Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Year: 2023
Something I’ve heard a lot since The Secret Agent came out: “You should watch Pictures of Ghosts first”. Now-famously, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 2023 documentary was something of a sketchbook for his Recife-based political thriller.
I’ve found the opposite. I’ve been working my way through Mendonça Filho’s work since seeing Bacurau, and Pictures of Ghosts was the last big one outstanding. Watching it after seeing his other films is deeply satisfying. This film, part historical meander, part scrapbook, part homage to the great art of cinema, is bound up with so much of his work, and you have the sense of watching him make sense of it all on camera. It’s not a ‘making-of’ exposé, but a reflective window into the filmmaker’s mind. His city is an itch he can’t stop scratching, and Pictures of Ghosts pulls on the threads of what catches his eye, how long he holds onto details, memories and footage, and how he weaves it together into his very distinctive cinema. One has the sense of being on a very unusual open-top bus tour.
Pictures of Ghosts segues from his experiences watching his seaside neighbourhood in Boa Viagem change around him over the years, and starting to make films in an apartment and neighbourhood in flux, to a pensive exploration of the largely lost downtown Recife cinema scene (save for the legendary Cinema São Luiz). A deeply rooted filmmaker, Kleber’s work is firmly centred in Recife and the surrounding Pernambucan countryside, and his deep pride in his city and its part in cinema history is constant; it’s Janet Lee and Tony Curtis strolling across the Ponte Duarte Coelho, it’s the 60s and 70s’ greatest titles being installed in big red letters on cinema frontages.
Pictures of Ghosts is evocative, leisurely paced and deliciously curious, with a grainy visual elegance throughout that pulls us back in time, and it deserves the undivided attention that a velvet-draped picture palace commands. Safe to say it’ll be a regular repertory fixture for years to come. It takes its time to unfold, like someone thumbing through a box of yellowed old letters. KMF appears intermittently in his own film, but his quiet narration is strictly voiceover – when he pops up it’s usually to pad around silently, digging around in archives and photographed in his youth with unsung, behind-the-scenes stalwarts of the theatres.
In footage evidently recorded over many years, as well as gathered from archives, he traces the riverside screen temples that flanked the Rio Capibaribe, as well as the now lost film production scene dotted around the area. Grand old mid-century cinemas turned inside out into shopping malls and evangelical churches; buildings in ruins; evidence of production houses that modern-day superintendents insist were never there. History erased and recovered. I visited Recife in February; it’s an energetic, proud city whose centre has been neglected financially as the money moved down the coast, and phantoms, relics and haunted artefacts from its cinematic glory days lurk in its streets and in these frames.
Certainly the germ of The Secret Agent is all over Pictures of Ghosts. Late São Luiz projectionist Alexandre Moura – along with his cinema – is the beating heart of the film, and would later be immortalised as a pivotal fictionalised character. It’s tantalising to identify the ideas, motifs and shots that would find their way into the 2025 thriller; frevo, the umbrellas of Carnaval, the sweat of the projection room, a chair by a window with an evening view.
It’s also fascinating to see how much of KMF’s own world found its way directly into films like Neighbouring Sounds (filmed in his childhood home, itself turned over and refurbished like the neighbourhood around it) and Aquarius. Spot the shot from mischievous short satire Recife Frio, too. But he’s recently started hinting at his next project, set in 1930s Recife, and as he narrates the shady inter-war links between Nazi Germany and Recife’s then-ascendant film industry, it’s hard not to speculate that here too may lie the seeds of that next film.
That mention of Recife’s brief flirtation with Hitler’s regime casts a long shadow. Pictures of Ghosts was a fairly lonely effort, edited painstakingly together during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mendonça Filho and producer Emilie Lesclaux (his partner in life and in business) worked on it in lieu of the funding they needed for the next fiction feature, thwarted and isolated by the fascist Bolsonaro regime for being vocal about Brazil’s electoral turn to the far-right. As in all of KMF’s cinema, even when politics isn’t narratively front-and-centre, it’s always there, like a filter over the lens.
In a playful, supernatural flourish that fans will recognise from his other films, including indeed The Secret Agent, he injects a little magical realism at one point, in a conversation with an invisible taxi driver. Whether in the ruins of a movie theatre or the back of a cab, he’s a traveller through time, visiting what remains of a past long lost, and unearthing buried treasure and the spectres that linger behind Recife’s soot-stained façades like burned-in shadows. Watching this, we’re mindful of course that, as a filmmaker whose success has inspired regular location tours around Recife for tourists, Mendonça Filho is also in the business of helping to write its future.
