Queer Melodrama: Analyzing the Aesthetics of 1987’s Law of Desire

By Pau Brunet-Fuertes, Edited by Bridget Zhang

When Nicholas Ray combined a colorful, vibrant female melodrama with the  traditionally masculine Western genre when directing Johnny Guitar (1954), he indirectly  opened the imagination of many directors. Pedro Almodóvar was one of them, and he recognized  the potential to combine melodrama with other genres, such as film noir. Law of Desire (1987) is the product of that reimagination of a classic Hollywood genre with a radical sight, resulting in the queer melodrama. Melodramas are considered female territory, a type of cinema that delves into domestic situations with a tint of social conflict, primarily caused by patriarchal constructions. Hollywood has a rich tradition of melodramas and so do other national cinemas such as Mexico, India, and Spain. Because of their iconic weight in popular culture and the exploration of the female universe through drama, music, and aesthetics, melodramas are a particularly rich space for queer filmmakers. Law of Desire tells the story of a filmmaker who gets entangled in a complex homosexual relationship with a devoted admirer, while longing for his lost soulmate and navigating an intricate bond with his transgender sister. The film is a distinct melodrama mixing homosexuals, transgender people, passionate crimes, and “la Virgen de la Macarena”. The final scene of Law of Desire encapsulates all of these melodramatic and queer elements. The scene's complexity relates to the setting, the symbols, and the representations that the three main characters embody in a post-dictatorial country that is beginning to explore a liberal future after years of political and social repression. Almodóvar's cinema is crafted around many visual elements charged with cultural considerations within symbolic orders of gender, sexuality, and desire. In the final scene of Law of Desire, Almodóvar uses allegories and symbols to highlight the film's central theme of a new generation of individuals moving on from Spain's political and social dictatorial past. 

Almodóvar’s aesthetics constantly challenge hegemonic powers by twisting religious iconography and cultural symbology from a queer perspective. Because of the relationship between film language and social context, Law of Desire reaches a complex significance when analyzed as a cinematic apparatus engaged in an oppositional gaze. From a mainstream perspective, cinema has been analyzed by first interpreting the content and then creating a meaning that can be digested easily. Susan Sontag critiques this analytical dynamic in her 1966 book Against Interpretation. She argues, “by reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable [sic]” (Sontag 5). This dominant approach avoids understanding cinema’s form and significance from an ideological perspective, but movies are social agents with the capacity to engage with symbolic meanings and political significance. Jean-Louis Baudry defined cinematographic apparatus as, “[cinematic mechanism] destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology: creating a fantasmatization (Note 1) of the subject, it collaborates with a marked efficacy in the maintenance of idealism” (46). While Baudry frames cinema as a mechanism to maintain dominant ideologies, the inverse of this concept is also possible, in which cinema becomes a mechanism against dominant ideologies and symbolic meanings. This framework allows the aesthetic and visual elements of Law of Desire to be analyzed from a queer and deviant perspective.  

The particularity of the final scene of Law of Desire lies in its division into two different locations that are interconnected in time and space through sound and editing. At the beginning of the scene, the police inform Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) that his sister, Tina (Carmen Maura), has been held hostage in her apartment by Antonio (Antonio Banderas), his former lover and passionate fan. When Pablo arrives outside the building, he agrees to go upstairs with the police to free Tina. Almodóvar establishes the connection between the two spaces when Antonio appears on the balcony with Tina while the police are stationed downstairs, pointing lights and guns at him. He demands that Pablo come upstairs alone. At this point in the story, the audience is aware that Antonio experiences his homosexuality secretly, far from the sight of his conservative family. Similarly, Tina and Pablo's gender and sexuality (transgender and homosexual, respectively) also experience a degree of privacy from the exterior world. In both cases, this reality creates a personality split between public and private persona in which these queer individuals need enclosed spaces to experience their freedom. As Marta Saavedra suggests in her essay about Almodóvar’s cinematic world, the director “understands the filmic space as a basic element for the emotional development of his characters” (378). In this last scene of Law of Desire, the filmic space reflects the dualities and dichotomies used by the director as the primary mechanism to create the characters and conflicts developed in the plot. The director establishes the spatial connection between both spaces using cross-cutting and diegetic sound continuity, particularly in the form of dialogue and music.  

