The Real Life Off-Screen Death of Zita Duarte and her character, �Zita Duarte�: An Observation on Pedro Costa�s In Vanda�s Room and Colossal Youth

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It is rare indeed that we see real death in the movies, or at least real humandeath.  I mentioned in a recent post the occasional killing of animals in various films (a preponderance of which seemed to be Korean) such as slaughtered fish, eels, snakes, frogs, and on up to donkeys, buffalos, and horses.

It is in documentary films that we get closer to seeing �real� death, and not just the deaths of animals (although who could help but be disturbed at footage of the shooting of a giraffe in Chris Marker�s Sans Soleil?)

In Patricio Guzman�s epic documentary trilogy The Battle of Chile, which was filmed in the final months of the Allende government, there is a famous scene in which one of Guzman�s cameramen films a soldier who shoots and kills him.  Allow me to elaborate: the cameraman is filming some mutinous soldiers in the abortive coup attempt that took place in Chile several months before the successful overthrow of Allende on September 11, 1973.  The camera films a soldier who�s brandishing a gun and who turns to look at the cameraman (or his camera, or both) points his gun directly at the camera (or so it seems to us, the viewers) and fires.  And then there�s a brief moment of �what the hell just happened?� and then the shot teeters and falls over onto its side.  And a voiceover informs us that the cameraman was shot and killed.  So, even if it happened off-screen, the cameraman filmed himself being killed.

The soldier who killed the cameraman, as filmed by the cameraman while he was being killed.

This notion of off-screen death brings me to two of the �Fontainhas films� of the Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa: In Vanda�s Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006).  The borderline between fiction and documentary in these films is perhaps hopelessly blurred, but I�ll try to bring it into slightly sharper focus.  In Vanda�s Room is a largely plotless depiction of the lives of a group of Portuguese drug addicts and Cape Verdean immigrants living in Lisbon�s Fontainhas slum.  The main focus of the film is on the titular Vanda Duarte, a young woman who spends much of her time ingesting either cocaine or heroin with her sister, Zita.  In my narcotic na�vet�, I must admit that I�m not quite sure which drug it is they�re taking.  They roll something into a joint, place the tip of the joint against a piece of tinfoil, and then use a lighter to heat the joint through the tin foil.  Or at least that�s what it looked like to me.  Does someone know what this is? (Comments, people, make them.)

Zita Duarte (L) and her sister, Vanda Duarte, ingesting mysterious drugs.

So most of the movie is Vanda and Zita Duarte smoking whatever it is they�re smoking and having conversations about their lives and the other denizens of the Fontainhas housing project, several of whom we get to meet in little subplots.

Now, from what I�ve describe thus far, is this fiction or documentary?  To answer this question, we must go back to Pedro Costa�s first Fontainhas film, Ossos (Bones) which is unambiguously fictional, although it would seem to draw from the neorealist tradition, as it is filmed on location in the Fontainhas neighborhood and is cast largely with non-professional actors drawn from the denizens of Fontainhas.  Among these nonprofessional actors were Vanda and Zita Duarte.

Ossos is an excellent film in its own way, but Costa was disappointed with it.  It was made with a full film crew, and the disruption to the lives of the Fontainha-ns was distressing to him (in filming poverty there are always serious ethical issues, which I suspect are more often than not just ignored).  And so Costa got into conversation with the Duarte sisters, and they told him (and I�m paraphrasing here, and this is according to Cyril Neyrat�s essay that accompanies the Criterion Collection�s Letters from Fontainhas), �If you want to get a real look at life in Fontainhas, you should just film us, doing what we do.� Costa thought this a wonderful idea and he put it into practice, following the Duartes and their friends around the neighborhood for months and watching Vanda and Zita Duarte in their favorite activity, the smoking of [mystery drug x] in Vanda�s room.

More drugs.

And so when the time came to make an actual feature film out of this, Costa and his actors went about it like this.  Rather than making a straight documentary, they would make a film in which the participants played themselves and acted out their day-to-day lives.  And so Costa would get an artful shot of the Duartes in Vanda�s room as they smoked and talked, and then they would repeat their conversation over and over, sometimes over twenty times, until all unnaturalness had been drained out of it and the non-fictional scene had been transformed into fiction.  This practice of repetition is highly similar to Robert Bresson�s approach to screen performance with his mostly non-professional actors, in which he would have them do their lines over and over again until all trace of �actorliness� was drained out of them.  The main difference between Costa and Bresson in this respect is that Bresson�s actors are nonetheless participating in an unambiguous fiction, whereas Costa�s actors are transmuting reality into fiction.

