The Taking of the Cinemateca Brasileira

On August 7, 2020, over one hundred supporters gathered in front of the Cinemateca Brasileira (CB) in São Paulo. There they watched members of Brazil's Federal Police, armed with machine guns, accompany government representative Hélio Ferraz de Oliveira, acting head of the Audiovisual Secretariat (SAv), to collect the venerable institution's keys from Francisco Câmpera, director of the Roquette Pinto Educational Communication Association (ACERP), which had been officially contracted in March 2018 by the Ministries of Culture and Education to manage CB's operations.¹ In December 2019, less than one year into Jair Bolsonaro's presidency, which began with the dismantling of the Ministry of Culture, the government failed to renew the ACERP contract. New proposals for the CB's management would supposedly be considered in February 2020. This did not happen, nor did the government agree to an emergency proposal by ACERP to insure the CB's continued operation and safekeeping until a new organization could be named.

In February 2020, floodwaters in São Paulo struck one of the CB's units, which lost over one hundred thousand DVDs, film reels, and book collections to water damage. In May 2020, ACERP announced that it had received no government funds since December 2019 to cover utilities and staff wages, and to support the institution's mission as the nation's center for the acquisition, preservation, documentation, and exhibition of Brazilian audiovisual materials. That mission also involves projects and services in the areas of audiovisual research and information technology.

A week after the tension-filled handover of keys, ACERP was forced to dismiss the remaining members of CB's original sixty-two technical staff, who had stayed on for months without pay to safeguard materials, especially nitrate and acetate collections requiring strict temperature controls and regular checks. Security and general maintenance staff were let go until alarms were raised about the potential for fire and other hazards that could wipe out entire collections. In response, the government hired a small, untrained staff for basic services, including cleaning, fire prevention, and security needs. Although Oliveira assured a group of staff members at the August handover that a new management organization would soon be named, repeated promises toward that end have yet to be fulfilled.² What hangs in the balance is Brazil's massive audiovisual memory—a legacy dating back to the turn of the twentieth century. Portions of that memory have already been erased by four fires in nitrate deposits, the latest in 2016. Over the last several years, cuts in specialist staff and untrained replacements have imperiled the CB's health and well-being. The current troubling scenario is far from unique. In 2018, a significant portion of the nation's patrimony went up in smoke when the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro burned to the ground. Losses there included irreplaceable artifacts documenting the history of Brazil's indigenous peoples and their rich heritage.

The potential losses at the CB, South America's largest audiovisual center, are significant: at risk are more than 250,000 reels of film representing some thirty thousand titles and an estimated one million documents. Archives of major directors such as Glauber Rocha, Carlos Reichenbach, and Ana Carolina; of film companies like Atlântida and Vera Cruz; of the state agency Embrafilme; and of CB founder Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes are among the many housed there. The CB's large newsreel collection includes newscasts of TV Tupi, the nation's first television network, created in 1950. Its conservation efforts and preservation facilities are world-renowned, with digital capacities alone enabling the transfer of 8mm, 9.5mm 16mm, and 35mm to HD, 2K, 4K, and 6K. Digitized materials include 6,322 films, 3,834 Brazilian

Figure 1.

Cinemateca Brasileira headquarters. Image courtesy of the author.

and international film posters, 53,381 production stills, and 24,354 other items ranging from TV Tupi news scripts (1950–1980) to all issues of the prestigious journal Filme Cultura, first published in 1966.³

Occupying an area of over 250...