Almodóvar's unique visual world is charged with relevant narrative information, which makes it essential to decoding the melodramatic tension in Law of Desire, especially in the actions done by his characters during the climax of the movie. Cross-cutting and sound editing help unify and create tension by using discontinued spaces connected by sound, music, or dialogue (Bordwell 244). Two examples are the use of the song "Lo Dudo" and the fire. One of the most emphatic moments is when Antonio plays the song "Lo Dudo," and that song becomes a connection between the exterior space where public opinion awaits and the inner space or intimate space of the apartment where desire can exist. Because of Antonio’s secret homosexual desire, his relationship with the exterior (social pressure) and the interior (sexual freedom) of the apartment appear connected through the song, which at the same time speaks to the development of the story. With this song, Almodóvar seems to foreshadow the fatal ending as the lyrics are about a love that was intense and wild, but is now over. While this song could have achieved the same functionality as non-diegetic sound, it is vital to point out that Almodóvar uses it in diegetic form to support the idea that Antonio wants the world to know he loved Pablo, even though it is over because of the social pressure placed on him. 

Furthermore, Almodóvar uses fire as a symbol of the inevitable tragedy pushed by the  external (law, order, conservative society) and the internal (the passion of an impossible love). The aesthetic relationship between love and death through the fire inside the apartment serves as a powerful melodramatic mechanism to finish a love story that is still not easy to showcase in the exterior of the apartment. As José Quiroga points out in his book Law of Desire: A Queer Film Classic, “Almodóvar found a cinematic language that allowed him to represent both aesthetic distance from a sentimental notion of life, and the affective triggers that allow for identification with life” (15). The other fire in the scene is happening outside of the building, in front of the police cars. The presence of fire in both public and private spaces links the two worlds together, symbolizing a society that is changing and still dealing with a traumatic past. This convergence of spaces and dualities created first by diegetic music and later by the two fires is essential to understanding the visual and dramatic complexities of the movie.  

On top of the visual elements mentioned, Almodóvar uses another significant aesthetic element charged with critical semiotic significance throughout the scene: the religious installation. The Virgen de la Macarena is an essential symbol that illustrates a radical understanding of sexual repression and liberation from a queer perspective. The director employs such religious symbols to delve into the complex social conflicts of the film. While religious symbolism can be associated with sexual repression and violence, for instance, the controlling mother and the priest who abused Tina as a child, Almodóvar subverts their meaning to something almost mestizo. As Brígida M. Pastor affirms, "the inversion implies the transgression of a culturally designed model of conduct that is heterosexual and therefore implies the complete negation of that model or norm" (8). The Virgin in Tina's house becomes a positive symbol, a female one whom she and Ada trust for protection and the one that will become an almost mystic observer of Pablo and Antonio's love and tragedy. Almodóvar's use of religious symbology combined with Hollywood iconography aligns with what José Esteban Muñoz coined as the disidentification process. Disidentification is the strategy used by minority groups to manage historical trauma and systemic violence by reassembling how the majority sees and oppresses them (Muñoz 35). In the movie, the Virgin, Saints illustrations, crosses, and candles are detached from a Christian meaning to become protective symbols and objects of worship and inspiration almost equal to posters of old Hollywood actresses (Saavedra 382). The fact that a negative symbol in Pablo and Tina's world becomes positive reflects a queer perspective that reclaims traditional symbols from mainstream and conservative spaces to a more radical one. Through this, queer artists developed a complex analysis of the dichotomy between tradition and queerness, which is vital in the last scene of the movie Law of Desire. 

Consequently, it is essential to understand how Almodóvar creates the scene using  excesses in his narrative language through the combination of melodrama and film noir as well  as the radical use of sexuality, religion, and police force. This use of well-known social norms  and beliefs in an opposite and radical way is essential as part of the queer narrative present in the  film. As Pastor points out in her article, "Almodóvar's insistence on adopting culturally  established roles [police] and attitudes [repression] that are performed through parody and a  stereotypical exaggeration, generates a detachment on the part of his characters in relation to the  cultural reality that surrounds them" (13). The melodramatic scene works thanks to the  extravagant construction and connection between characters and the art direction surrounding them, such as the use of folkloric and religious iconography, music, and passionate love scenes. These symbolic and emotional constructions have a dialectical relationship pointing out the dictatorial society and the new liberal one. In their new present, queer characters are reconstructing their identities within a space that provides new meanings to the conservative world of the past (folkloric and religious elements) and the postmodern reality of the mid-1980s (sexual freedom). 

