‘Pictures of Ghosts’ Is a Beautiful Eulogy for a Sense of Home

Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho once photographed a ghost in his apartment’s living room, and his friends were so impressed that they suggested he take it to a “spiritist center” because they thought he was a medium. Years later, he now assumes that role, figuratively speaking, with Pictures of Ghosts, a haunting (and, to some extent, haunted) documentary about Recife, the hometown where he grew up and began his professional career, and whose long-gone theaters nurtured his movie passion. A wistful non-fiction memory piece that’s highly personal and yet deeply attuned to universal feelings about the forgotten and vanished past, it floats through time and space like a specter, seeking to locate and connect with other spirits—a process that’s filtered, always, through a cinematic lens.

Premiering in theaters Jan. 26 following celebrated showings at last year’s Cannes, Toronto, and New York film festivals, Pictures of Ghosts is a collage comprised of photographs, analog tapes, archival films, and clips from Filho’s own Aquarius and Neighboring Sounds, the latter of which is often featured in its early passages about the director’s apartment in Setubal, where he lived with his single mother Joselice, a historian who studied 19th-century Brazilian abolitionists. Joselice renovated the apartment twice, expanding it until it resembled a fully-fledged house (in part thanks to Filho’s budding-architect brother), and it became the birthplace of the auteur’s love of moviemaking. Filho intersperses glimpses of his earliest amateur works—frequently shot with the participation of his non-professional neighbors—with snapshots of the district from various eras, echoing what the filmmaker himself says in his guiding voiceover: “Over all these years, I learned how time changes places.”

While that may not be a revelatory notion, it’s one thing to hear it and another to see and feel it, and Pictures of Ghosts’ montage-y structure imparts a piercing sense of the various ways (death, abandonment, disrepair, reconstruction) that yesterday evaporates into thin air. As in every movie ever made, Filho’s images are of the departed, be they of his beloved mother (who passed away in 1955 at the age of 54), the barking dog Nico who lived next door, or his former younger self, who’s now turned into his gray-goateed current iteration. Scenes from Neighboring Sounds help underscore the means by which film filters reality into something otherworldly, as well as preserves that which is destined to disappear, whether it’s the termite-destroyed house that Nico called home or the open windows and passageways that soon became closed off by netting, bars and gates designed to keep out the area’s multiplying stray cats.

Real and cinematic life are intertwined in Pictures of Ghosts, and that extends to its longer second chapter concerning downtown Recife’s movie palaces. Editing his material as if guided by dreamy instinct, Filho moves freely between different eras while revisiting these cherished monuments of his youth. Between the ages of 13 and 25, Filho visited the city’s downtown several times each week to see the latest Brazilian and Hollywood productions in grand interiors on massive 70mm screens. The three most important sites (at least for the director) were the Art Palacio and Trianon on Sun Street, and the Sao Luiz—which faced the other two from across the river—on Dawn Street. Together, they were a holy trinity where dreams and desires were broadcast big and boldly before one’s eyes, although with money having abandoned Recife’s once-thriving downtown, they’re now hollowed out husks, skeletons, that have been transformed into mundane functional spaces.

Pictures of Ghosts isn’t a timeline but a winding journey through remembrances of things past, and it moves with entrancing gracefulness through a history that’s near and dear to Kleber Filho’s heart—as well as those millions of people who visited the Art Palacio, Trianon, and Sao Luiz during their heyday. From slow-motion images of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis strolling down the streets of Recife, to pictures of the military beneath a marquee promoting John Boorman’s 1967 classic Point Blank, to the gala opening of the chic Veneza Cinema (the night’s attraction: Universal’s Airport), to the Art Palacio’s projectionist Alexandre Moura (aka “Mr. Alexandre”) toiling away in a sweltering un-air-conditioned booth, the documentary is a swirl of recollections of bygone moments that have nonetheless been frozen, and thus kept alive, by the camera’s lens.

Filho blends the personal, the regional and the national in Pictures of Ghosts, which glides on a pensive wavelength that’s not just nostalgic but heartbroken for all that doesn’t remain. Everything is ephemeral and Filho crafts his latest as an idiosyncratic investigation into his own affection for the many institutions and areas that had such a formative impact on his future. That his fictional movies are innately tied to these things, and by definition contextualize and memorialize them at a very particular moment in time, is another central element of his documentary. His is a layered look back, touching upon the Nazis’ plans to turn Recife into an epicenter of Third Reich propaganda during WWII, and the once-prominent presence of almost every big American and international studio, whose offices would discard memorabilia in their back-alleys—thus allowing a local port-authority worker to collect and sell them on the city’s streets.

Uninterested in a straightforward chronological recitation of Recife’s evolution as a metropolitan cine-mecca, Filho flips through old newspapers to run his finger along ads for King Kong (which was all the rage upon the 1976 remake’s debut), gazes at footage of himself sweeping the lobby floor of the Art Palacio during the week it ceased operations in July 1992, and discusses how his favorite theaters have always been likened to churches—and sometimes replaced (or were replaced by) them. That’s a fitting notion given that Pictures of Ghosts is an act of communion between a filmmaker, a setting, an art form and a shared past that can never be reclaimed and yet lives on in eternity, flickering brightly in the dark—so close and vibrant one can almost reach out and touch it—at twenty-four frames per second.