“All the cinemas went extinct,” observes a street vendor who used to sell movie posters and lobby cards behind the film distribution centre in downtown Recife, Brazil, before the bottom dropped out of the market. The kicker: this interview was recorded 30 years ago.
In 1895, Louis Lumière supposedly concluded that the cinema was “an invention without a future.” We’ve been reading the obituaries ever since, and with increasing urgency since the medium celebrated its centenary and went binary on us. Yet the movies keep on coming: good, bad, and indifferent. Here’s one of the good ones: Pictures of Ghosts, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s lovely, relaxed, and personal riff on movies, memory, and the imaginative space conferred by that place we call Cinema. And the rub: while the movies ain’t dead yet, “cinema,” in the sense of theatrical exhibition, feels like it’s on life support right now.
Kleber is in now his mid-fifties, and most of the cinemas he visited as a youth in downtown Recife aren’t cinemas anymore. These are some of the ghosts he’s talking about—the Art Palacio, the Trianon, the Veneza—along with folks like Mr. Alexandre, a projectionist at the Palacio for 30 years or more, until it shuttered in the early ’90s. Mr. Alexandre projected nothing but (1972) for four months straight; it got so he couldn’t bear the music anymore, even swapping his last shift with a colleague at the Trianon just so he wouldn’t have to hear Nino Rota’s theme again. He was old enough to remember the first manager, a German, who used to avail himself of the trap door connecting his office to the balcony if things were getting hot
