Textured Cuts: The Demolition Cinema of Pedro Costa and José Luis Guerín

Abstract

This article reexamines the aesthetics of the cut through cinema that challenges the possibility of totality. Looking back at films of demolitions in two Iberian cities, the author considers how cuts – both architectural and cinematic – reveal fissures created by urban renewal projects that preceded global crisis. En construcción (Work in Progress, 2001) by the Catalan filmmaker José Luis Guerín follows the reconstruction of Barcelona’s neighborhood ‘El Raval’, while Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room, 2000) films residents in a slum area of Lisbon as their houses are slowly demolished. By attending to neighborhoods that were ‘cut out of’ the urban landscape, these films contest the representation of unified cityscapes, exposing the fractures underlying economic development. The films also provide new ways to understand the ambivalent aesthetics of the cut, which both violently wounds the surface and exposes what lies behind. I will argue that ultimately thresholds produced by the cut speak to the ethical ambiguities of filmmaking, in which the camera inevitably alters whatever it views, thus exposing the textured incompleteness of the image.