There’s a memorable scene in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s magnificent Aquarius where an older woman at a staid birthday party looks at a piece of furniture and recalls when she had passionate sex on top of this innocuous console. She smiles – only she knows the carnal connection. The brief sequence makes us see that every space and object hold within them associations that can be individual or collective; they are ghostly presences in our lives, sometimes to embrace, at other times to recoil from. Their powerful hold on our memory is the key to his movingly elegiac docu-essay Pictures of Ghosts, a self-narrated journey through the director’s hometown of Recife, from the apartment he grew up in that’s played a major role in many of his films to the city’s cinema houses. Far more than a localized nostalgic meditation, Pictures of Ghosts poetically weds cinephilia to more expansive ruminations on urban shifts and social patterns, leading us to contemplate the ghosts that populate all our spaces. It’s a shame Cannes allowed this gem to get lost in the amorphous, generally ignored “Special Screenings” section, though Mendonça Filho’s name should ensure interest from programmers and buyers.
Given how the film provides insight into the director’s oeuvre, one might imagine this as an extra on a Criterion set, but that would do it a great disservice because Pictures of Ghosts shouldn’t be reduced to being simply an accompaniment. Yes, it offers background, especially to Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, making concrete Mendonça Filho’s sensitivity to architecture and objects, and it also acts as a testament to his expansive cinephilia as well as his marvelous feel for music (who ever thought Herb Alpert could feel fresh again?), generously used here. But his scope is much broader, musing on bankrupt capitalism’s insipid levelling of urban spaces and the disturbing way the all-consuming conformity of evangelicalism has hijacked the spiritually richer (and far more humane) ritual of cinema-going, where the collective experience encourages individual communion between screen and soul.
The documentary is divided into three chapters, beginning with the family apartment in Recife’s Setúbal neighborhood, where the director moved with his newly separated mother Joselice when he was ten. Those familiar with his films will recognize rooms in the apartment and the street itself as well as views from the windows, all of which he shows through the years in private footage as well as scenes from his films, perceptively edited together. The gates on the ground floor, the bars on doors and windows, become Proustian for anyone who’s seen his movies while also reinforcing a more general self-perpetuating sense of fear exploited by a disturbing succession of right-wing governments and social engineers.
Part two, “Cinemas of Downtown Recife,” is a love-letter to the movie palaces that once occupied a major place in the city’s leisure activities but, like almost everywhere else, have been reduced to less than a handful. Through archival footage running the gamut from 35mm to super-8 and Betacam, guided by the director’s well-modulated narration, we’re offered a window into his relationship with the now neglected downtown areas via its former cinemas, exploring the affect of film culture and the emotional attachment that exists between what we’ve seen on particular screens and the spaces that house those magic blank canvases. Fortunately in his youth Mendonça Filho brought his cameras inside the streamlined Moderne architecture of the Art Palácio Cinema for the last few years of its existence, befriending the projectionist Alexandre Moura: “I’ll lock up the cinema with a key of tears” he says on its final day.
In lesser hands it all could have devolved into a sweet self-reflexive contemplation on movie-going pleasures, but of course Pictures of Ghosts is far more than that. Brazil’s fraught political history comes into play as Mendonça Filho reflects on the ways marquees accompanied, and sometimes unexpectedly commented on, life at the time. The decline of the Hollywood studios, all of whom had offices in Recife, paralleled downtown Recife’s decay as well as the flight of an international presence that was once there (b&w footage of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh on the streets of the city are so imbued with the sense of a lost world that it could inspire films of its own).
The final chapter, “Churches and Holy Ghosts,” amplifies an earlier discussion about shopping malls replacing cinemas and even schools: cookie-cutter mass consumerism supplanting art, creativity and communal activities. The Cinema São Luiz, the sole surviving movie palace downtown, opened in 1952 on the site of a destroyed Anglican church, ironic given that so many cinemas have recently been converted into evangelical megachurches. It’s neomedieval decorations, referencing St. Louis of France, look lovingly restored, and the diverse repertory programming encouragingly still attracts loyal audiences looking to capture – or recapture – that earlier experience, the one many of us up through Generation X were raised on and still informs our cinema knowledge.
Mendonça Filho adds a delightful coda that returns to the concept of ghosts: we don’t need to see them but they are there, as much inside us as in the rooms we inhabit and the objects we hold dear. In his poem “The Ghost of the Past” Thomas Hardy wrote “I did not mind the Bygone there… There was in that companionship / Something of ecstasy.” Ghosts are concretized yet non-corporeal companions; they crowd within us, lively or melancholy accretions fed by the spaces we once inhabited and partly composed of the DNA of cultural memories from before we were born. Cinema illuminates them, helping us to understand why they dance together to a refrain full of saudade, but also, sometimes, hope.
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Screenplay: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Producer: Emilie Lesclaux
Co-producers: Silvia Cruz, Felipe Lopes
Cinematography: Pedro Sotero
Editing: Matheus Farias
Sound: Kleber Mendonça Filho, Ricardo Cutz
Production companies: CinemaScópio Produções Artisticas (Brazil), Vitrine Filmes (Brazil)
World sales: Urban Sales
Venue: Cannes (Special Screenings)
In Portuguese
93 minutes
