Monday, 25 March 2024

(2/2) “If It’s Love, It Must Work Out:” Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela and Modes of Hauntology

A post by Edward Guetti

**This is the latter part of the article, with the preceding component coming before.

Finding a Home, Putting Words to Rest

The character of Vitalina in Cavalo Dinheiro reminds Ventura not only of his neglected obligations to his wife, but she also reminds Ventura of his role, in Cavalo Dinheiro, of bringing about the despair that killed Joaquim. Only after reciting letters from official bodies, detailing information related to the burial of her husband, her birth, her marriage, all of which cannot approach a truthful account of her situation, does she put to Ventura the claim that he had brought ruin to her and Joaquim by cutting Joaquim’s arm during a fight so as to render it paralyzed. It is impossible to tell if this same accusation carries over into VV, as the circumstances surrounding Joaquim’s death in VV do not mention any sort of paralysis, and Ventura is a different avatar of the Ventura character. What further complicates or blurs the distinction between the movies is Ventura’s (i.e., the actor’s) presence as the priest of an empty church. This priest, too, is fleeing a personal shame from Cape Verde (related to his refusal to baptize or bless a group of people who are shortly killed in a gruesome car crash). The priest passes his time alternating between repeating certain phrases to himself or beseeching God to cast His eyes to the “shadows.” In many ways, it is not obvious that Ventura-as-a-Priest is meant to be a different character than, say, the Ventura of Juventude em Marcha.

Juventude em Marcha is structured by the presence of similar themes as VV — acquiring a proper living space, reflecting on love — only it is clear that each of these themes in Juventude can never be brought to fulfillment by Ventura. In Juventude, Ventura (every bit the priest) is seeking to teach Lento how to write a love letter by memorizing a canonical example, he visits with members of his family (his parochial ‘children’), and spends time seeing potential homes for his family (potential individuals who the real estate agent plainly alleges do not exist). Ventura’s positive activity in Juventude, which becomes the despairing mirror-image of Vitalina’s activity in VV, is a negotiation with the structures available to him in Lisbon. His pedagogy in writing love letters is to repeat a letter that has its origin in the first of Costa’s movies of this sequence — Casa de Lava — where the details must become impersonal, where the expressions in which love could be communicated are the words of another, whose only relevance is predicated upon the presumption that the experiences of all Cape Verdeans in Lisbon, of all the women in Cape Verde waiting for word from their husbands, is essentially the same. It is the use of this kind of impersonality here, the presumed sameness of the experience of all Cape Verdeans, which is brought into delicate tension with the indelible singular personality, the subjectivity, of both Ventura and the letter writer.

What is perhaps eerie is Ventura’s conviction that the canonical love letter is obviously of use to Lento, but this conviction is no different than the conviction that popular songs can serve as vehicles for expressing the suffering of “hard work, cheap labor” (Ventura in Cavalo will start singing some of these in quiet moments with his compatriots). The very impersonality of the letter — which promises the intended reader 100,000 cigarettes, a dozen fancy dresses, a car, and “that little house of lava you’ve always dreamt of” — serves as a kind of shield against the burden of a more personal confrontation, a more intimate expression fit to the life of the addressee and of the writer. This impersonal tutelage of the letter, in Juventude, is amplified by the actual broken record which Ventura plays for Lento, which is a recording full of skips or repetitions of a song celebrating the revolutionary leader, Amílcar Cabral, and only appears in Juventude as an homage to the dream of a future that never came about. Ventura, in Juventude and beyond, thus promises a kind of education via recollection, but the lessons available to recall have only led to the end of his being imprisoned, prone to collapsing, apparently delirious, or homeless.

Dwelling in the impersonality or objectification of the colonized would be to rob Ventura of the guilt that manifests itself in such thorough and differentiated encounters in Cavalo, and of course it would be an approach that leaves Vitalina with nothing, waiting at the office for her husband’s pension in the same way that Benvindo awaits his salary. Whether through compassion or guilt Ventura, convincingly or not, is shown in Cavalo ghostwriting, one assumes, a letter from Joaquim and giving it to Vitalina, and even if the letter promises 100,000 cigarettes and a house of lava (the contents of that letter are not revealed), it still only finds its place there through Ventura, and still generates a smile from Vitalina in her exit from Cavalo. It is also important to notice that the career of the letter comes to an end in Cavalo, that Vitaliina does not spend her time memorizing these impersonal and encoded words of love. The letter does not appear in VV, and Vitalina makes it clear that she already knows what love means.[20]


