With Pictures of Ghosts, Kleber Mendonça Filho has boldly positioned himself alongside great directors–Agnès Varda leaps most directly to mind–who have cannibalized their own work in the service of making a sort of film memoir. But Filho’s filmography, impressive as it is, only makes up a small part of the story here. As fun as it is for cinephiles like us to be walked through the editorial decisions Filho has made (and is even making as we watch), this is a bigger project, a melancholy meditation on impermanence.
For the more personal parts of Filho’s explorations, we are taken to the Brazilian city of Recife both as it exists now and as it existed in the director’s youth. No small part of the movie’s bemused sadness comes from the difference between those two things. It shouldn’t be a surprise to return to old haunts and find them changed or, more often, removed but it’s still a loss to be mourned.
One gets the impression Filho could not have turned out anything but a filmmaker, given the endless amounts of footage he has shot over the course of his life, whether he was officially in production on a feature or not. The wealth of imagery is a treat, especially of locations we may know from movies like Aquarius seen minus production design, as they really are. As these lovely images are paired with Filho’s restrained, comforting narration, Pictures of Ghosts is often a supremely pleasant viewing and listening experience.
Filho wastes little time making the connection between his own life and the movies. One of the first images we see is coyly described as being of “Janet Leigh and her daughters” strolling around Recife, leaving it up to us to realize the youngest of the girls is Jamie Lee Curtis. That little wink is a way of letting us know we’re watching a documentary made for cinephiles by a cinephile.
But Janet Leigh is dead now. So is Tony Curtis, her husband and Jamie Lee’s father, who also appears in archival footage. All of movie history, like all of everything, exists in the past. And, as much as we want to capture its image on celluloid or put down its description in words, time eats everything and will eventually consume those things too. Where will we preserve the truth and honesty that is Psycho if the cinemas themselves keep disappearing? In Recife, just like in my neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, old movie houses have been sloppily converted into evangelical churches. Maybe there’s a poetry in that but I know which of the two uses makes me feel closer to communing with the eternal.
