New Buildings, New Pathways: Toward Dynamic Archives in Latin America and the Caribbean

This article addresses the proliferation of audiovisual centers and cinematheque projects in Latin America, which translates into the construction of new buildings, the renovation of existing ones, or the transformation of old landmark buildings for this purpose. By discussing specific examples, both national and regional, the construction of new cinematecas and audiovisual centers is seen here as an encouraging move that calls for the appropriation of images of the past for a badly needed mobilization of the present and future. Hence the specific circumstances that surround the creation of each project inform the model of services that they can offer, impacting the ability to activate collections and engage citizens. Despite some commonalities, the specificity of each country and region calls for a heterogeneous and informed understanding of the Latin American and Caribbean audiovisual archival context. Looking beyond the generative moment at the turn of the twenty-first century, the discussion reminds us that the societal, political, and administrative enclaves of these institutions are key to illuminating discussions on the complex negotiations that are central to activating archives.

This article focuses on how audiovisual collections located in established or emerging archives in Latin America and the Caribbean are being activated or reactivated and how they handle keeping old audiences while engaging new, contemporary ones. In a region characterized by political unrest, the current distribution of the economy is challenged by an aggressive return of the right—especially in the last decade. Many of these far-right administrations have dismantled national policies, defunding the arts, the humanities, and research in science and technology, fields that are all essential to the creation, modernization, and survival of archives. Yet, paradoxically, the first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a burgeoning moment for audiovisual centers and cinematheque projects, which translated into the construction of new buildings, the renovation of existing ones, or the transformation of old landmark buildings for this purpose.

These institutions (old and new) are aware that projects to archive, preserve, and expand access to their collections serve large and diverse populations and that they allow members of the public to forge stronger connections with their audiovisual cultural heritage. In most cases, funding for cinematheques and audiovisual centers is provided by the state or city administrations, either through ministries or secretaries of culture. Barring a few exceptions, these architectural processes are often the target of political disputes that turn the projects themselves into administrative battlefields, making the possibility to establish management models that translate into the stability of the institutions, and hence guaranteeing the continuity of cultural ventures, a challenge.

I argue that, while the construction of new cinematecas and audiovisual centers is encouraging because they call for the appropriation of images of the past for a badly needed mobilization of the present and future, the circumstances of their creation are determinant in the model of services that they can offer to citizens, hence impacting the ability to activate collections and engage citizens. While these projects share commonalities, there is also the need to examine the specifics of each case, in particular as regards the building and remaking of all these institutions, such that we can achieve a heterogeneous and informed understanding of the Latin American and Caribbean audiovisual archival context. Looking beyond the generative moment at the turn of the twenty-first century, we must attempt to understand the societal, political, and administrative enclaves of these institutions to illuminate discussions on the complex negotiations that are central to activating archives.

I start by offering some considerations that provide ground to the understanding of the current challenges to audiovisual archives in the region, regardless of their date of creation. Readers should be aware that this list is nongeneralizing and incomplete; each observation deserves more extensive context and a discussion and specific examples that go beyond the scope of this essay. Then, I provide a summary of the thriving scenario of Latin American and Caribbean cinematheques, and I conclude with some examples to illustrate what the acrobatics of management of these institutions reveal about the possibility not only to activate the archive but to sustain dynamic archives on a more continuous basis.

SETTING COMMON GROUND: SOME GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

The emergence of audiovisual archives in Latin America responds to heterogeneous initiatives that range from state-funded institutions to the creation of spontaneous, collective, and individual enterprises made up of citizens concerned for the preservation of audiovisual heritage. A distinction between major and minor archives is therefore pertinent here. Major archives are those big film archives whose mission statement is saving heritage that belongs to the grand récit of the nation or its dominant narratives. This is mostly a first wave of film archives, cinematheques, and filmotecas created from the 1940s to the mid-1980s. Cinemateca Brasileira (1946), Cinemateca Argentina (1949), and Cinemateca Uruguaya (1952), for example, responded to private initiatives.¹ Institutions such as Filmoteca UNAM (1960), Cineteca Nacional (1974), Cinemateca Nacional de Venezuela (1966), and Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano (1984) are state funded; their inception related to some extent to a nationalistic impulse, which stands even in those cases where the investment from the state is extremely meager.

