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Pictures of Ghosts and the Images That Outlive Us All
The beguiling new film from Bacurau’s Kleber Mendonça Filho is a meditation on place, film, and time passing.
Filho dredges up an old photo he took in the living room that has a mysterious blurred figure he describes as a ghost, but the specters that haunt his film are less literal — all that history that remains in spaces, even after that have been abandoned, revamped, resold, or demolished and rebuilt. The temptation to get maudlin about the moviegoing past has been irresistible for filmmakers, but while there’s a certain amount of nostalgia to the way that Pictures of Ghosts regards the grand movie palaces of another era, the film’s prevailing sentiment is one of rueful bemusement at the way things change, and the way a building that was once one of the gravitational centers of your life can be awkwardly repurposed as a mini-mall. But Filho also doesn’t elide the fact that the Art Palácio, which now has a flower stand crouched under its crumbling edifice, was originally built to be a cinema for the German distributor UFA as a venue for Nazi propaganda (“Pretty good story,” he notes, wryly).
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