The Political Gesture in Pedro Costa's Films by Fiona Handyside

This book offers a new reading of the work of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa. It provides a formal and detailed analysis of his films to suggest that Costa's formal procedures generate a contingency of meaning. The book proposes that Costa's films suggest a critical thinking posited through the materiality of the cinematic medium that is capable of exposing the limits of filmic representation itself. In addition, the author argues that Costa's political gesture derives from the articulation of the intrinsic elements of the filmic medium rather than the depiction of a social reality.

Patricia Sequeira Bras is Visiting Assistant Professor in Film Studies and Integrated Researcher at CEIS20 at Universidade de Coimbra. She concluded her doctoral research in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2015. She previously taught at Queen Mary and Birkbeck, University of London, and at the University of Exeter in the UK and then held a research position at Universidade Lusofona in Lisbon. The relationship between politics and cinema that motivated her doctoral work continues to shape her new research projects. Her current research interests include documentary film genre, feminism and gender studies, filmic temporality and visual coloniality.