé for Le Monde and me for Le Nouvel Observateur. It was in 1982, Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss won the Golden Bear. Hervé was already familiar with the city and suggested that we skip a day of the festival to visit East Berlin where he wanted to go to a tearoom as gay as it was possible to be at that time in that part of town. We went, the tearoom was as empty as the bathroom of some floor I can’t remember of some West Berlin department store I can’t remember that he’d been told was a cruising spot, to be clear it was so deserted that after having come with high hopes we’d ended up giggling nonstop. As soon as we’d arrived, Hervé took me determinedly up the stairs to some floor I can’t remember of some building I can’t remember where we went into a room where I was totally disoriented and scared by the sounds I was hearing: it was an institution for the deaf and mute, and he hadn’t warned me. When I read Hervé’s fictionalization of this little jaunt, I told Michel Foucault that it was all wrong, it hadn’t happened like that, and he responded by saying of Hervé: “Only false things happen to him,” a line I liked so much that I’d parroted it to Hervé who’d liked it enough to refashion it in To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.

We’d left West Berlin very early and it was still early when we were walking down Unter den Linden. A little boy was hanging around there and with a few smiles we’d struck up a rapport. He didn’t speak a word of French or English but he was so excited to meet strangers. Hervé was able to manage in German. There wasn’t any discussion, but at that point he went with us like a guide, all smiles and full of joy and charm, taking us wherever he wanted, showing us whatever he wanted. We invited him to lunch (it might have been just a sandwich or a snack) then the rest of the afternoon was the same, he was comfortable with us and we with him. There was something odd and natural, we’d set out as a pair and ended up a trio, well, that was that. It was February, night was falling quickly, and Westerners would leave East Berlin just as they’d come, by taking the subway, a simple thing that wasn’t so simple for East Berliners because that was where the checkpoints were. The little boy whose name I’ve forgotten went with us to the station and came down with us to the platform to wait for the train to come. We still made a natural trio. The subway came into the station and we got in. The doors shut. We’d barely said good-bye to him and then everything happened quickly all of a sudden. It was clear that we’d never see each other again. And, on an impulse, Hervé pulled out his camera and snapped a picture of him through the subway window. No photo of Hervé’s touches me as much as this one.

Extras

Mathieu Lindon “Ce qu’aimer veut dire”

Mathieu Lindon, Ma Catastrophe adorée

 

 

________________

‘What You Said at 1:00AM

‘Three years ago: “That sounds reasonable:” a response to a text message from my current girlfriend while I am in the childhood bed of your childhood home with you. The text message is telling me not to come back to her apartment in the morning as was the previous plan and that she needs space, this new arrangement that was fully worked out is no longer applicable and that she is going to hold all of my belongings hostage until she decides she will give them back to me. I will have to threaten to call the police, something I never do—threaten or call—to be able to retrieve my things. Since we are in a long distance relationship, everything I have with me for this trip is at her apartment, I no longer had access to anything.

‘What You Said Through Your Teeth

‘Before I see you again, I spend time staring at “Dune” by Joan Mitchell: a painting of squares, white space. I get lost in the green, black, ivory. I feel so deeply staring at this work. Joan Mitchell says “There has to be meaning to what you are putting on.”

‘Three years later, we are in the city where you still reside to this day. I am sitting on your adult bed in your adult bedroom in your adult apartment that feels like a hotel in a gentrified neighborhood of a large city. Even in this moment, a moment I have been waiting for for a long time, I am escaping feeling. I say all the things I have wanted to say to you: how my emotional landscape is so large and how I hold all of these feelings in place, how you changed my life years ago, and how my life would not be the same without you. I tell you how incredible you are, how if I could go back in time I would do a lot of things differently. You say nearly nothing in return. You apologize for “being a dick” back then. I bring up the break-up email you sent me: Yes, remember, you broke things off through email, not even to my face, or a phone call, or something decent. You say “I don’t even remember what it said.” The words from that email are burned brazenly inside of me. I will never forget what that email said, even though I have long since deleted it and then deleted it permanently.

‘The question on your lips years ago was: How Do I Become A Better Writer? and my answer was Read A Lot, Write A Lot, Read More Than You Write. That was not the answer you were looking for, you got so angry. In this new moment you ask again How Do I Write a Poem? Do You Have Any Advice Or Tips To How To Write A Poem? and I say Sit Down And Write, There Is No Other Way. You are annoyed with me. Annoyed and angry into perpetuity. I realize in this moment there is no real meaning here.’ — Katie Jean Shinkle

 

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Podcast: Katie Jean Shinkle on the Trailer Park of Her Mind
Buy ‘Thick City’

 

Katie Jean Shinkle Thick City
Bull City Press

‘Thick City is an attempt at reconciliation of need and desire: the cyclical characters adjacent and sutured together create a constellation of a cityscape caught in its own fists. In the space of innovative prose, Thick City focuses on language and how language escapes, begins, reemerges, and lives.’ — Bull City Press

‘Thick City is a dark mood whispered in delicate prose. Prepare to be haunted by this ghostly journey through Katie Jean Shinkle’s imagination. — Timothy Willis Sanders

‘Thick City is a wild collection attempting to manage the intersecting lives of narrators all broken by the same disruptive environment. At times disturbing, other times raw and sad, each section bleeds into the next, pulsing curiosity, betrayal, regret, and repentance, asking the reader to try to breathe without oxygen, without promise, without a real reason to exhale.’ — Monica Prince

Excerpt

Meanwhile, my ex-girlfriend, R, and I finish our relationship like this: Five bamboo plants I gave her as gifts left outside on the doorstep of my new apartment. When asked why she left the plants, she says “Because fuck you that’s why.”

