Zé do Caixao: The Nightmare That Must Survive

VIENNALE: Do you think that life is getting faster and faster these days?

PEDRO COSTA: There is an impression of things, I don't know if it's the reality. One of the things I like about the work with Vanda in this film, is that it's a very slow thing, nothing moves. For me it's still very quick. If you look closely, you can see the walls move. Sometimes the colours change, light changes and that's the speed of the sun because I don't use artificial light. You see the speed of the planet, the universe, the sun turning. My friend Jacques Rivette says, when you shoot a film you're going along with the planet. The film is rolling like the earth is rolling. You should be in the same speed. With some filmmakers I like, you have that impression that they are in the same speed. A film like Vanda, which is a very long film, 3 hours, I felt it should be 3 hours because if it was only 10 minutes or half an hour people wouldn't see it the way I wanted them to see it. Some things are very slow today. You go very fast in a plane or a train but you go very slowly in your head. I think people used to be faster in a way that they went with the world, with the movement. Today, it's fake movements, it's artificial things, like drugs. You want to be in a state of going very slow or very fast but not your natural thing. You want to forget your situation, you don't want to talk to a person, to the world. So you put yourself in very transformed states. For me, it's not Vanda who is drugged, it's the world. Sometimes I go to the cinema and I really don't understand what's happening on the screen. When the camera moves around and goes very fast, I don't see anything. Probably it's to give an impression of the speed of life today but I think you should do this in another way.

Como é bom não ter o que falar - e melhor, não ter a obrigação de ter o que falar - sobre os favoritos da temporada.

The base is the camera eye filming with an angle of vision that Mizoguchi identifies with the spectator. The right line of this angle of vision will be taken as the axis of desire and of agressivity, therefore of action. The other line will be the defensive axis confronting that desire, namely, the axis which folds onto itself, therefore the axis of contemplation. The V of the angle of vision becomes the V which serves as the device for mise en scène on the screen. Frequently the screen closes the V opened by the camera in such a way that if one made this combination into a figure, it would form a lozenge. In the V visible on the screen, the axis of agressivity and desire is occupied by the male, and the other is ascribed to the woman trying to protect herself from attack.

Jean Douchet

Problemas modernos