The history of institutions in the Southern Cone is marked by an intricate exchange, dating back to the aftermath of World War II, between the Cinémathèque française and programmers, film societies, and members of cine-clubs in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Since these cities were (and are) hubs of European migration to Latin America and primary cinema circulation sites, they were particularly attractive to Henri Langlois’s collecting impulse. His efforts to locate lost European films pushed him to visit both countries, where he backed persuasion efforts for cine-clubs to consolidate into national archives. Eventually, those new institutions—SODRE, Cinemateca Uruguaya, and Cinemateca Argentina—would become members of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), and circulation of materials would serve his particular interests as director of the Cinémathèque française.²

Minor archives have a more fragmentary nature, even residual at times. They are sometimes located inside other cultural heritage institutions (museums and libraries, for example) or universities. At times, these are not even archives but a series of hidden collections waiting to be processed. When they are part of larger institutions, they do not always have an independent mission statement, and they are legally bound to the bylaws and budgets governing the main institution. Minor archives also extend to community archives, for example, a growing number of queer archives and audiovisual archives at centros de la memoria that attest to political processes in a region characterized by social upheaval and political unrest.

Regional cinematheques, located in cities other than the capital, may also be described as minor archives, even if they receive state or city funding because the political and economic power in Latin America is still centralized in capital cities, with direct repercussions to funding for cultural heritage institutions in secondary and tertiary cities. Even when partially funded by the state, the modus operandi, administrative and financial challenges, blurs the lines between a fixed description as major and minor archives. Some examples are those cinematheques located in Cali, Medellín, and Bucaramanga (Colombia); Nuevo León and Guadalajara (Mexico); and Recife (Brazil).

Minor archives are also those that operate outside state or city administration, and they take shape as counterarchives, antiarchives, and audiovisual archives that steward particular collections. They often unveil residual and fragmentary stories from the margins of society; they are “political, ingenious, resistant, and community-based. They are embodied differently and have explicit intention to historicize differently, to disrupt conventional national narratives, and to write difference into public accounts.”³

Major and minor archives in Latin America hold heterogeneous frames of administration, financing models, and physical and technological infrastructures that determine the possibilities around how citizens are engaged. This has resonance in the design of outreach activities and modalities of access that demand regular balance between repurposing analog assets and digital technology (if any) and pushing for a continuous rethinking of the role of the user/spectator as well as programmers and curators. Infrastructure also impacts the possibility of decentralizing activities, which includes peripheral/marginal communities in cities that are densely populated.

As digital technologies evolve, and data and algorithmic systems organize the world, the boom of institutions does not always translate into more robust and generous digital environments to the service of the archive and for access by users; hence, even if archivists are aware of the importance of access to information, the creation of new cinematheques and audiovisual centers does not guarantee that access will be expedited, increased, or even provided. A vexing issue is the ability to generate and preserve digital content, since digital technologies are costly and access to the internet cannot be taken for granted everywhere in the region.

While many institutions elsewhere in the world are ready to talk about a post-digital culture, many institutions in Latin America have not even transitioned to digital at all. In “Feels Like Heaven: Five Major Challenges for Audiovisual Archives in the Era of ‘Full Digitisation,’” Brecht Declercq poses five challenges that, in his view, audiovisual archives still face: (1) digitization per se, (2) challenges in textual description for queries on audio or video, (3) copyright and ethical and privacy rights, (4) digital preservation, and (5) legitimacy and repositioning in a changing and political landscape.⁴ These challenges are relevant to the Latin American and Caribbean contexts. The digital infrastructure of institutions is uneven, with Cineteca Nacional (Mexico) and Cinemateca de Bogotá currently holding positions of leadership in comparison to other places. Institutions in the region face the pressure of saving and preserving analog materials that have been neglected over the years, while they simultaneously have to confront the pressure to transition to born-digital works, digitization, and mass storage technologies. For many archives, the basic expense for website hosting and design is a luxury that they cannot afford; hence, promoting active access to online content, considering all the collection management procedures that such a goal entails, is a far more remote possibility.

