Among the pantheon of directors whom Pedro Costa habitually invokes when speaking about cinema (Godard, Straub, Ford), the youngest I’ve heard him include, and certainly the only one to have emerged in the 21st century, is Wang Bing. It therefore felt appropriate that Cannes would program the premiere of their respective new films, both relatively short works, as a double bill, with Costa’s eight-minute Daughters of Fire followed by Wang’s 57-minute Man in Black. (The former film was also paired, in a second screening, with Godard’s posthumous Film annonce du film qui n’existera jamais: “Drôles de guerres”, suggesting that the festival was keen to please Costa.)
As formal experiments with music, the two films represent forays into territory thus far unexplored by either director. (In Costa’s own words, his 2009…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 95 - Summer 2023