In conclusion, the final scene of Law of Desire showcases Almodóvar's talent in blending melodrama and film noir aesthetics, exploring a subgenre in which he can employ a radical use of sexuality, religion, and police force. By transgressing established social norms and beliefs, Almodóvar creates a unique queer perspective that not only challenges conventional roles and attitudes, but also generates detachment from the cultural reality surrounding the characters. The scene’s juxtaposition of exterior forces, symbolized by law and order, with the interior spaces, realms of sexual freedom, underscores essential dichotomies inherent in queer cinema. These dichotomies are no longer a subtext since the queer experience does not hide between ideas of representability but lies in representation. Almodóvar's cinematic style aligns with other filmmakers of his time, such as John Waters, Derek Jarman, or Todd Haynes, who similarly explored this radical vision of social conventions and helped to create queer visual representation. The intricacy and elaboration of the visual settings in the movie serve to support its complex characters and their connections to post-dictatorial Spain, highlighting the rich world of gender diversity. Almodóvar's film form, characterized by duality, provides a profound and incisive critique of conservatism in society and explores the contrast between public and private personalities influenced by societal decorum. Finally, the microcosm of the scene in the movie serves as a representation of the larger social issues that Pedro Almodóvar explores in the film such as repression, sexuality, and passion, three elements that are all linked to General Franco’s dictatorial period (1936-1975). Almodóvar's distinct and influential cinematic style has become largely influential worldwide to such an extent that his name has become an adjective, "almodovarian," which refers to this stylization of queer and folkloric Spanish social issues that thanks to him have become universal. 

Notes

1. According to Jean-Louis Baudry, fantasmatization refers to the creation of a visual illusion through images, sounds, and colors.  Baudry affirms that fantasmatization is a method to create visual reality according to ideological ideals that appears to be objective. 

Works Cited 

Almodóvar, Pedro. Law of Desire, feature film, El Deseo/Lauren Films, 1987. Bordwell, David; Thompson, Kristin; “Chapter 6: The Relation of Shot to Shot”. Film Art. An  Introduction. McGraw-Hill Education 12th Edition, 2020. 

Quiroga, Jose. “Introduction : Queer Melodrama.” Law of Desire, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.  University of Minnesota Press, 1999 

Pastor, Brígida M. "Screening Sexual and Gendered Otherness in Almodóvar's Law of Desire  (1987)—The Real 'Sexual Revolution'." Studies in European Cinema, vol. 3, no. 1, 2006,  pp. 7-23. doi:10.1386/seci.3.1.7/1. 

M. Saavedra Llamas and N. Grijalba de la Calle, “The creative cinematographic process at the  service of national identity: Pedro almodÓvar and the promotion of spanish stereotypes,”  Creativity studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 369–386, 2020, doi: 10.3846/cs.2020.8563.

Dead Air, Dead Space: Culpability and Collapse in Landscape Suicide (1986), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023)

By Micah Slater, Edited by Avana Wang

Documentary cinema has spent time in alignment with prevailing thought and subversion in equal measure. It has engaged as both dissident and conformist; employing the apparatus as an agent of change, of conservatism, and practically every (nominal) shade in between. Subversive cinemas subsequently frequently employ documentary in service to alternative histories and perspectives. Unfortunately, in order to legitimize these perspectives, these documentaries often reference established documentary norms in terms of form and structure. These norms can be and have been established outside the influence of Hollywood alone. Therefore, it is both of note and of interest when documentaries on subversive subjects make use of subversive forms. This paper poses that the unconventional histories told in Landscape Suicide (1987), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023), reject both prevailing social sensibilities and conventional documentary form. They instead labor towards a film language of space itself, where events and narratives are not best told by people, but through the places where they occurred, the air through which they moved. They choose to thread their narratives through the cracks in the foundation, revealing the looming, imminent collapse of space itself.

