On screens this Wednesday, November 1, “Ghost Portraits” by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, stories of love and disappearances. A tribute to his mother, to his city of Recife and to cinema, which is also memory.
4 mins
In this new autobiographical film, in three parts as The sounds of Recifein which he multiplies the comings and goings, the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho pays tribute to his dearly departed. “ I remembered that when you love, you have to say it », recalls the voice of Mendonça Filho, at the beginning of the film.
In this visual and sound ballad, he says again and again his love for this city and its ghosts. We discover him as a teenager at the beginning of the film, then as a young man in the cinemas of Recife which he frequented several times a week. A walk that takes us to our time when towers have replaced the mangroves and cinemas have become evangelical churches on avenues lined with shops with aggressively lit storefronts. A world where smartphone applications no longer allow you to wander through the streets.
The director also summons his family: we see two young children playing in the family apartment who echo the own games of Kleber and his brother Mucio; he invokes his mother Joselice, a historian, and this labyrinthine apartment in Setúbal which served as the setting for so many of his films – more than a dozen –; he revisits the cinemas where he studied, walks the streets of the Recife of his youth with its city center, its small houses with gardens, deserted by the inhabitants on the pretext that there is no air conditioning in its buildings…
Photos of family, places, archives in black and white or color, animated images, extracts from films – his own and others like those of Claudio Assis (another Recifian) – he pulls out all the stops to tell us what was and what remains. A visual ballad, with pretty editing effects, but also sound, guided as we are by the director’s voiceover which takes us by the ear and by film sound extracts. He thus pays, in a way, a tribute to the work of his mother, a specialist in oral history: the story, the testimony gives information on what History with a capital H leaves aside, explains Joselice. A patient patchwork work to tell the story of a city, in its interstices, between its multiplying bars and gates. “ If I make cinema, it’s to make visible what we no longer see”, declared the director a few years ago in an interview.
And that’s the magic of cinema. The ghosts of Mendonça Filho are like this driver who likes to disappear. When Rubens Santos – who we have already seen in several of Mendonça Filho’s films – plays us again The invisible Man at the wheel of his taxi. When Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis were walking hand in hand on the bridge over the Capibaribe River. When Joselice reappears thanks to a filmed sequence; like the neighbors’ dog, Nico, dead for years, whose barking continues to mark some soundtracks. And the handsome character of Monsieur Alexandre (Moura), the projectionist at the Art Palacio cinema who “ closed his cinema with a key of tears », died in 2003 or that of the docker who sold posters, photos and films behind the Trianon cinema thrown in the trash by the distributors. And isn’t it the Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel who we see in the large São Luiz cinema?
Cinema is also a temporal marker, recalls Mendonça Filho with its posters, its decorated canopies, the madness King Kong which invaded the cinemas of Recife in 1977, the films censored by the Brazilian military dictatorship which had considered that the film Hate by Milos Forman was suspect and had banned it for under 18s. Cinema can also serve an ideology. Thus, while working on the history of the Art Palacio, one of his favorite rooms, the director discovered that it was founded in 1940 by the German studio UFA to infuse Nazi ideology into Brazil. Two strategic cities had been retained, Recife and São Paulo… taking advantage of the fascist sympathies of the government of Getulio Vargas.
Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers a moving personal geography of Recife like this plan on sheet of paper on which are drawn “ his favorite ruins », where cinemas are represented by round and curious eyes.
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