José Manuel Costa

José Manuel Correia Costa (1953) is a Portuguese film archivist, scholar, and educator. After graduating in electrical engineering, he dedicated his career to the Cinemateca Portuguesa, where he created and directed the National Archive of Moving Images (ANIM) and led the ongoing digital preservation of Portuguese cinema. He retired as director of the Cinemateca in 2024. Costa has held key roles in European film heritage organizations, including presidency of the LUMIÈRE Project and the Association of European Film Archives (ACE), and served on the FIAF executive committee. He taught cinema history and documentary studies for over 30 years at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He has published extensively on film history, museology, and documentary cinema, and authored monographs on filmmakers like Griffith, Flaherty, Ivens, and Wiseman.

Jaime
José Manuel Costa, 1985
ARTICLE
26.03.2025
EN

The directorial debut of António Reis was something of a bolt from the blue. While it was certainly not the first instance of a great first work in Portuguese cinema – a cinema whose most interesting directors have, ultimately, been those who showed themselves as such in their earliest works – Jaime was nonetheless an arresting spectacle, due to its own beauty as a work as well as the striking impression that it conveyed. Reis’s first work impressed itself upon our cinematic landscape as a unique showing of raw materiality and instinctive force. It turned heads for its extreme modernity as well as its extreme originality; it instigated an unheard-of formal permissiveness and an approach to expression that was at once ascetic and rigorously precise.

Related