Juventud en marcha de Pedro Costa. La misiva negada. Palabra, memoria y resistencia

The aim of this article is studying the use of the epistolary device in the film Colossal Youth (Juventude em marcha, 2006), by Pedro Costa. I will analyse this element to demonstrate how the impossibility of writing a letter becomes an act of resistance, by means of speech and memory, against the marginalization and exclusion suffered by immigrants. The denied letter then turns into progressive and repeated recitations that construct its content while defining the nature of this epistolary resistance by the variations in its mise en scene. The aesthetics of the hybridization of documentary and fiction, achieved through the author’s use of digital image, defines itself as representative of a contemporary cinema that reveals its relation and evolution in regard to modern cinema. By means of the stylization, abstraction and fictionalization of a documentary raw material, the reality of the Fontainhas neighbourhood, Costa generates a timelessness of a mental nature where an essential image is revealed; an image that recovers the concept of indiscernibility enunciated by Gilles Deleuze about the time-image of the modern cinema. An aesthetics of a rewriting of reality which is also produced in the epistolary material, where a Robert Desnos’s real letter, written from a concentration camp before his death, becomes an epistolary palimpsest created by Costa in order to testify the necessity of memory of excluded people. A letter never written and repeatedly recited inside a timelessness that allows the dialogue of the sender with his past identity. Thus, the letter suffers from the same abstraction process of the filmmaker’s aesthetics proposal with the aim of finding the epistolary essential image pursued by Costa, the image of a shared act of politic and artistic resistance, thanks to the presence of this unique denied letter.