Figure 3: Vitalina and Ventura in Vitalina Varela


From Melancholy to Mourning

As the custodian of privileged words or incantations, it might be easy to blur the character differences between Ventura in Juventude and Ventura-as-Priest in VV. Ventura-as-priest tells Vitalina that if she would like to speak to her dead husband, she will have to learn Portuguese. As the language of the redeemed world, or as a means for making sense of oneself and truly communicating with the dead, in the Priest’s advice, Portuguese stands to the Creole spoken by Costa’s characters in the same way that the modern apartments stand to Ventura in his quest for a home in Juventude. But perhaps by way of twisting an insight of Wittgenstein’s, that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life,[21] the notion that speaking Portuguese will help Vitalina into a new form of life, or at least allow her to develop an understanding of the dead, and to properly mourn her husband is the inversion of the cruel and insensitive thought that the possibilities for communication available to Creole speakers in Lisbon reveal almost no form of life at all. “There is nothing for you here.” Vitalina, as an emblem of the resolute hope to be able to inhabit her own living space in her dead husband’s house, will of course stick to Creole in talking to her dead husband in that house. And, as in the above exchange with Ntoni, she does not offer any intermediary steps in learning what it would mean to love someone or to communicate that love. This, we might say, is the moment of Derridean heterodidactics, something taught to a living being beyond its own experiences. It draws from a wholly other register than the homogeneous didactic materials imparted via tradition in Ventura. In a similarly Wittgensteinian register, she only offers reminders of what such a commitment would involve in the furnishing of a home (e.g., a roof) or, as in Cavalo, actually sending word for your marriage partner to join you. This is essentially a denial of the position that Ventura (in his many manifestations) has been performing across Costa’s Cape Verde movies by dwelling among what must appear to be selective ghosts, unable to face the hardest memory of a personal infidelity to the past.

The peculiarly awkward misfit between the spoken language and the muted inner demands of each character of Costa’s movies is a particular expression of a more general misfit between the forms of structures or conventions of expression and what might be variously described as reality, the needs of the soul or of life. We might thereby say that there is an internal imbalance, a constitutive violence, that structures the form of life of Costa’s Cape Verdeans. This is to say that the imposition of form, a requirement for the intelligibility of what is expressed, leaves these characters without much to say to each other. And it is Costa’s brilliance to maintain and linger in the presentation of a violence that has reduced his characters to languidly staring at the walls.

The dissonance between form and life has been a sticking point of literary aesthetics at least explicitly since the early work of Lukács (Soul and Form and Theory of the Novel). The “second nature” of artificial forms described in Theory of the Novel seems especially fitting for Costa’s Cape Verdean movies:

This second nature... is a complex of senses — meanings — which has become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority; it is a charnel-house of long-dead interiorities; this second nature could only be brought to life — if this were possible — by the metaphysical act of reawakening the souls which, in an early or ideal existence, created or preserved it; it can never be animated by another interiority. It is too akin to the soul’s aspirations to be treated by the soul as mere raw material for moods, yet too alien to those aspirations ever to become their appropriate and adequate expression. Estrangement from nature (the first nature), the modern sentimental attitude to nature, is only a projection of man’s experience of his self-made environment as a prison instead of as a parental home.[22]

 

Figure 4: Vitalina Varela

In Costa’s own words in the transcript of a lecture given at Tokyo Film School in 2004 (“A Closed Door that Leaves us Guessing”[23]), he describes the primary function of cinema is to “make us feel that something isn’t right.” But rather than understanding this imprisonment or this dissonance as something that has been imposed by an internally necessary development of spirit, culture, capitalism, etc., Costa's films evade grand diagnoses and instead his camera is occupied by these muted lives. There is thus something of Benjamin’s Angel of History at work in these films, wishing to stay with and awaken the dead but pulled away by the onrush of progress.

But it seems to me best to frame the accomplishment of VV as a turning away from the hauntology that characterized the earlier films of this series. We only need think of Benvindo awaiting the salary he is owed, or the Ventura of Juventude listening to the festive song celebrating Cabral to understand (along the lines of what Fisher has laid out) that “what is being longed for in hauntology is not a particular period, but the resumption of processes of democratisation and pluralism” (2014: 26), “what should haunt us is not the no longer of actually existing social democracy, but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect.” (2014: 27) The curious temporality of Ventura’s present day in Cavalo is one articulation of the failure of the promised future to unfold. It is precisely Vitalina’s refusal of this melancholy, along with the memorial or bureaucratic mediation with which Ventura is constantly negotiating, that serves to complete a figural arch extending from her present establishment in Lisbon back to her prior dream of a house in Cape Verde.

