Brazilian critic turned filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho made a smart, thoughtful documentary about films and criticism (“Critico”) some years back, and made a film festival darling that was Brazil’s submission as Best International Feature in 2014, “Neighboring Sounds,” a drama shot mostly in and around the apartment he grew up in and lived-in for some forty years.

His latest is a return to documentaries, a rambling dream of his youth, the life of his city — Recife, Brazil — and the great cinema palaces there that he worked for, filmed and saw close as downtown Recife went into a steep decline that many cities have seen and not all have recovered from.

Recife, he notes in his arid, somewhat monotonous narration, smells of “the tide, fruit (from fruitstands) and piss.”

“Pictures of Ghosts” is built on archival footage of Recife — from grainy silent street scenes and early motorsport race footage to a visit in the late ’50s by film stars Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, with their two daughters (not indentified by the critic) Kelly Curtis and Jamie Lee Curtis.

There are clips from and return visits to Filho’s childhood flat as it was then and is now, allowing him to note how the neighborhood changed. And eventually he starts showing us clips of downtown life as it was, with several grand old movie palaces — mostly remembered by still shots and archival footage as many of the structures have gone.

Filho re-uses footage he shot of an old projectionist he worked with, Mister Alexendre (Moura) for a short film in 1992, “Homem De Projeção” to show nostalgic viewers and youngsters who never knew what a carbon arc celluloid film projector looked like, and the nature of the projectionist’s job — physically editing films, which might break, lining up the pencil sticks of carbon that lit up and burned to make a light intense enough to project an image on a far-off screen.

Mister Alexandre is the film’s most interesting subject and he points Filho towards other threads of narrative, the history of Brazil — “the dictatorship” — and how Mister Alexandre handled their police-enforced censorship. And the old man told Filho the story of how the city’s biggest and splashiest art deco film palaces was designed by a Jew and built for the German UFA film studio/distributor for use as a Nazi propaganda cinema in fascist-ruled Brazil just as World War II was about to begin.

But “Ghosts” is more of a musing, reflective movie, a bit self-absorbed in a personal essay (think “Roger & Me” with only a couple of “interviews”) way and very slow to get around to its real subject — old, lost cinemas and what was lost with them. And it’s tad hazy in its philosophical point, which it never quite gets around to.

As a college projectionist and longtime critic and film journalist, I found it fascinating, here and there, but something of a slog as Filho and the viewer struggle to find a focus other than “This is what I’ve done and this is where I was shaped as a movie lover and filmmaker.”

Rating: unrated

Credits: Scripted and directed by
Kleber Mendonça Filho. A Grasshopper Films release.

Running time: 1:33