James Benning’s Landscape Suicide is part of an anthology focused on space, in an oeuvre already thoroughly marked by meditations of the same. California Trilogy (1999–2001), Ten Skies (2004), The United States of America (1975), and Thirteen Lakes (2004), should all in name and release date alone indicate the expanse of Benning’s spatial sensibilities. His work has often been described as among the greatest of slow cinema; despite the term itself being coined only in 2003 (Luca and Jorge 2022). This combination of slowness, of a deliberate lingering and occupation of space, and of the topics chosen here—Cheerleader Bernadette Protti, who stabbed a friend to death over an insult, and Ed Gein, American serial killer—creates a stark contrast to prevailing models of true crime documentary in both its patience and its condemnation. “Anti-true crime, or the truest version of it,” Landscape Suicide is a product both of Benning’s preoccupation with space and of an effort towards a more ethically-concerned alternative to conventional crime documentary narratives, notorious for their voyeuristic lens and exploitative content (Cole). Picturing the conventional American true crime documentary about these people makes Landscape Suicide’s individual impetus towards a spatial language much more apparent. The people Benning selected–an all-American cheerleader and the Butcher of Plainfield—are high-profile cases that have stirred deep emotion in the American consciousness for decades. However, Benning’s ethics regarding these subjects are acutely apparent in all of the scenes where the individuals are not present. Landscape Suicide is not solely weighing space as an auteurist signature; it is being used to mediate (or perhaps even soothe) the strong feelings that conventional true crime seeks to inflame. The landscapes audiences see are all spaces that the subjects have occupied, spaces we feel to occupy as we view them. Though the locations themselves are explicit, in that they are tied to events of national importance, the rows of houses, two-lane roads, and ungroomed vegetation could very well exist in any part of America. Therefore, Benning’s common experience of space is his great middleman. The “rejection of drama, the implementation of long takes, and stationary shots [...] allow audiences to come to their own understanding,” pointing to efforts toward a film language that believes ethics are tied to spacetime itself (Ross 261-62). This spatial language becomes concentrated—more so than in Benning’s visual diaspora—in Grey Gardens.

Upon release of Albert and David Maysles’ Grey Gardens, many critics condemned the film, claiming that “the brothers had exploited two vulnerable and perhaps unstable women” in the interest of direct cinema (Abbot 108). While discourse has proliferated on this topic for decades, Grey Gardens’ titular estate has remained a visual landmark, a space so iconic (or iconoclastic) it nearly supersedes its residents. After all, the Beales themselves were not mentioned in a title until the 2006 sequel The Beales of Grey Gardens. The first film was made when Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, two eccentric socialites, were subject to headlines after the Suffolk County Board of Health cited multiple violations against the property. The film makes Grey Gardens’ otherness even further apparent: opening on a brief conversation about a lost cat, the camera drifts through empty rooms, focusing on chipped paint, broken baseboards, and finally, zeroing in on a gaping hole in a wall into which Whiskers the cat has allegedly disappeared. And, while Little Edie remarks on the policies of East Hampton (“they can get you for wearing red shoes on a Thursday. They can get you for almost anything”), the film cycles through static shots of the village—affluent, well kept homes; ponds, beaches—before ending on a static shot of Grey Gardens: unpainted, run-down, overgrown [00:01:50]. The language of space here is not nearly as much of an assertion as in Landscape Suicide as it is a foundation, both the source of the sensation surrounding the Beales and what we first—and most consistently—are presented with. While the Maysles seem to marvel at the otherness of this space, again raising the discourse of exploitation, no compromises or alternative locations are used. Little and Big Edie are not transported to another place for interviews, the camera never again physically leaves Grey Gardens after the introductory contrast: the lingua franca is the space itself. 

Pictures of Ghosts (2023) is both more conventional and more personal than Landscape Suicide and Grey Gardens together. As the only film that makes primary use of archival footage, its treatise serves as a remembrance of the analog cinemas in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, which were key features of director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s youth and adulthood. He spent both periods in residence in an apartment owned by his mother in Downtown Recife, and after her death, by himself. In fact, the first half of the film centers on this apartment, viewed through the lens of the dozens of amateur, and, eventually, independent films he made there through university. We see decades of change wear away the neighbor's yard; then we see the house devoured by termites. Brick arches go up and walls come down, bedrooms change into media rooms, furniture rearranges and disappears. It’s evident that the apartment, much like Belén Vidals’s theoretical house, has “accumulated a particularly fierce and determined specificity” (Rhodes 86). This is in explicit contrast to the cinemas, which, as victims of the public economy of interest, are presently becoming abstracted—abandoned, transformed into churches and malls, or plainly demolished. Therefore, the footage Mendonça Filho has amassed, in its sheer volume and longevity, is an invaluable resource in the film language he sets forth. Spatial portraits of both locations would be fruitful alone, but forty years of change—especially regarding such a marked decline—transforms the spaces from topics to parts of speech in the type of communication Pictures of Ghosts is aspiring towards. Shots of the same buildings, chronicling apogee, to decline, to shuttering, to decay, crystallize time and its passage. The changes are gradual, but they are drastic, and the cinemas hold those memories diligently. Mendonça Filho is also an interlocutor: in one instance, with the support of footage from three different eras, he notes a plain red external wall of a former cinema palace that used to contain vitrines of posters and memorabilia. It is this kind of rumination—on what used to be, and what is now hidden or remiss—that makes Pictures of Ghosts an extremely compelling (and, due in no small part to its seven-year direct construction and decades of preparation, authorial) tributary to a cinematic language of space. Though subject to time and decay, Recife’s cinema palaces speak for themselves, embodying the spaces—past, present, and future—they occupy.

