Pictures of Ghosts – first-look review | Little White Lies

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Pic­tures of Ghosts – first-look review

20 May 2023

Words by David Jenkins

Group of people dressed in elaborate costumes, possibly for a parade or celebration, posing on a city street with buildings in the background.
Group of people dressed in elaborate costumes, possibly for a parade or celebration, posing on a city street with buildings in the background.
Brazil’s Kle­ber Men­donça Fil­ho returns with this extreme­ly charm­ing per­son­al sur­vey of the grand pic­ture palaces of Recife.

As Bal­ti­more is to John Waters, or Rome is to Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, or Ore­gon is to Kel­ly Reichardt, that’s what the sun­ny Brazil­ian state of Recife is to film­mak­er Kle­ber Men­donça Fil­ho, as proven in this com­plete­ly charm­ing cine-jaunt though the community’s cin­e­mas and the director’s own fam­i­ly home. It’s a place he describes as smelling like fruit and piss, and it was one of the main char­ac­ters” in films such as 2008’s Neigh­bour­ing Sounds and 2016’s Aquarius.

The title alludes to a pho­to­graph that Men­donça Fil­ho one took inside his liv­ing room which con­tained a blurred fig­ure who most cer­tain­ly wasn’t stand­ing in front of the cam­era when he clicked the shut­ter. Yet it also refers to the idea of ghost­ly struc­tures, of places that once were teem­ing hubs of activ­i­ty and excite­ment, and are now lit­tle more than over-sized tomb­stones lit­tered on the land­scape – a feast for the encroach­ing ter­mite armies or, even worse, com­mer­cial developers.

In com­par­ing and con­trast­ing con­tem­po­rary streets and build­ings with var­i­ous depic­tions in pho­tographs and on film, Pic­tures of Ghosts offers a per­son­al­ly-skewed doc­u­ment of vibrant social his­to­ry, one which attempts to deal with a fluc­tu­at­ing urban topog­ra­phy through the lens of time. 

The first of three chap­ters deals with the fam­i­ly apart­ment the film­mak­er lived in for close-to 40 years, a small but char­ac­ter­ful abode which under­went a num­ber of facelifts in order to roll with the ever-chang­ing envi­ron­ment. It act­ed as both liv­ing space and film set, a place where he and his friends would make movies armed with only a cam­corder, bound­less imag­i­na­tion and, appar­ent­ly, plen­ti­ful access to gun­shot squibs.

The sec­ond chap­ter offers a tour of local pic­ture palaces, the major­i­ty of which remain as crum­bling ruins or have been recy­cled as grim-look­ing appli­ance stores or mega church­es. We meet Alexan­dre, pro­jec­tion­ist at the long-since-shut­tered Tri­anon cin­e­ma, and star of one of Men­donça Filho’s for­ma­tive doc­u­men­taries. He talks of his dis­taste for The God­fa­ther, and is unwor­ried by the fact that his first boss was most like­ly a Nazi, as the cin­e­ma was ini­tial­ly planned and designed as one of Joseph Goebbels’ UFA pro­pa­gan­da outposts.

It’s worth not­ing that this film has none of the pal­pa­ble anger of his pre­vi­ous one, 2019’s Bacu­rau, and the dis­mal cul­tur­al waste­land of the Bol­sonaro years are only evoked very sub­tly, if at all. Men­donça Fil­ho feels jus­ti­fied in his melan­choly for these spaces that still mean so much to him, and that did much to shape him as a per­son, and as a film­mak­er. In fact, despite its cri­tique of urban des­ic­ca­tion and shifts away from the col­lec­tive joys of the cin­e­ma, the over­rid­ing sense the film deliv­ers is affir­ma­tive and hope­ful, or at least a grate­ful­ness that these amaz­ing venues even exist­ed in the first place.

The film’s final chap­ter is a lit­tle more oblique, look­ing at the places that some of these fall­en cin­e­mas have become, while also includ­ing a delight­ful staged vignette inside an Uber that fur­ther engages with the film’s title. Yet this final reel helps to cal­ci­fy the film’s over­ar­ch­ing plea for col­lec­tive remem­brance, but also a plea for artists to val­ue and engage with what their home­towns have to give them, and to use these places as inspi­ra­tion for mak­ing great art. Which is exact­ly what Men­donça Fil­ho has done here.

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