A pool party on the top deck of our old apartment building that will burn down soon, though we don’t know this yet. When the pool party begins, the water is too cold so no one is swimming, everyone loafing around longingly gazing at the water. –Someone will drown tonight—I tell R.

I am ending our relationship with a pool party and a prediction. The worst thing: Two drunk people get locked out of the building, have to sleep in Adirondack chairs.

There is a note on the new door to my new apartment in R’s handwriting: “Who was your New Year’s kiss?” The note is not meant for me but for my new roommate. The handwriting is not

R’s but someone else’s, a forgery, a thin disguise. Who was your New Year’s kiss? –It certainly wasn’t me—I say aloud to the note, which is lineated like poetry, taped with Christmas-themed gift-wrapping tape, all pine trees and golden garlands.

A few months ago, R and I were driving towards the mountains and the mountains were on fire. At a certain point, under an overpass on a one-way dwindling road, we were stopped by the authorities, large men in huge gasmasks, and were told to turn right around, the fire is spreading quickly, get away from this place, you don’t belong here.

But here was where the scene doubles back. Here was R in the moment before our apartment catches on fire. Here was R taking over the wheel as I passed out behind it on the mountain’s gradually thinning road just before we were asked to turn around.

R says she is a power bottom, and I am aware by the way she says yes, yes, when I am on top of her, yes, yes. When I say –yes, sir—I mean it. “Don’t call me sir, it drives me nuts, especially when you say it in public,” she says. When we are on the train, we see a mistress & a submissive acting out a power dynamic and I nod to R and say –see—see—do you see what I see—you see—.

Our world was ending and R said, “I am taking you to the mountains to break up with you. Pets 4 Less is no place to end things.” We were using her new girlfriend’s car, but I did not know this yet, I did not know she had a new girlfriend. –You don’t have to drive me to the mountains to tell me anything—I said. When we drove back from the mountains, the apartment was on fire.

I am in my new apartment by myself. R wants to come over and I let her and within an hour my fist is in her mouth. I try calling her a dirty little slut. –Talk to me, you little slut, tell me how you like it—and she pauses. “Who said you could call me a slut?” she says. The words echo and the echoes become echoes until echoes are not enough, never enough. I call her a slut and she stops moaning, moving, breathing, all her air is choked as if caught inside of her. –What happened—I’m sorry—are you OK—I’m sorry—is everything OK—I’m sorry—hello—hello—talk to me—I say. An hour later, she is gone again.

When I first met R, she almost stopped talking to me when she heard the kind of films I like to watch. She is very picky about these types of things “Have you seen this film? That film?” she asked, and I said –no—and somehow, still to this day, I am ashamed I haven’t been pickier about my film choices. “It was almost a deal breaker,” she said.

R was leaving me to a soundtrack; a soundtrack differing greatly from the soundtrack of our lives. How music I never thought I would hear was playing itself throughout our apartment, an apartment about to burn to the ground. R was listening to the The Who’s Tommy. “I love Tina Turner in this film,” she said. And then, looking sideways at me, “Oh, you’ve never seen it, I forgot.”

One-by-one the bamboo plants show up outside the door. I don’t know where R is, and I can no longer ask who she is with or what she is doing because it is no longer any of my business.

We were sitting on the corner of the street, our apartment building on fire, and everything she owned was gone. She wanted me to drink her blood. There was an explosion. Her body was bloody and she offered her arm and said “Lick it.” She smashed her open wound into mine. My knees were scraped and bleeding, too. “Together forever,” she said.

But we will not be together forever. We were on top of the mountain and she said “No, no, no, its all wrong, this is too much, too intense, we have to end.” –I haven’t even given you much intensity—I said to the trees, to the mountains. R was no longer listening. “There is a possessiveness here I cannot wrap my head around, and I can no longer go there with you,” she said. She was the largest tree in the forest. She was a tree split two ways, an opening so large you can drive a car through. We were driving her new girlfriend’s car through the gigantic hole in the tree. We were driving through and I wanted to get out of the new girlfriend’s car and take a picture. I wanted to look up inside the innards together, what guts. I wanted to take a picture of us inside of the gigantic opening in this tree in the middle of my heartbreak. She refused to take a picture with me.

