A good personal essay, so thoroughly embedded in the author’s experiences, tends to require some broad exterior perspective or context to give readers a stronger reason to care. Pictures of Ghosts, director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s new documentary, starts with personal experiences: His upbringing in Recife, the capital of the Brazilian state Pernambuco, his memories of his mother, and of what the city was versus what it has become throughout his 55 years. You’re forgiven for assuming Filho is his own subject. He is, after all, the inception of the film, and without him, there’s no story to tell.
But without Recife’s cycle of development and decline, and a culture once-upon-a-time friendly to arthouse cinemas, there would be no Filho, either. Through his wryly narrated anecdotes, he becomes a conduit for a larger story. Pictures of Ghosts is about him, and in so being, it’s also about the process by which cities are unintentionally brought to disrepair through modernization. And between these two axes, it’s also about Brazil’s growing pains from the 1960s to the 2020s. Filho is self-reflective, not self-obsessed, and his clear-eyed stance is crucial to the anti-vanity he brings to his examination of his childhood home and youthful obsession.
Pictures of Ghosts is told in three chapters, with the first, “The Setubal Apartment,” serving as a prologue to the other two. As far as it seems to concern Filho, the apartment he grew up in may as well be ground zero for the slow-rolling gentrification inexorably swallowing up the city beyond its doors; the stylish, spacious flat feels representative of the social forces driving the mass-remodeling of Recife’s deteriorating neighborhoods. Whether Filho considers his former home in these terms is less clear, but his thesis hinges on the idea that one must necessarily focus on where art comes from in order to appreciate where, and how, art is exhibited. Extrapolating a degree of responsibility from the relationship Filho draws between his home and Recife feels reasonable.
He provides no further elaboration, instead staying at the movie’s edges, guiding the narrative along. It’s revealing to learn that Filho got his start making movies in an apartment that practically constitutes a micro-kingdom, secluded away from the rest of the world; it tells us that his cinema is rooted in primal, formative moments of his life, and that despite the semi-sequestration, he remains to this day committed to film’s collaborative characteristic. Filho’s neighbors partook in his projects as extras, a practice he’s kept all the way through Bacurau, the weird Western he co-directed with Juliano Dornelles in 2019.
“It’s when you bring together the mundane and cinema’s look,” Filho says in voiceover. “Then it feels like a movie.” Articles of the everyday are, to him, essential for creating cinema, which incidentally affords Filho even more leeway for weaving his background into the tale of Recife’s downturn by way of overdevelopment. Another filmmaker could have made Pictures of Ghosts as an impersonal investigation, rather than as a lifelong observation, but Filho’s familiarity with, and attachment to, Recife lets him measure the vast differences between the ’60s and the present with better clarity. He was there. He’s always been there. He has outlived several of Recife’s moviehouses, like Art Palácio, whose projectionist, Mr. Alexandre, appears in Filho’s own handheld archival footage.
He’s outlived Mr. Alexandre, too, a symbol of the human cost incurred in the closure of such “places of kindness,” as Filho fondly refers to movie theaters. These are communal spaces for people to gather under one roof and, for a couple hours at a whack, participate in a mind meld, where everyone is singularly focused on the same thing, exposed to the same emotions, and asked the same questions by whatever movie they’ve paid to see play on screen. To lose our cinemas, our most democratic culture hubs, is to lose opportunities for experiencing these rare instances of social synchronicity. It signals a shift in civil priorities, for one thing, replacing one house of worship with another; Filho explains that many of Recife’s defunct theaters have been reappropriated as churches, where the service isn’t anywhere near as fun as sitting through The Godfather.
Watching Filho’s account of this gradual doom might inspire thoughts about streaming, though the concept remains far from Pictures of Ghosts itself. Filho isn’t a time traveler, and the folks running the digital platforms that have influenced how movies get made and seen for the last decade aren’t, either. But Recife’s history is bound in these moviehouses, and turning away from them has consequences. Spackling over Art Palacio, for example, means erasing memory of how the Nazi regime designated the spot as a Universum-Film AG outlet, intended as an extension of their propaganda cinema machine nestled within Brazil’s sympathetic bosom. Nevermind Recife’s glitzy glory days, graced by visits from Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis; the city’s relationship with the Third Reich can’t be allowed to fade from the public record.
In a way this makes Pictures of Ghosts Filho’s show after all; he’s performing the duties of a preservationist, using a combination of archival footage, family home video footage, and his own filmmaking (including clips from his first feature, Neighboring Sounds) to sculpt the full image of Recife, from half a century ago to today, warts and all. Filho doesn’t seem interested in remaking Recife to match his own image he lives there, and that’s about it. Filho is affected by Recife’s changes. He isn’t the one affecting them. Instead, he’s ensuring they won’t be forgotten.
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Writer: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Release Date: January 26, 2024
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.