Dispatch from the NY Film Festival: Of Documentaries and the Civic Need for Movie Theaters

At this year’s New York Film Festival, the marquee documentary event was the American premiere of 93-year-old Frederick Wiseman’s latest opus, Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros. La Maison Troisgro, a three-star Michelin restaurant in central France, is at the center of the film, which radiates outward to explore the supply chain of farms that provide much of the place’s food and the lives of the staff. Mouth watering, perhaps, but also, at four hours, eye watering. Anyone complaining about the three-and-half-hour runtime of Killers of the Flower Moon should be immediately dropped into a screening of Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros to be set straight. Not to say Wiseman’s film isn’t worth it; he’s the American master of observational non-fiction cinema and can do what he wants. It’s just that asking audiences to spend 240 intermission-free minutes in a theater watching a documentary about an exclusive French restaurant is a bit, how you say? Decadent.

And, anyway, there were more compelling doc options on offer at the festival: Orlando, My Political Biography (103 minutes), about the intersection of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and trans lives; Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (103 minutes), a portrait of the poet as she reaches 80; The Night Visitors (72 minutes), focused on moths; Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (102 minutes), a final one-man performance from Japanese composer and pianist Sakamoto. (Director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) also had Occupied City, his 262-minute “mammoth confrontation” with Amsterdam during World War II, at the festival, which feels more deserving of that kind of epic length and scope.)

Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts, though, was a standout. A 93-minute interrogation of the civic role of public spaces centered on the faded (and lost) movie palaces of Mendonça’s hometown of Recife, the film is less nostalgia and more elegiac provocation. And it arrives at the right moment, when theaters in all forms are threatened by shifting industry priorities, changing audience habits, and a general cultural indifference.

Broken into three sections that generally track the rise, slide, and current state of Recife through architecture, demographics, and moviegoing, Pictures of Ghosts is an urban biography and a deeply personal memoir. The center of the film,

by Dante A. Ciampaglia

literally and metaphorically, are Recife’s great movie palaces: Veneza, Art Palácio, Trianon, Moderno, São Luiz. Mendonça clearly loves them all. In fact, he draws on copious amounts of camcorder footage he shot, particularly inside the Art Palácio while documenting its demise for two student films he made in the early 1990s. He also has deep affection for the people who work there, with a special place reserved for longtime projectionist Alexandre Moura. In the footage and narration, he’s treated like the lord of the manor — probably because he is — even as Mendonça never backs away from the reality that Mr. Alexandre is, in the end, an employee. When the projectionist says, on the eve of the final screening at the Art Palácio, “I’ll lock up the cinema with a key of tears,” he’s voicing the sentiment of someone whose choices, vocation, and fulfillment are, in the end, controlled by some other, nebulous entity: a boss, a population, capitalism. (He also speaks for all of us who weep when a beloved place closes forever.)

Mendonça’s fondness for these spaces is boundless. He luxuriates on auditoriums, projection booths, interior design, box offices, marquees, poster displays — usually in archival footage, since so much of it is gone — then on what has replaced them: shopping malls, blank and painted walls, churches, sometimes nothing at all. Only one palace, São Luiz, is still operating as a theater. It is a public cinema managed by the state, and remains a community hub, not just for cinephiles but the city as a whole. “I don’t know of anywhere in Recife as unanimous,” Mendonça says in the film. “A cinema like this helps build character.”

