Pictures of Ghosts

In “Pictures of Ghosts,” Kleber Mendonça Filho does for the Brazilian city of Recife what Terence Davies did for Liverpool in “Of Time and the City.” Like Davies’ film, “Pictures” is a hometown portrait in documentary essay form, threaded with memories from its director’s youth and suffused with the melancholy in how places change. Taking the demise of Recife’s once shining movie palaces as its particular point of focus, the film is also a moving rumination on movie-going, impermanence, and the preservational capacities of the cinematic image.

Richly assembled and stirringly personal, “Pictures” is culled from a wide swath of source material, including everything from silent era reels and vintage stills, to Mendonça Filho’s own home videos, clips from his filmography, and freshly captured footage of Recife. Across three chapters, we see the apartment and neighborhood where Mendonça Filho grew up, then the downtown movie theaters where his cinephilia took hold (the longest segment), and finally the churches that those same theaters have become. “I love Recife” Mendonça Filho says in voiceover, just before confessing that he nearly cut that line out, assuming that much was obvious. Indeed, his tenderness towards the city comes through in spades, but he also manages to ward off the sentimentality that plagues so many other “love letters to cinema.”

With dexterous editing, the movie is most affecting at its seams. Sharp cuts reveal the stark contrast between a movie theater in its 20^th century heyday, when millions passed through its doors, and today, as the building has fallen into ruin. Through evocative angles, Mendonça Filho shoots the venues as if they were ancient temples. Elsewhere, a slow crossfade reveals the architectural transformation of the house where a friend once lived. The passage of time is keenly felt, but “Pictures” is not without playfulness and humor. In one cheeky scene, Mendonça Filho studies a photograph of someone whose face has been mysteriously warped into a ghostly smudge, and what sounds like the score from a ‘40s thriller plays on the soundtrack. 

Recife figures heavily in two of Mendonça Filho’s fiction films, the social realist dramas “Neighboring Sounds” from 2012 and “Aquarius” from 2016 (the former is my favorite of his; he also made 2019’s “Bacurau”). “Pictures of Ghosts” is thus in direct conversation with those films, and to a significant degree, these films enrich each other. Early in “Pictures,” scenes from “Neighboring Sounds” are intermixed with Mendonça Filho’s family photos and home videos, underscoring the porousness between the director’s lived experience and the world of his films (the apartment of his childhood is shown to be where much of “Neighboring Sounds” was shot). Here and all throughout the documentary, what comes through beautifully is the longing of a filmmaker to immortalize the place he calls home.

Streaming on The Criterion Channel.