Apprendre chaque jour de nouveaux mots, de beaux mots: le cinéma de Pedro Costa comme scène politique d’une démonstration égalitaire

Abstract

The Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa has been working on Lisbon’s suburbs for more than fifteen years. In his films, these neighbourhoods’ residents invent the stories that are being told, at the same time they are interpreting them. Costa’s cinema takes strongly into account the events and the transformations of the urban areas he is filming and of lives of its residents. This paper will try and address this focusing of Costa’s films, articulating it with Jacques Rancière’s notions. It will try and argue that they are a demonstration of equality, for through the mise en scène of the speech itself, characters are also revealing their capacity to actualize and expose a particular conception of their world. Moreover, the specific treatment of characters in these films offers a multiplicity of voices that refer, not only to individuals, but also to collective figures. In Costa’s cinema, the elaboration of narratives during the process of making a film requires an attentive listening that is also extended to the spectators, engaging them in the process. In this cinema, telling and understanding stories include the possibility, or the impossibility, of transmitting them.