The Slow Cinema of Pedro Costa

A man stands in a doorway in the dark. Behind him, a single bare bulb throws his shadow across a wall the colour of old bruises. He does not move for a long time. He speaks, eventually, in a low voice, about a letter, about money he is owed, about a daughter. The camera does not move either. The shot holds, and holds, until the holding itself becomes the subject — until you stop waiting for the film to do something and begin, instead, to look. This is the cinema of Pedro Costa, and there is nothing else quite like it.

Costa is the most uncompromising of the filmmakers gathered under the loose banner of “slow cinema,” and also its most misunderstood. The slowness is real — his shots are long, his films are quiet, almost nothing in the conventional sense happens. But to call the work slow and leave it there is to mistake the method for the meaning. Costa is not slow for the sake of austerity. He is slow because the people he films have been given, by the rest of cinema and by the rest of society, no time at all. His patience is a form of attention, and his attention is a form of respect.

Fontainhas

The films for which Costa is known are set in Fontainhas, a poor immigrant neighbourhood on the edge of Lisbon, populated largely by Cape Verdean migrants and their families — people who built the city’s roads and houses and were then left to live in the margins they had constructed. Costa first went there in the 1990s to shoot Ossos, a more conventionally produced film, and found that the apparatus of normal filmmaking — the crew, the lights, the trucks — was an obscenity in such a place. So he dismantled it.

For the films that followed, he worked alone or nearly alone, with a small digital camera, returning to Fontainhas day after day, year after year, until the residents stopped performing for him and simply lived in front of the lens. In Vanda’s Room (2000) is the result of this method at its most extreme: more than three hours assembled from hundreds of hours of footage shot in the cramped room of Vanda Duarte, a young woman, as she and her sister and their neighbours talk, cough, take drugs, and wait out the slow demolition of the neighbourhood around them. By the time of Colossal Youth (2006), the quarter had largely been bulldozed and its people relocated to the sterile white public housing that the films regard with such quiet horror.

Together with Ossos (1997), these works form what is usually called the Fontainhas trilogy, though Costa has kept returning to the same people and place ever since — most powerfully in Horse Money (2014) and Vitalina Varela (2019), which extend the project into something closer to myth.

The dignity of the long take

What does the long take do, in Costa’s hands? It does the opposite of what it does in most ambitious cinema, where the held shot is a flex — look how long I can sustain tension, look how much I can make you feel. Costa’s long takes are not tense. They are spacious. They give his subjects room to exist as something other than a problem to be solved or a victim to be pitied. A man recounting his life in a single unbroken shot is not a documentary subject and not quite a character; he is a presence, granted the time to be fully there.

This is why the comparison to painting comes up so often, and why Costa himself invokes it. His compositions are built like the canvases of the old masters — figures emerging from darkness into a single source of light, faces modelled in chiaroscuro, interiors that seem to hold centuries of stillness. There is a kinship here with the grey, patient interiors of Vilhelm Hammershøi, whose rooms also ask the eye to slow until it sees what is barely there. Costa films poverty, but he films it with the visual grammar reserved, historically, for saints and kings.

Why this is a moral act

It would be easy to accuse a privileged filmmaker of aestheticising the poor — of making beautiful images from other people’s suffering. The accusation has been made. What disarms it, for me, is the duration of Costa’s commitment and the agency he hands his collaborators. These are not subjects he found, used, and left. He has worked with the same people for decades. They shape their own scenes, supply their own words, are credited and paid. Vitalina Varela is named for the woman at its centre, a Cape Verdean widow who arrives in Lisbon days after her husband’s funeral; the film is built from her story, told in her cadence, photographed as though she were the most important person who ever lived. For the length of the film, she is.

There is, in this, a discipline of patience that runs through everything we tend to admire most at this magazine — the reduction of the composer Arvo Pärt to a single sustained chord, the refusal of Clarice Lispector to hurry a sentence past the edge of what it can hold, the conviction of Andrei Tarkovsky that a film’s only real subject is the experience of time itself. Costa belongs to that company. He has staked his entire career on the proposition that attention, given fully and without flinching, is itself an ethical good.

Watching Costa

A warning and an encouragement: these films ask a great deal, and they repay it. You cannot watch Costa distractedly; the moment your attention drifts, the film appears to be about nothing, because its events are buried in faces and silences and the slow accretion of detail. Give it your whole attention and the opposite happens. The films become almost unbearably full.

The principal home for Costa’s work in North America is Grasshopper Film, which has restored and distributed Vitalina Varela and other titles; their editions are the place to begin. For the wider argument about where Costa sits in the history of the form, the critics at Sight & Sound have written about him at length, and Vitalina Varela and Colossal Youth both placed in the magazine’s most recent decennial poll of the greatest films ever made — an extraordinary fate for a body of work shot, almost in secret, in a neighbourhood that no longer exists.

That is finally what Costa has done. He went to a place the world had decided to erase, and he stayed long enough, and looked hard enough, that the place became permanent — not the buildings, which were destroyed, but the people, who endure now in images as patient and as dignified as anything cinema has made. The demolition won, in the end. So, more lastingly, did Costa.

FAQ

Q: Who is Pedro Costa? A: A Portuguese filmmaker, born in Lisbon in 1959, regarded as one of the major figures of contemporary world cinema and a central voice in the “slow cinema” movement. He is known for long, painterly takes, minimal narrative, and an enduring focus on Lisbon’s poor immigrant communities, with whom he collaborates closely over many years.

Q: What is the Fontainhas trilogy? A: A loose trilogy of films — Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2006) — set in and around Fontainhas, a poor, largely Cape Verdean neighbourhood on the edge of Lisbon that was demolished over the course of Costa’s filming. The films document its residents and the destruction of their world, and Costa has continued the project in later works such as Horse Money and Vitalina Varela.

Q: What is “slow cinema”? A: A loosely defined tendency in art cinema characterised by long takes, sparse dialogue, minimal plot, and an emphasis on duration, atmosphere, and observation over conventional drama. Costa is among its most rigorous practitioners, though his slowness is tied specifically to an ethics of attention toward marginalised people.

Q: Where can I watch his films? A: In North America, Grasshopper Film distributes restored editions of Vitalina Varela and other titles. The Criterion Collection and various arthouse streaming services also carry his work, and his films screen regularly at film festivals and cinematheques. Vitalina Varela or Colossal Youth are the best starting points.