![]() It was from this fear that a film which would become the new template for post-apocalyptic fiction was born: Mad Max 2. ![]() The oil crises of 19 made people aware of how fragile some aspects of their society were. As cold war fear began to fade in the 1980s, new worries took its place. The dawning of the nuclear age at the end of World War 2 led to a resurgence of the genre, lent an air of spice by the fact that society could be ended by World War 3. Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man about the struggles of a world devastated by plague, while HG Wells has his protagonist in The Time Machine travel to a future where our civilisation is no more. A thousand years later writers looked at the fall of the Roman empire and considered that their world, too, must fall. It has its roots in the “Dark Ages” of European history, after the Western Roman Empire had fallen and left its former subjects wandering around the ruins of buildings they could not recreate. While he’s alive, however, he will seek solace in the screens available to him.The post-apocalyptic genre is older than you might think. ![]() The director laughs it off: His film isn’t sentimentally naive about the future of filmgoing, wryly recognizing that his treasured notion of communal cinephilia will eventually go the way of the ghosts. In a drily whimsical closing sketch, Mendonça Filho converses with a taxi driver who’s delighted to learn he has an artist in his cab, immediately asking the filmmaker if he’s ever made a telenovela. Noting that cinemas “can be places of kindness,” Mendonça Filho takes limited comfort in this change it plainly delights him more that the São Luiz - originally built on the site of a church, with telling Catholic imagery in its architectural detailing - continues to reverse that pattern. In the film’s third part, “Churches and Holy Ghosts,” he probes the alternative future for these halls, visiting those that have been repurposed into Evangelical churches, reflective of shifting religious trends in modern-day Brazil. One such palace, the riverside-set Cinema São Luiz, endures as an independent arthouse and repertory cinema others the filmmaker visits as mere shells, abandoned and unoccupied. Archival photos and newsreels recall a golden era of Recife glamor, when stars like Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis could be lured there for a premiere, while Mendonça Filho’s own scrapbook of materials captures his cinematic education in a gradually waning age of interest and expertise, as the then-aspiring filmmaker formed friendships with veteran projectionists who would not be succeeded. In part two, “Cinemas of Downtown Recife,” he ventures out to explore the theaters that once fed his obsession but have mostly shuttered, thwarted by diminished footfall in the run-down CBD, and competition from suburban multiplexes with advanced aircon. Mixing vintage home video with his own filming, he suggests how shifting interior decor reflects interior life (his intensifying cinephilia marked by posters on the walls, encroaching on space once dictated by his mother, a historian), and peers over walls to check in on neighboring homes that have atrophied or moved on. The director’s acolytes may recognize as it as a location in more than one of his previous films - he’d occasionally lie about the degree of production design in his work, he quips - and Mendonça Filho’s present-day inhabitation of the space echoes those films’ social fixations. The first, “The Setubal Apartment,” explores the roomy modernist apartment in which the filmmaker grew up, a stone’s throw from the beach in an ever-gentrifying neighborhood. Loosely conversational in tone, the film is divided into three chapters that nonetheless bleed into each other thematically. Indie distributors sympathetic to Mendonça Filho’s nostalgia for old-school theatrical exhibition should pay attention. The director’s own droll first-person perspective, meanwhile, is an asset to a film that should rack up festival appointments following its out-of-competition Cannes premiere. ![]() ![]() Though it crosses into nonfiction, “Pictures of Ghosts” feels thoroughly of a piece with those films: When it doesn’t explicitly reference and sample them, it shares their air of cockeyed melancholy and nosy human interest. You can see why Mendonça Filho might have felt he didn’t need to restate his feelings for Brazil’s fourth-largest city: His first two features, 2013’s “Neighboring Sounds” and 2016’s “Aquarius,” also functioned as complex valentines to Recife, a place somehow in a simultaneous, symbiotic state of progress and decay, both overrun by noisily echoing urban activity and haunted by absence where one way of life has made way for another. ![]()
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