My initial thoughts on Horse Money, which I saw Friday at Film Society at Lincoln Center
Horse Money 2014 by Pedro Costa
The newest film from Ventura and Pedro Costa (whose name appears after the central cast in the credits) reminds me of two comments made by Costa in interviews. The first is a comment about the way Costa and his actors make their films. Costa said that he wants to be like Val Lewton, the famous producer of "horror" films in the 1940s at RKO whose films, especially the Jacques Toureur directed
I Walked with a Zombie, are a major influence on Costa. Though Lewton was a producer, who normally have cursory influence on the films they produce, always chose the lighting for the films he produced. One gets this feeling from
Horse Money all throughout, as though Costa is setting the lighting and camera while his actors act out their past. Much of what occurs is so personal, Vitalina reading of all of the Notary information available of her and her recently deceased husband's lives, Ventura and his cousin singing a folk song and arguing about the lyrics, that it's impossible to know or experience anything but the depth of expression present on screen. If
Colossal Youth inverted the Brechtian nothingness of
In Vanda's Room,
Horse Money represents a frightening middle ground, where we, the film watchers and the characters in the film, experience the tragedy of a Fordian hero but find ourselves unable to understand it.
The second comment I am reminded of is one of the most perceptive points on the great Japanese filmmaker, Yasujiro Ozu, that I've ever heard. Costa says that the images in Ozu appear to shake, ever so slightly, in their stillness. There is no better way to describe the images, presented more as a series of images than as scenes in a film, than Costa's own comment. There is physical shaking as well. Ventura is suffering from a nerve disease, which causes him to constantly shake. The few camera movements that do exist in the film, of which there are only two that I remember, hit like a brick in their unusual speed and both times threaten to tear the film apart at the seams. In a talk given in Tokyo, Costa brings up an comment that Kenji Mizoguchi made of Yasujiro Ozu, who said, "What that gentleman does with these doors is more difficult than what I'm doing." Mizoguchi was also a master of doors, as Costa recognized when he duplicated the ending of
Street of Shame in
Ossos. In
Street of Shame, and in
Ossos, the closing of the door represents an emotional blackout, the characters are telling us to stay away and we're cut off from them emotionally. In
Horse Money, the doors are open, but we can't see through to the other side, just an abyss or, like Ozu, another door.
Beyond these cursory connections, it's hard to say something specific about Horse Money given that it is, in itself, about a specificity of experience. Mark Peranson has written of Horse Money, “the most true-to-form analysis of Horse Money should proceed in this painstaking way, shot after shot, because to examine the film as a whole, or as a connection of scenes that flow one into the other, is an impossibility.” This is because the scenes, or shots, more correctly, in Horse Money’s case, are often more like photographs collaged together, like the photographs from Jacob Riis that open the film. The idea of the still moving image is something almost entirely unique to Costa’s cinema. Even other practitioners of Costa’s framing and staging styles like to cram mise en scene and movement into a scene. The strands of photographs in Costa’s films cause for a confused weightlessness of experience. Some shots have no indication whatsoever of when they will end. Like the dancing scene in Bela Tarr’s Satantango we sometimes wonder if a shot will go on forever. When Costa does cut from these kinds of shots, the compositions are thrown completely off center, such as a cut from Vitalina in three-quarter profile to a plain shot behind a man that seemingly ironically follows the rule of thirds to a T.
Horse Money is in fact so specific and personal, and of many persons, Ventura, Vitalina, Costa, Joaquim, Cape Verdeans, that the only appropriate response seems to be one’s own personal experience with it rather than any sort of evaluation. Describing the film in terms of plot is about as silly as trying to capture the essence of a moving image in static text. To describe the hospitals, alleys, blood filled woods and the ghosts that walk through them is only to limit one’s experience with them. To describe a bloody fight between Ventura and Joaquim would not only be unimportant, but potentially wrong given the elusive and obscure nature of every shot in the film. I can only deal with
Horse Money as an experience, and not an object, hardly a film, at this point and potentially at any point in my journey with it.
In that sense, I found myself experiencing colors that feel new even though they plausibly cannot be. I felt the physical presence and absence of light more than in any other film that I can recall. I felt a tactility in the images that strikes counter to the film’s ghost world, everything in the film pleads to be felt, touched. Like Ozu, I look at doorways differently after having seen the film, yet in a completely different way than I would from an Ozu film. I have a feeling of history, but only a feeling, nothing concrete. What can be said about
Horse Money, and the team, or more accurately the community of people that made it, is that they are creating a new art, and one that gets more complicated at every turn.
Reply to Topic
