Colossal Youth (2006) [Masters of Cinema #111]
A Film by Pedro Costa
2xDVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL 4:3 (720x576) | 02:30:00 | 7,71 Gb + 5,48 Gb
Audio: Portuguese AC3 2.0 @ 256 Kbps | Subtitles: English
Genre: Drama | 1 win | France, Portugal, Switzerland
A Film by Pedro Costa
2xDVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL 4:3 (720x576) | 02:30:00 | 7,71 Gb + 5,48 Gb
Audio: Portuguese AC3 2.0 @ 256 Kbps | Subtitles: English
Genre: Drama | 1 win | France, Portugal, Switzerland
Across the course of history, only a relative handful of filmmakers can be said to have developed and refined a language of cinematographic expression which, inimitable, belongs to its creator alone. Pedro Costa, of our time, exists within this select group, and Colossal Youth is one of his sublime achievements.
An intimate epic wherein present and past move as one, Colossal Youth (Costa’s English-language title for Juventude em marcha, or Youth on the March) chronicles Ventura, the towering Cape Verdean who has assumed the role of surrogate “father” to an untold number of characters around Lisbon and its now-razed neighbourhood of Fontaínhas. Through Ventura’s ghost-like visitations to figures such as Vanda Duarte (the central personage of Costa’s previous In Vanda’s Room) and repeated recollections of his past life as a newly migrated manual labourer, Costa explores the nature, and necessity, of storytelling in the course of the human adventure.
As with In Vanda’s Room, Colossal Youth lays bare the residence of documentary inside of fiction (and vice-versa) using a digital video aesthetic in which every single image resonates with an indescribably poetic and rarefied force. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Colossal Youth in concert with Costa’s complementary short works Tarrafal, The Rabbit Hunters, and O nosso homem – all for the first time in the UK.
IMDB
Eureka - The Masters of Cinema Series
DVDBeaver
There's no getting around this: Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth couldn't be more difficult to comprehend, discuss, or stay awake through. And at the same time, there hasn't been a film like this in years, one that begs to be mulled-over and picked-through, analyzed, and forensically-examined as if it were some dried up corpse found in the middle of the desert without a tent or camel within 100 miles. When it premiered at Cannes in 2006, the walk-out count was reportedly in the triple digits, only being rivaled by Richard Kelly's Southland Tales for misinterpretation and bitter bewilderment.
Costa doesn't give an inch. The film derives all construction through character and atmosphere without even the faintest whiff of a script or a legitimate story to speak of. In minimalist fashion, the only music comes from the shuffle of dust against a sandal and the sound of decaying voices echoing through the Lisbon ghetto where Costa filmed Youth. Shot in gritty yet ethereal digital video, Costa's triumph of existence cinema can only be fully understood as an act of experience.
The only character of note is that of Ventura, a human vulture that skulks around the shattered apartments and moldy ruins of his ghetto. Ventura walks around, talking to his neighbors, people he refers to as his 'children.' A vast portion of the film is spent watching Ventura speak to these children about the mother who left them and him, only being dragged away for the occasional card game or to check out a new apartment for his children and him. And if that doesn't get your blood pumping, wait till you hear about the endless moments spent on a bed with one of his daughters, watching a TV we never see.
Ventura suggests a certain spiritual duality. He does indeed exist in this surreal ghetto, but he also seems to be haunting it at the same time. You could consider him a ghost, but a ghost doesn't seem so irrevocably welded to the physical world the way Ventura is. Yet, he looms over his own existence as if measuring the metaphysical weight of every action he takes.
Costa himself has noted the influence of John Ford on his work, specifically citing the old master's military-court drama Sergeant Rutledge. At moments, Costa's imagery has a resonating style with space that recalls the open prairies, mountains and clay-red canyons that Ford filmed with such pristine grandeur. The varying difference comes from Youth's darkened corridors and soggy apartment-lighting, suggesting a present sense of dread and gloom in its aesthetic.
Taking the ghetto out of its often-referenced turbulence and into a state of rusted grace, Colossal Youth offers the year's most refined sense of character. Ventura's world is defined only through him and, therefore, the experience of watching him becomes an action of trance. The screen itself serves as a meditative mediator to the audience and the image becomes the only focal point. It's impossible to describe as anything less than reverie.
Special Features:
- Director-approved transfer of the feature, presented in its original 25fps playback speed
- Newly translated optional English subtitles
- New and exclusive 17-minute video piece filmed at the Tate Modern, London, featuring Pedro Costa discussing Colossal Youth
- Original trailer for the film
- Three shorter works by Pedro Costa which complement Colossal Youth: Tarrafal [2007, 18 minutes]; The Rabbit Hunters [Portuguese title: A caça ao coelho com pau, or Hunting the Rabbit with a Stick, 2007, 23 minutes]; and the first home video release of Costa’s most recent work, O nosso homem [Our Man, 2010, 25 minutes]
- Finding the Criminal [2010, 118 minutes] — a new film by Craig Keller, featuring Pedro Costa in a 2008 conversation with Keller and Andy Rector on the history of cinema, cinema aesthetics, politics, music, etc.
Criterion's 'Colossal Youth' is here –> Link
Many Thanks to Original uploader.
If you want to download it, but found out that links are dead,
just leave a comment or PM me!
just leave a comment or PM me!
No More Mirrors.