The revitalization of archives also has to do with changes in film industries in the last twenty years, often tied to local legislation and laws on cinema that have repositioned Latin American and Caribbean cinema on the world map. There have been more production and a stronger presence in competitive film festivals, as well as an increase in experimentation with media, technology, and cinematic languages. In archives, this also translates into a new generation of archivists who are approaching the profession with other digital and technological tools, aesthetic interests, and preferences for a cinematic corpus beyond the European one that was so dominant in the first wave of cinematheques. New digital technologies and the new ways they provide for narration have become a challenge not only at the level of production but also in the area of distribution and consumption, since institutions can only program according to their capital and human resources. Not all the cinematheques or new audiovisual centers have the digital capacity and budget that multichannel/multicomputer installations, video/data mapping, and/or other complex media art demand. In the absence of this, exhibitions of this nature are usually relegated to art museums, private galleries, and mostly cultural spaces financed by corporations, leaving it to archives to take on the role of being cosponsors. As Hernández, Yasky, and Learner point out in a Getty newsletter, “even though museums and other institutions provide professional support for conservation in varying degrees, there is much to be done to generate the funding required to tackle the insufficiencies in infrastructure, legislation, research, and education.”⁵

In the boom of archiving institutions in Latin America, the preference is still for naming institutions as “cinematheque,” a concept rooted in a cinephile culture shaped in the 1940s under European standards—mostly with the Cinémathèque française in mind. One may question whether the term is still valid vis-à-vis changes in audiovisual languages and technologies, as well as what kind of audiovisual centers and archives should be created in the region. This process needs to keep in mind the emergence of new social actors, the need to mediate old (colonial) administrative frames, and the persistent inequality in the economy, which, ultimately, permeates all the approaches to activating the archives.

Old and new institutions face the conundrum—and even have the responsibility— to reconsider the way minor and counterarchives are included, adopting proactive measures to decolonize both the archive and its administrative practices, aiming to establish other hierarchies of knowledge and a more nuanced dialogue. The exhaustion of the neoliberal economic model and the aggressive return of the extreme right in the last decade have resulted in massive social disruption as evidenced by the political demonstrations at the end of 2019 and the enacting of cacerolazos (collective pots-and-pans protests) far and wide in the hemisphere.⁶ Women, Indigenous groups, Afro-descendant groups, non-gender-conforming individuals, and young people all played a key role in recent political demonstrations. In all these cases, there is clear awareness of the power of the image, the value of the archive, and the agitation value of viral social media. Old and emerging institutions should become ideal scenarios to safeguard historical memory resulting from this social unrest, provide resources to favor projects that encourage communities to create more dynamic archives, and create active repositories that speak to the transformations of the social constituencies.

THE THRIVING PRESENT

By the end of his presidential term, Felipe Calderón visited the works of renovation and expansion of Cineteca Nacional (Mexico City), a building compound often seen as the model to aspire to by other Latin American film archives. Calderón’s visit was part of a government protocol that replaced an official inauguration of the changes to the institution; the visit reiterated that this expensive and ambitious project was part of the legacy of his administration despite the fact that the projects had not yet been completed. In 2013, Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano (henceforth Patrimonio Fílmico) moved to new headquarters. In 2018, Cinemateca Uruguaya acquired new theaters and was able to relocate its documentation center; earlier that year, the former Cinemateca Distrital became Cinemateca de Bogotá, at the same time moving to a modern building; the move included an upgrade in technology and a diversification of spaces for public activities.

In 2011, Caroline Frick noted, “Despite the fact that Honduras appears to be the only Latin American country without a film archive, no Central American countries appear on FIAF’s member roster, indicating less formalized relationships with the professional association.”⁷ That situation has changed; however, not every archive can afford membership in international associations and thus enjoy the benefits that this entails. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras established the Cinemateca Universitaria Enrique Ponce Garay in 2017, attempting to make up for the absence of a national film archive. In 2019, in association with other Central American countries, a Red Centroamericana y del Caribe de Patrimonio Fílmico y Audiovisual (Central American and Caribbean Film Heritage Network; CCAPFA, acronym in Spanish) was created, with the purpose to strengthen training on audiovisual archives. The network gathers the Honduran project, the Cinemateca Enrique Torres de Guatemala (1970), Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen de El Salvador (late 1990s), Fundación Luciérnaga de Nicaragua (1993), Centro Costarricense de Producción Cinematográfica (1977), and Cinemateca Nacional de Panamá (2017); currently, there are plans to extend the network to Cuba and the Dominican Republic.⁸ The dual status of Puerto Rico as a country but also a colony of the United States places the island in limbo in the face of these collaborations. However, the dispersed audiovisual collections in Puerto Rico are located at institutions associated with ArchiRed,⁹ a strong, dynamic, and well-organized local network of archives.

