Pictures of Ghosts [2023]

 Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts – a confluence of diary, essay, sociocultural document and city symphony – is an idiosyncratic mosaic and personal meditation on how the director’s journey as a cinephile and evolution as a filmmaker are inextricably tied to Recife, the ever-changing Brazilian coastal city which is his home. He made intricate use of memories, reflections, interactions, footage from his own canon – low-fi home videos, clippings from shorts he made as a budding amateur, sequences from his compelling first two features Neighbouring Sounds and Aquarius (the former, in fact, was filmed extensively in his own apartment) – and other historical artefacts while composing this playful convergence of autobiographical montage and personalized observations. It’s broken into three episodes where each expands and shifts the scope vis-à-vis the preceding one. In the first section, “The Setúbal Apartment”, which is confined to his flat and served as a miniature memoir, he speaks of the influence of his mother, and transition of his hobby into vocation. The second chapter, “The Cinemas of Downtown Recife”, focussed on the beautiful old theatres that he’d frequented as a teenager and were hallowed joints for the city’s cinephiles, and in turn chronicled how Racife was once a target for Nazi propaganda in the 1940s, and later a throbbing place for filmmakers and film lovers, until – as he ruefully muses – “capital moved elsewhere”. The final segment, “Churches and Holy Ghosts”, is an alternately satiric and melancholic examination of the famous theatres’ transmogrification into malls, crumbling relics, and even churches. This exploration of the demise of old single-screen theatres, incidentally, reminded me of two films on similar themes, viz. Tsai’s haunting masterpiece Goodbye Dragon Inn and Kaushik Ganguly’s Cinemawalla.

Director: Kleber Mendonca Filho

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Diary Film

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil