Haunted Mis en Scene : the digital stage play of Pedro Costas Colossal Youth

Colossal Youth     Dir. Pedro Costa 

At one point of the film Colossal Youth Ventura , the main character,is laying in a dracula position. In one of his daughters' bedrooms the TV is on but the soundtrack is disassociated from Venrura and his daughter's image.  Characters sit for long periods of time contemplating the past, talking and shooting the shit. This you might say consitiutes most of what happens in this film but if you look closer you might start questioning what your actually seeing. Its also easy to see threw the comedy in this film.

The real reason I wanted to write about Colossal Youth is because I want to try and articulate something that  I feel like Costa might be exploring in the Mise en scene of this Portuguess ghetto. 

 Costas digital image creates a stage , it dose not make things look more real but instead everything looks like some sort of avant garde set design. The stationary camera is still interested in duration and time moulding in monolithic like takes, but the characters and their action ( or lack there of ) are exploring the corners of the frame and our eyes might be even more in tune with movement.

Dogma 95 films had a rule that no film about how the film must take place where the action is. These early dogma films are explorations, scientific investigations and formulations for alchemic recipes into this new world of digital film and its future of digital film making and that maybe Stan Brakhages dreams for the amateur the amateur filmmaker and its revolutionary eye of color and movement might be closer to a reality.