Extras

Katie Jean Shinkle 2021 Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices Reading

The Arson People #2

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks, Ben. Yes, no small relief. Happy the class went well, and didn’t end for all intents and and purposes. I’m guessing the new class’s distinction is just that the flash novella is lengthier than the flash fiction concentrated on in the last class? Or is there an added concentration on narrative drive in a tight space? Maybe you don’t know yet? ‘Pleasure’ sounds interesting. I’ll seek it out. The little clip they show on the IMDb page looks very porno. Huh. What’s up today? ** Misanthrope, Thanks. Yeah, I was more than a bit terrified during the data rescue mission, let me tell you. From now on, everything goes into the cloud regularly. I was avoiding doing the cloud thing ‘cos I don’t trust it, but … Yeah, let me know about the publishing thing if you want. I’m here. I unsurprisingly have a weekend full of film stuff I have to do plus my biweekly Zoom book club plus seeing some friends. Should work. Enjoy the Mexican food. I miss it already. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I’m pretty all right, thank you for asking. So the TV cameras are still connected by all those cables. I somehow imagined all of that was WiFi connected by now. Interesting. Watching TV shows get filmed was pretty fun. And living in LA, it was kind of a fun/random thing to do for my friends and me. I’m sure you know, but they had/have these prompts to tell you when to laugh and when to applaud and stuff, and when we didn’t laugh loud and hard enough, which we rarely did because the ‘funny’ stuff wasn’t very funny, they’d stop and redo it. Deep dish pizza, assuming they do it right, is among the most insanely good mouth fodder there is. Yeah, I get exhausted by everything, sure. I’m pretty driven and high energy so I can usually forge my way through it. When you’re shooting a film, it’s so fucking much and exhausting all day and sometimes night too, day after day with no break, because you have to stay really attentive and focused, and that’s a real toughie. But amazing too. No argument about the Soft Cell album. That O’Connor story is truly great, for sure. Tip top. That’s fantastic about your film club! When I was growing up there was this one amazing film series in LA that showed experimental films, and I was addicted to going, and I honestly think being exposed to that work at such a young age is a lot of why I’m who I am. So, obviously, I hugely admire you doing that. Something like that can totally rewire some naive young, or not even young, person’s mind and make them want to strive for the innovative and unforeseen, and that’s so important, I think. Especially these days. I … don’t think I have seen Juraj Herz’s films, no. Huh. I’ll go investigate that work. Maybe I’ll do a post at some point even. Thanks, Cody. What’s on your immediate agenda? ** Steve Erickson, Okay, I’ll try the new Orbital. I’d given up after that last one. Yury is trying to save the murdered laptop mostly out of curiosity, but it was very damaged, so that might be a fruitless goal. Because language failed NIGHTMARE20 and emojis are too vague to fail? I’ve heard nothing of the new 100 gecs album. Your report isn’t getting me very excited for it, but of course I’ll give it a stream. ** Meg Gluth, Thanks, Meg. Things are good, very busy, but good. With you? My guess is that the earlier you come down the better since things will get increasingly busy and nuts the closer we get to the shooting start date (20th), but either is okay. I’m not sure if I’ll be in LA or out in Yucca Valley at the location then, probably more in LA if it’s the 4th, but check in with me beforehand, and we’ll figure it out. Cool! ** alex, Hi, a. Thanks, yeah, no actual casualties as far as I can tell, apart from the laptop itself, but it was getting old anyway, truth be told. When I’m writing something, I feel like I never stop thinking about it, even though I obviously do. I’ve read reviews of the Kelela album, but that’s it. As soon as I get some downtime, I’ll lock it in. Thank you, sir! Have a very fun weekend. ** Gick, Hi, Gick! Me too about being glad I’m back. Life without a computer is so unbelievably boring. I was shocked. We haven’t shot our film yet, we’ve just been getting ready to. We shoot it in mid-March-ish. Thank you about the films. That’s ultra-kind. Really happy to see you! What are you doing, what’s going on? ** Bill, Hi, B. Ha ha, I always thought I was the world’s biggest text concision nazi, but I think you get the crown. I haven’t seen ‘L’Homme Blesse’. Our old d.l. pal Frank Jaffe is distributing it. I hear it’s good, but I hear all kinds of garbage is good. Take a chance? ** shadeoutmapes🍝, And hello to you! Totally, when I was writing ‘I Wished’, which accessed a lot of my deepest stuff, I had to pause all the time. I tried not to though. Me, I’ll dig in and write and bail on everything else if I possibly can, but breaks do help, I suppose. Did you see your friend? The video was for the track ‘Wondering’. I personally would like to just release it on Vimeo or something, but Zac feels too burnt by the experience and doesn’t want to. Jamie starred in the video, so we spent a bunch of time with him. He was cool, very complicated, of course, but it was mostly really fun. When the record company rejected the video, he kind of bailed on supporting us with them, and that left a sour taste, to be honest, but, like I said, he’s complicated. ‘The Outsider’, gotcha, I’ll seek it out either here or once I get back to the States if I can’t score it locally. It’s exciting to read your intense connection with what you’re writing. I know how that is, and I miss it at the moment when writing has to wait on my filmmaking side. Say more anytime obviously. What happened during your weekend, eh? ** Right. This weekend you get to peruse five books I recently read and recommend to you, and I hope you’ll find a book or two or more in there that you want to grab and devour. See you on Monday.