Frames and Bodies—Notes on Three Films by Pedro Costa: Ossos, No Quarto da Vanda, Juventude em Marcha

The question of the body in cinema — of the filmed body — is inseparable from the question of the frame. Like the visible body, the visible world is framed by cinema.1 We could say that everything that is cinema, good or bad, is framed and has always been framed. The filmic image, the photogram, the shot are framed and cannot be otherwise. This is not the case with visual events we can group together under the heading ‘spectacles’. A fireworks display, a circus act, a military parade, an airplane taking off, a tall building exploding: all these appear to their initial viewers as unframed, meaning that they are viewed within the same spatial field as normal human vision (180 degrees). These events are only placed in a frame when they are filmed. In opera or the theatre, the stage is framed on three sides, but the very nature of these dimensions — despite the fact that they are fixed — keeps the stage’s wings from functioning like the off-screen of cinema: one knows that the wings, backstage, are contiguous with the stage, that they are its extension and do not amount to the otherness of an ‘outside’. This is not the case in film. There the frame by definition restricts our normal field of vision, which becomes limited, constrained, truncated. The viewer’s gaze is framed at the same time as the space being observed. The film frame, therefore, is a direct expression of the confinement of the scopic impulse. My desire to see has been framed: limited and formatted by this rectangular opening which is not present in normal perception and comes into play only when watching a film. The cinematic viewing experience becomes radically different; it separates itself from any visual experience encountered outside the darkened cinema. The frame distinguishes between nature and art. It is artifice, and the value of this artifice is precisely that it is not natural. This is why there is something desperate — an unease, a phantasm of normality — in the temptation of a naturalist aesthetic to which so many films yield today. This naturalism is something that the deliberately pictorial quality of Pedro Costa’s films rejects. The trilogy of films Costa made about the Fontainhas neighbourhood in Lisbon, which today no longer exists — Ossos (Bones, 1997), No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room, 2000), Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006) — tells us forcefully that it is up to art to cast in relief the world that has been lost. But the figuration and locating of this world must refuse to re-naturalise the very thing that ruined the world: the present-day reign of merchandise. The abasement of the weak and the ruination of the losers — the obsessive concerns of the persecutory logic governing competition — are taken up by art as if they were an opening onto grace and a direct path to beauty, beyond good and evil, the opposite of any form of miserabilism: the grace of the weak, the beauty of those without any power, the angelical forms of those who are ‘nothing’. And yet this restriction of the visible brought about by framing is an opening, a call to the non-visible. Taking a section of our normal field of vision, the frame cuts out a portion of the visible and confines and encloses it. In this way the field, a portion of the In a close analysis of the role of the frame in film, Jean-Louis Comolli highlights how Pedro Costa's Fontainhas trilogy makes the invisible film frame visible: a political gesture, a response to the confusion of the world with its spectacle.