The documentary form must inherently accommodate space. For decades, documentaries have taken iconic spaces as subjects. However, as these films postulate, spaces are not only passive elements, alike to a stage or venue. Space is a language capable of communicating ethics, character, history, and time. Landscape Suicide circumvents documentary norms by using space to ethically and simultaneously interrogate genres and a subject characterized by polemia and hyperbole. Grey Gardens examines the house as a private and public subject, where space communicates institutionally (and societally) imposed right and wrong ways of being. Pictures of Ghosts sees space in dialogue with time, discussing the changes to downtown Recife, the Brazilian film industry, and the failures of their buildings themselves. These films are all also efforts in preservation. As Paula Rabinowitz has noted, filming an “essentially ephemeral event, a vanishing custom, a disappearing species, a transitory occurrence, is the motivation behind most documentary images” (120). This is true in the cases of many documentaries, but the efforts towards a spatial language in these films augment her argument: it is not just the filmed that is ephemeral, that is in need of preservation, but the act of filming itself. Spaces decay, but they do so in the labor of conveyance. Even the kind of space and the way it is depicted create meaning. 

The spaces of these three films are not only centered as agents of language, but possess a shared discourse on spaces in decay—what happens in order for, and after, a place’s ‘death.’ Landscape Suicide foregrounds the idea of topography itself being capable of murder. Benning is keenly interested in individuals as a born-in parts of the places in which they exist, and in the interconnectivity that arises from this relationship. Therefore, homicide, and especially serial homicide, is the most intimate and violent form of collapse: self-harm against the biblical clay from which we were formed. Landscapes abound; suburban houses and roads stand vacant and anonymous, yet this spatial language encourages the assumption that they are somehow relevant to the crimes that Landscape Suicide centers. An audience is encouraged to imagine how this place, despite its void of delivered context, is somehow liable for murder. Further, they are prompted to consider how these places have been abandoned, due to imprisonment, death, or other intentionally-undetermined exit. In many ways, Benning’s film is a cinema of the rapture. Dead air hangs over once-occupied scenes, landscapes that have caused their own death. A unique kind of rot is represented here: one that is not structural but spiritual, a para-natural abandonment that may one day lead to a collapse that has yet to occur. Perhaps refracted off of the condition of the film’s subjects—prison does not allow for itself nor its subjects to decay—Landscape Suicide sees collapse as a perpetually imminent consequence of the ruin we cause each other. Julian Ross cites Benning with the quote “I couldn’t get a sense of the murder, but the collective guilt still lingers” (271). Where this guilt lingers, out of the abstraction of the crimes themselves, is the locus of blame. For Benning, collapse is the inevitable aftermath. 

