Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? + 6 Bagatelles

In Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Oû gît votre sourire enfoui?) (2001), Pedro Costa captures Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet editing their drama Sicilia! (1999). Costa was given privileged access to document the uncompromising duo at work. In this revealing portrait, every cut and its effect are debated, and influences from Chaplin to Eisenstein are discussed alongside the ethical and aesthetic implications of various film techniques. Costa later described the film as his first comedy as well as his first love story.

 

In 6 Bagatelles (6 Bagatelas) (2001), Costa takes unused scenes of Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? and edits them into a new context.

 

‘Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? reinvents the idea and the practice of portraiture, or more generally of the homage. Through intelligence and attention, it avoids maudlin hagiography. Nobody has put in sharper relief, made more tangible the dedication to clarity, the conviction that the image is appearance and the conviction that the form is the material mediation of an idea, which are at the core of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. In short, nobody has ever given us a clearer view of the classicism they claimed for themselves, and nobody has made clearer the legitimacy of that claim. Nobody has put in sharper relief the politics of such an affirmation: the insistence on preservation (of nature and culture) as the essential component of revolution.’

 

– Jean-Pierre Gorin

 

Programme

 

Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Oû gît votre sourire enfoui?), Dir. Pedro Costa, Portugal/France, 2001, 104 min., French with English subtitles

 

6 Bagatelles (6 Bagatelas), Dir. Pedro Costa, 2001, Portugal/France, 18 min., French with English subtitles