#casa de lava

Pedro Costa - Casa de Lava

Pierre von Kleist Editions

In 1992, Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa travelled to Cape Verde to research his forthcoming movie, Casa de Lava. He returned with a scrapbook filled with island ephemera: postcards and photographs; newspaper clippings and poems; a visual script collected – pictured here framed by the delicate lines of his dog-eared, grass-green notebook.

Following his disappointment with the final film, Costa returned to this material he amassed. It would become everything that the movie could not. Free from the constraints of film, from the supposed need for resolution – the obligatory beginning and end – the notebook became a cathartic object; a tattered rethinking of a troubled endeavour.

The result is a not always coherent glimpse into the making of a film. After all, Costa has described the book as a warning sign. For him it predicts the erratic behaviour behind the scenes; his sabotage of the script, the actors, the producer and himself. The book is the critical conscience of the film then. Every image glued in then torn out is a burden; every scratch, every scribble a crisis.

—Sean Stoker