вторник, 7 августа 2007 г.

Pedro Costa and Colossal Youth.


"For someone whose films have until recently gone largely unseen, the Portuguese director Pedro Costa has a pretty vociferous fan club," writes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. "His admirers include the French director Jacques Rivette (who called him 'genuinely great') and the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall (who claimed that Mr Costa's films improve on Robert Bresson's)... Staking out a radical middle between documentary and fiction, he has invented a heroic and quite literal form of Arte Povera, a monumental cinema of humble means.... Speaking by telephone from Lisbon, Mr Costa called his methods a throwback to, of all things, old Hollywood. 'It's like a studio system,' he said. 'We go to work every day. We have our economic structure - everyone gets paid the same - and we have our stars.'"
"With Colossal Youth, Anthology indulges local screenheads with a full Pedro Costa retrospective," writes Ed Halter, noting this "excellent opportunity to see the Portuguese director's vision emerge over time, from his more traditionally cinephiliac debut drama The Blood (1989) to his documentary on the auteurs of austerity, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001), which doubles as a casebook of conceptual clues to Costa's own enigmatic esthetics."