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The film gives the audience very little that is actually decodable however, it gives them plenty to experience. No matter where you try go, another wall pushes you back to the center. Horse Money takes the form of Ventura’s experience, and is built like a massive echo chamber. #EFEITO DE DISCO ARRANHADO WINDOWS#The bazinian image of cinema as a window to the world is reaffirmed through its negative reproduction, bent by Ventura’s handwriting: this world is made of windows that only allow us to look inside. But these windows do not frame a view of the day, burnt in the overexposure of a paralyzing white. Windows allow the night to break through the barriers of sleep, bringing a streetlight to the middle of the room, or drenching the frame in highlights that hurt the eye – a light that is closer to the assault of birth than to the transcendence or redemption of death. #EFEITO DE DISCO ARRANHADO FULL#Doors lead to rooms that lead to other doors that end up in corridors full of doors that lead to other rooms and other doors and other corridors full of doors – or, at last, to an elevator one can take, so that it can take them nowhere, trapping them in a ride that never ends. Fontainhas remains as ruins of astonishment, because space here, much like time, is of a different quality. The world is no longer the world, for what we have here is the manifestation of a subjectivity that has been rendered objective – a selective point of view paradoxically captured by a wide-angle lens. Pedro Costa becomes the horse, the body to be possessed by African deities this time around, we are going to inhabit Ventura. The gesture is not only the answer to the question delayed by the man who cried it is also an element that marks a distinction between Horse Money and Costa’s previous film: this is a story that can only be told through Ventura’s own handwriting. There, in that space where everything seems to both have already happened and never stopped happening, a monumental gesture by Ventura takes so much screen time that it stands out without requiring an insert: he stretches his arms toward the doctor’s pocket e takes his pen. ![]() The man in scrubs gets closer to Ventura and tries to take his heartbeats. In the next shot, a man in scrubs provides a body to which we can anchor the voice, even though night has already fallen against the white walls and this leap in time which the film treats like continuity seems capable of holding the whole of time, since every chance of narrative progression has already been annihilated by the faith in progress, and every man in a uniform is only a man in a uniform. The cry is not coming from outside, because there is no outside the cry might not even be in the present, because Ventura’s present is an accumulation of multiple pasts and not a single future… it is anything but a present. Lying on his back, burdened by the time that does not seem to pass, Ventura stays quiet for a few seconds and then answers: “I can hear a man crying.” Scratched by clanking metals and off-screen traces that never fully configure a space beyond the borders of the frame, the soundtrack contains no identifiable cry. #EFEITO DE DISCO ARRANHADO HOW TO#“Do you know how to read and write?,” the voice asks. But they don’t stand out as much as the answers given to the questions that were never asked. Between direct, objective answers (a tonal choice that seems to be the biggest demonstration of subjectivity by Ventura in the whole film) that set up the entire foundation for the plot, certain questions remain unanswered. ![]() We will come back because, as with the film, we can never really leave it (but not Ventura – Ventura is not even there). We will come back to this opening interrogatory. This voice raises many questions, and the entire film seems to pour out of the gap between Ventura’s answers and his refusal to answer. Perhaps because of the sparse furnishing, the white walls, and my own lack of imagination, I imagine it’s the voice of a doctor, even though it sounds more like a police interrogation. Only a few minutes into Pedro Costa’s Horse Money (2014), a disembodied voice off-screen questions Ventura, who’s wearing a robe and socks. * Originally published at Cinética in January 2016. “Vitalina from Figueira das Naus” “Ventura from Chão do Monte”. ![]()
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