VV is, then, a turn away from the masculine and melancholic hauntology of the earlier films, the logic of the Angelus Novus, who would remain with the injustices of the past, a logic that has presented the Ventura character as mobbed by ghosts, and, in his priestly manifestation, to claim that “It is pleasing to the Lord when his servant dies” because at least all of the bitterness of labor is over. When he shouts “It is poison!”, referring to the labor and hardship faced by the Cape Verdeans upon arrival in Lisbon, it is clear, by this reading, that he is equally contemptuous of all the available mediating forms (Lukácsian second nature) that serve in the flailing effort of assimilating to the present in which he, in his other roles earlier in the sequence of Costa’s Cape Verde movies, had taken up an unstable residence.

Ventura presides over the mystical body of the dead, but Vitalina, we might say, is shaping her life outside of the poison which has infected the male immigrants of Costa’s series, and, as is suggested by VV’s final image, her efforts are given the reward of a closure, across time and space, of which the male characters had only ever been given fantasies. She has done so through her otherworldly commitment, maintaining her own position as directly responsive and responsible for not only a vanished future but also a loyalty to her own past and ideals. This effort of enduring persistence for an apparently temporally unhinged telos is an effort of mourning in the sense made abundantly clear at the close of VV that she has completed the narrative arc of a temporal unfolding of her life in ways that Ventura and the other male characters described above are not able. Not only an inquiry into an experience which is emblematic of the experience of Cape Verdean women, VV thus represents a movement in Costa’s series away from melancholic forms of hauntology and towards mourning, or, what could rightly be said to be the commitment announced in the Derridean account of hauntology.


The debut appearance of this piece was on Film Criticism.


Endnotes

1. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Frames and Bodies — Notes on Three Films by Pedro Costa: Ossos, No Quarto da Vanda, Juventude em Marcha” in Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry. (2010) 24: 62-70; cited material is on p. 62 

2. In Jacques Rancière, Les écarts du cinéma (Paris, La Fabrique éditions: 2011), 137-153. Also available in translation here: https://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1546

3. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. P. Kamuf. (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994)

4. See his “What is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly (2012) 66.1: 16-24; and his Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Washington, Zero Books: 2013)

5. Derrida, Specters, p. xvii

6. ibid., pp. xvii-xviii

7. ibid., p. xviii

8. ibid., p. xx

9. ibid., p. xviii

10. Fisher, “What is Hauntology?” p. 16

11. Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, p. 6

12. ibid., p. 26

13. ibid., p. 27

14. ibid., p 22

15. ibid., pp. 23-4

16. ibid., pp. 7-8

17. Derrida, Specters, p. xviii

18. ibid., p. xviii

19. Although Spínola was in 1974 a “celebrated national hero” in part because of his pro-decolonizing views expressed in his book Portugal and the Future [Portugal e o Futuro, (1974)], he seemed to accept blame by seeking asylum following the abortive coup in March 1975 to retake power from the increasing alignment of left-wing political parties and military forces. For “celebrated national hero” see Eduardo de Sousa Ferreira “An Analysis of the ‘Spínola Affair’” Africa Today (1974) 22.1: 69-73, and for the perception of his culpability for the coup see, e.g., the Thames Television report from March 20, 1975 available online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RJfOA8W1nE, accessed May 12, 2020) or the front page of The New York Times March 12, 1975, “Lisbon Says it Foiled Coup After Attack on Loyal Unit.”

20. It is doubly important to note here that the letter itself has a somewhat blurred or doubled origin. See Rancière’s essay, mentioned in note 2, for an account of the letter that stems actually from the prison/labor-camp at Tarrafal, in the background of the narrative of Casa de Lava, and also, per Ranciѐre “from a camp Flöha in Saxony, a way stop on the road to Terezin, and death.” Thus, as a symbol that is charged with the historical overtones of colonial punitive exclusion, forced labor, and genocidal mass murder, the drive to learn the letter, a tuition that so successfully encrypts the genesis of the letter as a monumental big black bird, takes on a very poignant historical weight.

21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. ed. R. Rhees and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. (London, Blackwell Publishing: 2001/1953) §19.

22. György Lukács, Theory of the Novel, trans. A. Bostock (Massachusetts, The MIT Press: 1971/1920) p. 64 

23. Available here: http://www.rouge.com.au/10/costa_seminar.html (accessed May 12, 2020)

No comments:

Post a Comment