Pictures of Ghosts review – Brazilian auteur haunted by his hometown’s decline | Film

Home is clearly where the art is for Bacurau director Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose childhood apartment is the locus of the first part of this poetic but somewhat bemused memoir-essay about place, cinema and time. Twice renovated by his historian mother, the apartment was the site of his first early imaginative forays behind the camera, and appeared in his first two features, Neighbouring Sounds from 2012 and, four years later, Aquarius. Filho’s native city of Recife has also been subject to similar remodellings, as shown in the second and third parts here, through the decline of its cinema houses. As they fall into dereliction, it feels like a form of collective dementia, robbing its citizens of a shared cultural continuity.

In Neighbouring Sounds, Filho has an almost diagrammatic way of shooting his street and continues in the same vein here. Interweaving his family’s history with home-video excerpts and his later feature-film deployments, it’s as if he is trying to fix the essence of the place. Nico, the long-deceased dog next door, is resurrected thanks to clips from Filho’s debut, in which his incessant barking became part of the plot. Art can be an act of resurrection – or an exhumation: a bleary inexplicable phantom figure appears in a negative of the director’s living room, though it is not his mother who died aged 54 of cancer. The director’s sleepy voice sifts this flotsam of art and life. “It may seem like I’m talking about methodology, but I’m talking about love.”

Filho’s hauntological mission then spills out into downtown Recife, in search of more ghosts. Now-bare cinema marquees, glimpsed in old photos, are time-stamps for the city. He was educated in these places; we see him talking, in more archive footage, to “Mr Alexandre”, the projectionist at the Art Palacio cinema who talks about locking it up on its final night “with a key of tears”. As well as the director’s own past, these now-decrepit buildings are repositories of the country’s cultural history: the Art Palacio, for example, was once earmarked as an outlet for UFA, the Nazi propaganda cinema arm seeking to tighten its grip on the sympathetic Brazilian regime.

The film’s third part focuses on cinema as a site of worship: literally, in the case of several auditoriums later converted into evangelical churches. Filho is hardly the first to make the comparison and, with the relationship between cinema and religion in Brazil only cursorily sketched here, it is a pat concluding note. The old cinema faith isn’t likely to see a resurrection in Recife, with the city’s dynamism (and presumably the multiplexes) having migrated to other districts, and digital distribution now coordinated from São Paolo. Which leaves Filho and his film alone inside cinema’s decaying ships – to use another of his metaphors – with uncertain bearings in the fogbanks of memory.

Home is clearly where the art is for Bacurau director Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose childhood apartment is the locus of the first part of this poetic but somewhat bemused memoir-essay about place, cinema and time. Twice renovated by his historian mother, the apartment was the site of his first early imaginative forays behind the camera, and appeared in his first two features, Neighbouring Sounds from 2012 and, four years later, Aquarius. Filho’s native city of Recife has also been subject to similar remodellings, as shown in the second and third parts here, through the decline of its cinema houses. As they fall into dereliction, it feels like a form of collective dementia, robbing its citizens of a shared cultural continuity.

In Neighbouring Sounds, Filho has an almost diagrammatic way of shooting his street and continues in the same vein here. Interweaving his family’s history with home-video excerpts and his later feature-film deployments, it’s as if he is trying to fix the essence of the place. Nico, the long-deceased dog next door, is resurrected thanks to clips from Filho’s debut, in which his incessant barking became part of the plot. Art can be an act of resurrection – or an exhumation: a bleary inexplicable phantom figure appears in a negative of the director’s living room, though it is not his mother who died aged 54 of cancer. The director’s sleepy voice sifts this flotsam of art and life. “It may seem like I’m talking about methodology, but I’m talking about love.”

Filho’s hauntological mission then spills out into downtown Recife, in search of more ghosts. Now-bare cinema marquees, glimpsed in old photos, are time-stamps for the city. He was educated in these places; we see him talking, in more archive footage, to “Mr Alexandre”, the projectionist at the Art Palacio cinema who talks about locking it up on its final night “with a key of tears”. As well as the director’s own past, these now-decrepit buildings are repositories of the country’s cultural history: the Art Palacio, for example, was once earmarked as an outlet for UFA, the Nazi propaganda cinema arm seeking to tighten its grip on the sympathetic Brazilian regime.

The film’s third part focuses on cinema as a site of worship: literally, in the case of several auditoriums later converted into evangelical churches. Filho is hardly the first to make the comparison and, with the relationship between cinema and religion in Brazil only cursorily sketched here, it is a pat concluding note. The old cinema faith isn’t likely to see a resurrection in Recife, with the city’s dynamism (and presumably the multiplexes) having migrated to other districts, and digital distribution now coordinated from São Paolo. Which leaves Filho and his film alone inside cinema’s decaying ships – to use another of his metaphors – with uncertain bearings in the fogbanks of memory.