The others, the ghosts of the title, exist in the rutted groove of memory. The structure, the body, might still be there, but the guts have been torn out, the heart extracted. And what does that mean for the place itself? Nothing good, Mendonça argues. We get glimpses of Recife in the decades between the 1930s and ‘70s, when it was a beacon for Hollywood business interests and stars alike. The city was roaring, elegant, important. Then the industry began pulling back, theaters started sputtering then closing, and Recife lost its luster and, eventually, its people. While it’s possible these theaters’ fates were sealed in the 1980s and ‘90s — by changing viewing habits and the forces of benign neglect that went to work on cities all over the Americas — it’s clearly not the sole doing of the invisible hand of the markets. There was a very real hand — many of them — not-so-gently pushing residents toward the suburbs and audiences to shopping mall-bound multiplexes (a moviegoing experience Mendonça has little love for). People are the lifeblood of a city. Disinvest in the urban needs of a population and direct that money elsewhere, the people will follow, leaving the city blanched and half dead, like being visited once too often by a vampire. The infrastructure frays, crumbles, teeters. Storefronts and restaurants and cultural institutions shutter, waiting for their turn in the revolving door of real estate speculation and quick-buck absentee landlordism. The people who sustain a city are abstracted, commodified, disdained, which repels more than it attracts. It’s the urban doom loop we’re all so familiar with, and there are shots of post-palace Recife that look strikingly familiar. As do the moments of contemporary Recife, a cityscape dominated by all-night pharmacies beckoning with their neon signs and blindingly antiseptic interiors.

But there’s another ghost haunting the film: Mendonça’s past. The first part, running nearly 45 minutes, is focused solely on the house he grew up in, his mother and her purchase of the home, and how he used it as a set for films as a kid and as an adult, ultimately turning the place into a throbbing hub of creativity and cinema activity. There are mentions of moviegoing, but they’re always background details to a larger anecdote or specific memory. It’s all interesting insight into one of Brazil’s most important working filmmakers (his 2019 Bacurau won the Jury Prize at Cannes and was an international hit), but it at first feels tangential to what got us into the theater to watch this documentary in the first place. But at some point it clicks that his home is also a kind of movie palace and focal point of film culture. Mendonça, his friends, his family, his neighbors — everyone’s participating in cinema, be it making it, discussing it, or watching it. And it’s always communal. (Yes, he must have watched movies on his own, but that’s not really important. We’ve all been to movie theaters where we’re the only ones in attendance. That doesn’t change the meaning of the place.)

The section closes with the house empty, as Mendonça and his family move out. And seeing this once vibrant space as an empty, hollowed out collection of rooms, it’s impossible not to feel moved. What will become of it? Will the new owners treat it as lovingly and fully as the previous ones? What history will stick to the walls, the ceilings, the floors, the air? They’re the same questions — with the same sad assumptions — that we consider when a movie palace closes, or when we walk into a stuffed-to-theceiling discount retailer and see a leftover detail and realize that it used to be something else, something vibrant and alive and communal. And in that way Mendonça mines his memory to prepare us for the journey of the rest of the film. Pictures of Ghosts isn’t an in-your-face, echo-chamber statement the way so many other politically-minded documentaries are today. Mendonça doesn’t hide his allegiances or point of view — spoiler alert: he’s pro-city and critical of the capitalist imperative that destroys them — but his film is confident in its beliefs, and therefore can be comparatively more subtle in its voice. And razor sharp in its incisiveness.

It’s impossible to leave this film not wanting to book the first flight to Recife to catch a film at the São Luiz. But it’s also impossible not to see your city with fresh eyes. We’re used to being harangued by politicians that office towers and billionaire-vanity-project districts like Hudson Yards are the thermometer by which we gauge a city’s health. If they fail, it all fails. Mendonça, though, poses a different argument. If the centers of culture — like movie palaces — disappear, then people disappear. And if people disappear, cities disappear. Those office towers and new-build commercial centers are transactional, anti-people, allergic to permanence. Theaters, sites of continuity and shared experience across generations, root themselves into people and communities and allow both to thrive.

Is this a lot to make of and put on a movie theater? Probably. But if you’re given the choice of walking into an office building or a movie palace — or, yes, sorry Kleber, a multiplex — which would you choose? For all this talk of Return to Office being the salvation our civics and culture requires, watching Pictures of Ghosts is confirmation that we should instead be talking about a different return — to theaters.

I had intended to use this space to also discuss Wim Wender’s brilliant new film Perfect Days, which also screened at NYFF, but I got a little carried away. It’ll be in these pages soon.