Restoring History, Materializing the Trauma: Observations on the migrant bodies in Pedro Costa’s Cavalo Dinheiro (2014) and Vitalina Varela (2019)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14591/aniki.v8n2.769Keywords:
Pedro Costa, trauma, body, materiality, history, affectAbstract
This essay proposes a reflection on the way in which Cavalo Dinheiro/ Horse Money (2014) and Vitalina Varela (2019), by Portuguese director Pedro Costa, restore the right to narrate and materialize the effects of the trauma related to migration and colonialism, from the analysis of the inscription of diasporic bodies and subjectivities in the contemporary postcolonial space, more specifically within the context of the representation of Cape Verdean immigrants and their descendants in Portugal. The notion of materiality is the prism through which this analysis is devised, both in the sense of the materiality of the cinema apparatus employed by the filmmaker, and in the sense of the materiality of the very image and its formal operations in the construction of the experience of history and of trauma. The essay contends that these formal operations, especially the use of (historic and filmic) temporality and the framing that creates a distance, reveal not only a singular aesthetics, but also a political and ethical engagement in Pedro Costa’s cinema.
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