Among the pantheon of directors whom Pedro Costa habitually invokes when speaking about cinema (Godard, Straub, Ford), the youngest I’ve heard him include, and certainly the only one to have emerged in the 21st century, is Wang Bing. It therefore felt appropriate that Cannes would program the premiere of their respective new films, both relatively short works, as a double bill, with Costa’s eight-minute Daughters of Fire followed by Wang’s 57-minute Man in Black. (The former film was also paired, in a second screening, with Godard’s posthumous Film annonce du film qui n’existera jamais: “Drôles de guerres”, suggesting that the festival was keen to please Costa.)
As formal experiments with music, the two films represent forays into territory thus far unexplored by either director. (In Costa’s own words, his 2009 documentary Ne change rien “had a lot of music in it, but it wasn’t a musical film.”) Its widescreen image split in three, Daughters of Fire is a triptych, with each panel framing a different woman filmed in a single take. The first (Elizabeth Pinard) is pictured in a medium shot, walking past a seemingly never-ending, presumably rear-projected black wall speckled with incandescent patches of lava. In a full shot, the second (Alice Costa) lies, then stands, near the mouth of a volcano that is lit from below with a glow at once ominous and divine. The third (Karyna Gomes), in a tight close-up, gazes directly into the camera from behind a door frame, the flickering illumination on her face intimating an unseen conflagration.
Continuing in the ever-darker visual trajectory of his previous films, in Costa pushes even further towards an obsidian palette as he crafts three painterly portraits of exquisite and haunting beauty. Their configuration, and Costa’s typically ethereal lighting, confers a religious aura to the apocalyptic tableaux that is complemented by the accompanying music. Over a string quartet rendition of 17th-century violinist and composer Biagio Marini’s (Op. 22), the three women, all professional singers, intone a hymn-like song whose lyrics speak of solitude and suffering, toil and exhaustion, and fortitude in the face of neglect. Given that the women are Black and singing in Creole, and that the themes they invoke are familiar from Costa’s films about Cape Verdean immigrants, it’s a surprise to learn from the end credits that part of the lyrics belong to a traditional Ukrainian
