8 - The Offscreen and the Promise of the Image

Summary

Ossos (1997) is the first part in a trilogy of films directed by the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa that focuses on life in Fontainhas – a poor, ghetto-like suburb of Lisbon that no longer exists today and whose residents were mostly immigrants. With a minimal plot that is constituted of rarefied dramatic elements, Ossos is a fiction film based on an including the real residents of the slum as non-actors, and on their hard living conditions and everyday life. The depressed, suicidal Tina has just had a baby with her boyish-looking partner. He takes the baby away to attract pity while panhandling on the streets of Lisbon city. Meanwhile, the father also tries to get rid of the baby by attempting to convince a nurse and then a prostitute to take care of it as Tina's gloom worsens. While one might say that the plot certainly gestures towards a melodrama, Ossos embeds the presumably melodramatic elements within a filmic body that de-dramatises what it contains. The film's richness, by contrast, is indebted to how the image is set up – an often rigid, monotone staging of bodies in static shots in which, as we shall see, onscreen presences are entwined with the thrust of the emptiness of the offscreen.

Reading Jean-Luc Godard's famous quote that ‘every film is a documentary of its actors’, Gilberto Perez argues that a ‘fiction movie constructs the fiction of characters from the documentary of actors. It is the documentary of a fiction enacted before the camera.’ Costa, in a certain sense, literalises Perez's statement as he casts the real residents of the neighbourhood to play their own selves. Found by Costa's camera, the bodies within the image do not stand in the place of something that is absent – they are, rather, as they appear within the image. More interestingly, Costa constructs his fiction through a documentation of bodies through not only his aesthetics but also his filmmaking methods.