Horse Money.
Following an invitation from Maria do Carmo Piçarra that I accepted with enthusiasm, I am participating in a one-day workshop on (post)colonial film and intermediality at the University of Reading next Thursday. Detailed information about this event organised by the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures (CFAC) is available on this webpage.
My paper is called “Spectres of Today: Fractured History and Digital Modulation in Horse Money (2014)”. The summary is as follows:
It took Pedro Costa four feature films to get to Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014). In Down to Earth (Casa de Lava, 1994), a nurse accompanies an immigrant worker in coma from Lisbon to his homeland, the Cape Verdean island of Fogo. Bones (Ossos, 1997), In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda, 2000), and Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha, 2006) form a trilogy in which a group of Cape Verdean immigrants who lived in the Fontainhas slum becomes central. First travelling to Cape Verde, then getting to know and working with people from that Portuguese ex-colony on the outskirts of Lisbon, Costa’s films respond to the need for the voices of the subaltern — the colonised, the discriminated, the exploited — to be articulated and valued. This paper argues that Horse Money tackles the spectres that haunt contemporary Portuguese society in a radical way, both politically and aesthetically. Its politics of representation are connected with the composition of a fractured history. These fractures emerge from the intricate interchange between Portuguese and Cape Verdean creole as well as the conflicting ruptures and continuities after the 1974 Carnation Revolution. In consonance with this approach and these themes, the use of digital video that has become usual in Costa’s cinema since In Vanda’s Room achieves hauntingly expressive qualities through mise-en-scène and image modulation.