Meanwhile, Grey Gardens’ picture of dead space is very nearly an argument in the reverse. Big and Little Edie inherently exist as “victims of and subject to the house in which they live,” as they had two years prior to coming under scrutiny (Rhodes 87). Deterioration is the premise of their lives as they lived them at the time of filming: they are surrounded by the debris of memory, sleeping in piles of papers and photographs, a large portrait of a much younger Big Edie leaned against the wall near the door. Grey Gardens postulates that decay is not a consequence of abandonment, but instead of use: it is its tenured occupation by these two particular women, alone with each other for decades, that has caused the house to rot. It is the containment of these years that amplifies the spatial voice of this film; despite the fact that we are not actually privy to much of it. Despite the house boasting 23 rooms, we only see 5, imbuing the space with “potentiality [...] a kind of imminence” that promises new and unknown forms of collapse (Rhodes 87). The Edies seem very skilled at the compartmentalization required to cut themselves off from society and their squalor from themselves. The Maysles filmed two years after the surprise inspection, and two years after affluent relatives (including niece/cousin Jackie Kennedy Onassis) paid for renovations, including hygiene facilities and running water. The unknown of a prior, more dilapidated space is perpetuated in these unseen rooms. Space is being used to proliferate ideas of worst-case scenarios, made more voyeuristically taboo by how frequently the Edies speak from offscreen, or talk about going to (or having been in) rooms we never see. Little Edie searches for cats in the attic and references a maid’s dining room. Big Edie speaks of her bedroom as “concentrated ground” [01:12:12]. A misuse of the word, as one of the Maysles corrects, but nonetheless resonant with the course of collapse as it has taken throughout the house. The very variety of home that Grey Gardens is, or once was, is diametrically opposed to constant, continuous, concentrated occupation. Many (and at the time of its construction, most) of the houses in East Hampton were vacation homes: temporary residences for socialites affluent enough to shirk loyalty to spatial notions of permanent residence. Space speaks loudly of the ways the Beales have neglected to perform their station. 

Pictures of Ghosts uses its spatial language to resist collapse, likely because it has a long-lived and personal stake in the preservation of Recife’s movie theaters. The film is also acutely aware of its inevitability. Neither Landscape Suicide nor Grey Gardens visualize an end to their decay: American prison sentences for murder are synonymous with forever; the Beales will presumably always have relatives to bail them out of eviction. Menonça Filho is surrounded by the imminent demise of the cinemas he loved so dearly, thus the making of Pictures of Ghosts—with its years of footage—while these places are still discernible in the landscape. Mendonça Filho treats the past as a vision of transcendence, acting with a reverence for the unique temporal palaces of cinemas: inside, time stands still, but outside, the winds of time and socio-economic forces chip away at their grandeur. This is particularly emphasized by a remarkably tender interlude in material history where Mendonça Filho grinds to a halt to memorialize a projectionist and a dear friend, who worked in one of the once-many cinemas in Downtown Recife. Aside from the director’s own interjections (including his own voiceover), this is the most human that Pictures of Ghosts identifies itself to be. Cinemas and their magic, at least to modern audiences, have forgone the projectionist for many years. With the proliferation of digital cinema packages (DCPs) and the dwindling need to switch reels during a film, projection—a profession that already intentionally hides itself behind the image—has become personless, automated. It reminds that decay is not merely structural or ideological, but has direct ramifications on concrete modernisms: employment, industry, real estate. A limb of Pictures of Ghosts addresses a time during World War II when one of the once iconic, now defunct theaters was constructed as a UFA cinema, a way for the Nazi party to reach South America with propaganda pictures, and also to benefit financially from Recife’s rich moviegoing culture. This event predates Mendonça Filho, of course, but the history is not being conveyed by him (despite his voiceover). These spaces speak of their own histories, carried forward through time. Marquees here earn their own segment of the film: towering above masses of blurred people, their cinemas mark time in equal measure as they move through it. 

Despite disparate doctrines on what their shared filmic languages actually communicate, Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts raise a shared question: by whom did this occur? What accommodated for these images of decay? Who is truly to blame for these murders? Who allowed the Beales’ living conditions to become so unsafe as to be threatened with eviction? Who took these palaces and tore them down? Who is liable for the death of these places? The indictment is clearly institutional. Throughout a question and answer at AFIFest 2023, Mendonça Filho repeatedly cited one reason for the remaining cinemas’ marginal, but surviving, present condition: state funding and cultural preservation grants. He spoke of cinemas as an endangered species, of the extant few still in Recife as landmarks whose spaces are imbued with narrative. While the spatial filmic language of Pictures of Ghosts allows itself to meditate on theoretical concepts, the utilitarian purpose of the film is extremely clear. Because of this, in many ways, this film is by far the most conventional; and with evidently good reason. Neither of the two aforementioned have courses of action to offer; they do depict problems but are nonetheless without solutions. Interestingly, though, they agree with Pictures of Ghosts in placing blame. Landscape Suicide identifies failures in bureaucratic systems as much as it does in humanity. Collective guilt’ is an accusation towards things that can feel guilt, certainly; but it also speaks towards the judicial verdict. Hinted at with its presentation of public ‘landscapes’ in schools and roads. Grey Gardens, interestingly, finds fault in both the Village of East Hampton and in the distant relatives that merely sent money for minimum repairs and did nothing to ensure the wellness of the Edies, nor the soundness of the house. Spatial language is a particularly effective medium for conversations on negligence: nothing bears accusations of decay like a rotting house, an abandoned building, or an empty street. It is infinitely more possible to defend oneself against a person than an empty room. 

