“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…