Luchino Visconti and the fabric of cinema

precisely it is able to demonstrate the nature of these institutions, instead of simply gesturing towards an inchoate thing called ‘art cinema.’ My chief reservations about the book, however, concern the nature and function of its critical agnosticism. Jorge seems concerned mostly to use Costa as a kind of unusual case study, rarely intervening forcefully in any critical debates. Although he declares his intention to ‘give attention . . . to how possible political expression in Costa’s authorial practice is negotiated via critical discourses’ (130), after surveying the very disparate critical evaluations of Horse Money, he simply concludes that ‘[t]he debates emerging around the critical reception of Horse Money are still divided and to some extent inconclusive’ (146). At times I found myself caught between two stools, unsure whether I was frustrated by the scarcity of sustained critical and evaluative work in the book, or whether I would have preferred Jorge to have explicitly thematised his neutrality. Although it goes against my usual instincts, I did find myself wondering whether a rigorous refusal to engage in aesthetic evaluation might have been even more intellectually productive. Different readers will feel differently, but anybody interested either in Costa’s work or in the contexts within which it exists will find in the breadth and depth of the material presented in The Films of Pedro Costa an invaluable resource.