And yet these interpersonal defenses abound. Grey Gardens’ human protagonists insist on their lifestyle; Big Edie “thrives” on the smell of her room (which, if the length of the film is to be considered, is a combination of cat food, urine, food waste, and body odor), and both of the Beales defend their lifestyle vehemently [01:12:08]. Little Edie refers to the Village’s surprise inspection as a “raid” [00:01:51]. Concerns regarding the mental wellness of the two are what sparked much of the film’s initial controversy, but ultimately they are adults who manage a daily life, feed and clothe themselves, and seem, though occasionally cantankerous, ultimately content. An element of resignation colors Pictures of Ghosts as well. For many of these lost cinemas, there is no way to bring them back: the camera meditates on vacant lots where demolition has befallen a theatre; abandoned implements of construction hang like tissue and jut like bone in other half-augmented structures. It’s only natural that these places would not last centuries; the social mode and cinemagoing culture specific to Recife that enabled their renaissance certainly didn’t. Projectionists aren’t expected to live forever; neither is film stock. As intrinsic as time is to space, ephemerality inevitably wins out with decay. For its ideas of shared culpability and shared place, Landscape Suicide occasionally errs to apathy. If we, and all of our loci, are all guilty of every murder, then there is no authority to define or prosecute these crimes. There is no space to hold perpetrators of a crime that is not itself a criminal. 

With a range of concerns, and a wider range of tactics, Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts are all collectively laboring towards an alternative film language, one that centers space as dialogue, as mediator, as lingua franca. Benning’s ethics of duration indict the collective American occupation of land as complicit, our violent crimes a product of our landscape, images of shared guilt echoing through our foundations. Our decay is spiritual, he posits, an internal rot that threatens to erode our structural selves. The harm we do to one another is reflexive; auto-desecration. Grey Gardens speaks in terms of spatial otherness, presenting the Beales in contrast to their neighbors and their estate as defiant of its governing bodies. Space is the mouthpiece of the eponymous house and its turbulent relationship with its occupants, as much as it is their defender. It is what drew the filmmakers to the topic and is what attracts their camera throughout the film. Pictures of Ghosts, in all of its conventional structure, perhaps allows space to speak the loudest. With images spanning a lifetime, these cinemas become familiar, if not trustworthy. They contain iterations of appearance, of use, of structural stability. They accumulate in a demand for continuous support that simultaneously accommodates understanding of the reason for their decline. Documentary cinema’s ability to chronicle environments, locations, landmarks, and even the anonymity of indeterminate places is deeply charged and deeply effective for the thrust of these films. Throughout Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts, silence speaks louder than words, for it is then when space is permitted to speak for itself.

Works Cited

Abbott, Mathew. "Grey Gardens and the Problem of Objectivity." Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience. Berghahn Books, 2021.

Directed by Benning, James. Landscape Suicide, performance by Anonymous , 1987.

Cole, Jake. "Review of Landscape Suicide." , 2022.

Luca, Tiago d., and Nuno B. Jorge. "Introduction: From Slow Cinema to Slow Cinemas." Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Directed by Maysles, Albert, and David Maysles. Grey Gardens, performance by Anonymous . Portrait Films, 1975.

Directed by Mendonça Filho, Kleber. Pictures of Ghosts, performance by Anonymous . CinemaScópio, Produções Ancine, 2023.

Rabinowitz, Paula. "Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory." History and Theory :Studies in the Philosophy of History, vol. 32, no. 2, 1993, pp. 119-137. CrossRef, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2505348, doi:10.2307/2505348.

Rhodes, John D. ""Concentrated Ground": "Grey Gardens" and the Cinema of the Domestic." Framework, vol. 47, no. 1, 2006, pp. 83-105. CrossRef, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41552449, doi:10.1353/frm.2006.0006.

Ross, Julian. "Ethics of the Landscape Shot: Aka Serial Killer and James Benning’s Portraits of Criminals." Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.