While In Vanda�s Room isn�t a documentary (although that didn�t stop it from winning the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2001 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival), it�s not quite fiction either.  I wouldn�t call it a hybrid, because that, to me, conjures up something like Du�an Makavejev�s WR: Mysteries of the Organism, which alternates between documentary scenes and fiction scenes.  In Vanda�s Room, by contrast, is fusing the two together to create something new.  In watching it, we see Vanda Duarte playing �Vanda Duarte,� but not in the sense of John Malkovitch playing himself in Being John Malkovitch, which did not make any pretense of fidelity to the real-life John Malkovitch (or at least I assume it didn�t; I have no idea what the �real-life� John Malkovitch is like).  Rather, Vanda Duarte�s �Vanda Duarte� is a very close approximation of Vanda Duarte; the same thing applies to her sister Zita.  The characters on screen are so close to their real-life counterparts that it becomes impossible to fully separate them one from the other.

Pedro Costa�s follow-up to In Vanda�s Room, 2006�s Colossal Youth, is something of a sequel to In Vanda�s Room, or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a �companion piece.� In this film, Costa applies the same techniques of In Vanda�s Room to a new character, the aging Cape Verdean immigrant Ventura.  In Colossal Youth (and in real life), the residents of Fontainhas are in the process of being transferred to a shiny, new, white-washed housing complex, and the film follows Ventura as he pays a round of visits to his numerous friends, both in Fontainhas and their new homes, and tells them about how his wife has left him.  Ventura has the delusion that all of his friends from Fontainhas are his children, and none of them seek to disabuse him of this notion as he tells them that �your mother has left me.�

Ventura is a fascinating figure in his own right, but I want to narrow our focus to his relationship with Vanda Duarte, whose life story Costa takes up again in Colossal Youth.  This film finds her married and living with her husband and daughter in the new housing complex.  She looks much older (well, James, six years have elapsed since In Vanda�s Room; I know, but I mean, she looks older than six years older, she looks prematurely aged) and we find that she�s quit [mystery drug x] with the help of her husband ( and by-the-by, the Portuguese word for �drugs� sounds like �droh-gohss.�)

Ventura sees her as another of his children, and so he comes to visit her in her antiseptic new apartment and they talk about his wife leaving him and other events in their lives.  And the conversation turns to Zita, and they speak along the lines of, �Ah yes, poor Zita, may she rest in peace, poor Zita.� And I remember when I was watching this being struck with the realization that �holy shit, did Zita actually die?� And sure enough, I think she did! (IMDB, which I had taken to be as inerrant as scripture, is unclear on this issue, because they�ve conflated their profile of the Zita Duarte who appears in Ossos and In Vanda�s Room with some deceased sexagenarian actress of the same name whose career dates back to the �70�s, before our Zita Duarte was even born).  And even though it took place �off-screen,� this death is a still a part of the narrative threads connecting In Vanda�s Room to Colossal Youth.  And so the character of �Zita Duarte� died because the actual Zita Duarte died, and the character of �Vanda Duarte� is mourning her sister because her real-life sister died.

Zita Duarte as "Zita Duarte."

And I don�t know why this strikes me as so uncanny.  I mean, I�ve seen documentaries depicting people who are dead or who later died.  And I�ve seen plenty of fictional films in which the actors later died (like the great Japanese actress Isuzu Yamada, who played Lady Macbeth in Kurosawa�s Throne of Blood(1957) and who died just a few weeks ago at the age of 95).  I think what makes Zita Duarte�s death so� I don�t know, surprising to me, is the strange nature of her on-screen identity, in which she was both Zita Duarte and �Zita Duarte.� She had more layers of on-screen personhood to her than did, say, the late Isuzu Yamada.  She�and all the other people/characters in these two Costa films�possess a great weight that simultaneously anchors them in reality while elevating them into more purely aesthetic realms.  Perhaps that�s it.  To my mind, there is the disappointing world of reality and then there is the �realm of the aesthetic,� and you can travel from one land to the other, but it�s hard to live in both.  And Costa has made it so that the Duarte sisters live�and by extension, die�in both worlds.