Suffocation and Flickers: Ossos – Pedro Costa’s Poetics of Poverty and the Human Trial
When a baby’s cry echoes through Lisbon’s slums, the film captures not just despair – but the shattered remnants of lives beneath capitalism’s gears
In 1997, Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa’s Ossos (Bones) ripped open the wounds of European neorealism. Awarded Best Cinematography at Venice Film Festival, this 94-minute black-and-white descent into Lisbon’s Fontaínhas district follows a young father attempting to sell his newborn. With no manipulative score or heroic redemption, Costa’s camera dissects poverty like a surgical scalpel. Nearly three decades later, as global wealth gaps widen, this “devastatingly minimalist” film has transformed into a prophetic dagger aimed at modern civilization.
I. Narrative: An Existential Collapse Along an Infant-Trading Chain
The opening scene chokes viewers: young mother Tina turns on gas to kill herself and her baby. Her boyfriend snatches the infant and flees into Lisbon’s streets, beginning a three-act tragedy:
- The Failure of Transaction: His silent attempts to sell the baby to strangers collapse – revealing even human trafficking loses “market value” at society’s bottom.
- Broken Community: A babysitter rejects the infant over unpaid fees, exposing how poverty shreds solidarity.
- Ultimate Alienation: He leaves the child with a street prostitute, completing his transformation from father to human trafficker.
Tina’s knife-wielding search for her child becomes a feminist vengeance against patriarchal abandonment.
II. Visual Theology: Poverty’s Icons and the Violence of Light
Costa’s cinematography (by Emmanuel Machuel) forges revolutionary grammar for depicting deprivation:
1. Space as Silent Accomplice
- Narrow alleys crush characters like concrete coffins
- Low-angle shots compress humans beneath oppressive architecture
- The only “open space” is a trash-strewn wasteland – crows pecking scraps become slum-life allegory
2. Light as Class Tyrant
- High-contrast B&W film renders white light a torturer: bleaching walls, reducing people to trapped silhouettes
- Darkness as Sanctuary: The sole tenderness emerges in dim rooms – a prostitute nursing the baby by candlelight evokes Rembrandt’s Madonnas
This earned Machuel Venice’s Best Cinematography prize for “writing poverty’s metaphysics with light.”
III. Social Autopsy: Romanticized Poverty vs. Silenced Lives
Ossos eviscerates two dangerous myths:
1. The “Noble Poor” Delusion
Poverty breeds not solidarity but disintegration:
- A babysitter rejects an infant over coins
- Neighbors ignore Tina’s suicide attempt
- A prostitute accepts the baby thinking “it might attract clients”
Costa reveals: Extreme poverty first annihilates community bonds.
2. Welfare State’s Mask
Lisbon – capital of an EU nation – hosts lawless zones where:
- Jobless youth haunt streets like ghosts
- ER doctors dismiss slum patients
- Social services never appear
The film screams: Modern states designate slums “human waste disposal zones.”
IV. 2025 Resonance: Revisiting the “Bones” Universe
Thirty years later, the film’s infant-trading nightmare birthed digital-era mutations:
| Ossos’ Prophecy (1997) | 2025 Reality |
|---|---|
| Physical baby-trafficking | $230M+ dark-web infant trade |
| Slums as systemic sacrifice zones | 1B+ people in informal settlements |
| Medical neglect of the poor | 12-year life expectancy gap in the US |
Costa’s ethical radicalism cuts deepest: he denies characters tearful monologues and even withholds baby close-ups. This anti-sentimentality forces confrontation with structural evil – when society reduces humans to “bones,” tears become bourgeois self-indulgence.
Conclusion: Mining Fleeting Humanity in Despair’s Depths
The final shot: a prostitute cradles the baby on a rooftop. Modern Lisbon gleams in the distance; ruins sprawl below. This religious tableau asks: When civilization’s towers stand on foundations of poverty, can we redefine humanity in the abyss?
The camera pushes toward the infant’s swaddle—
a shaft of light spears through storm clouds,
illuminating frayed threads at the cloth’s edge,