There are also plans to build a Peruvian Cinematheque; however, the timeline of the project is not clear, nor is the location. Peruvian film archives are dispersed among the Filmoteca of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, the Cinemateca at Universidad Agraria de La Molina, and some minor archives. In other Latin American cities, the strategy has been sprucing up old buildings to turn them into cinematheques: an old all-girls school is now the Fundación Cineteca Pública de Santander in Bucaramanga (Colombia, 2013); the Teatro Lido is temporarily the headquarters of the Cinemateca Municipal de Medellín (Colombia, 2017), with the documentation center temporarily working at a public library. The construction of a building is approved, and it will be located by Ciudad del Río, a gentrified old industrial sector that also hosts the Museum of Modern Art. Expanding from the Telmex Theater (2008) to a cultural compound with five new digital cinemas, the Universidad de Guadalajara Cinematheque (Mexico) officially became the International Guadalajara Film Festival Cinematheque in 2018, in tandem with the mission of the festival, which dates back to 1986.¹⁰

The case of the Cinemateca y Archivo de la Imagen Nacional (CINAIN) in Buenos Aires is intricate. CINAIN is linked to the Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA). By 1999, filmmaker Pino Solanas had lobbied for legislation to make the project a reality; Law 25.119 was promulgated in 2010, but CINAIN only began operations in 2017, with no specific budget and no actual headquarters. That year, expectations grew around its restructuring as anticipation also grew regarding its opening in the former headquarters of Cinecolor in the Olivos neighborhood; one of the project’s goals was to take advantage of the analog equipment the company was leaving behind. The Olivos project gained momentum with the celebration of the 2017 Film Preservation and Restoration School in Latin America of FIAF and L’Immagine Ritrovata, which brought together fifty-six participants from different countries.¹¹

The project did not consolidate, and a building across from the INCAA offices currently hosts the CINAIN offices. The film collection at the old location is still overseen by the same personnel that have served the institution over the years. Film critic and collector Fernando Martín Peña and historian and Museo del Cine associate Andrés Levinson are in charge of some programming, but the outreach is currently stalled by the COVID-19 crisis. In October 2019, there was news of the building of a CINAIN preservation lab. Specific details on the project are not clear at the moment, and the project at large is jeopardized by political complexities.¹²

The list of emerging archives is longer; the proliferation of institutions seems to be a marker of the first decade of the new century, yet activating archives in the region is a complex negotiation that poses endless challenges. It is paradoxical that at such a thriving moment for audiovisual archives, the Cinemateca Brasileira, the oldest in the region and steward of emblematic collections, is facing its worst crisis due to cultural policies established during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential term. Given the dissolution of the Ministry of Culture, and the firing of all the personnel, the institution is now facing the threat of having to close permanently. The fact that this has all occurred amid the crisis generated by COVID-19 exacerbates the quandary faced by this cinematheque.¹³

ACTIVATING ARCHIVES AND THEIR COLLECTIONS IN LATIN AMERICA

The growing interest in creating and revitalizing audiovisual archives should not be reduced to architectural projects, nor should the revamping of old constructions be taken as a token of modernization and progress of the field. On the contrary, the current moment demands that archives take advantage of the novelty of the construction or restructuring to consider new models of interaction with user communities, new ways to arrange and facilitate access to collections, and many other ways to activate collections.

Designating a place as a “cinematheque” does not in itself create the archive. For example, the activities of institutions like Cinemateca Uruguaya are oriented primarily to programming and not to the preservation of audiovisual heritage. Over the years, Cinemateca Uruguaya enjoyed a mythical aura in Latin America for its prominent role in shaping film taste and the dissemination of a model too close to the Cinémathèque française. This is an important legacy cultivated in the 1940s and 1950s both by SODRE and Cinemateca Uruguaya that is central to the history of collections of the institution. It also informs the evolution of cine-clubs into cinematheques and the role that Latin American collectors and institutions had in safeguarding important global film heritage in the aftermath of World War II. Later, it was Manuel Martínez Carril, film critic and director of the Cinemateca from 1978 to 2005, and emeritus director until his death in 2014, who cultivated such an aura, which still works as a trademark of the place.

Beatriz Tadeo Fuica’s excavation of FIAF correspondence with early directors of cinematheques in Montevideo and Buenos Aires and film collectors, and of Henri Langlois’s efforts to collect film, provides solid ground to understand the politics of film circulation at the time and what this has to say about contemporary history:

From the beginning, South American cinematheques indeed adopted several practices that led them to be considered “mere screeners of cine-clubs.” Beyond the pejorative connotations of this observation, it is true that these cinematheques were created to access copies for their screening outlets, most of which were previously established cine-clubs. Their collections have in fact been mostly composed of projection copies bought to distributors or received thanks to exchanges between cinematheques, and donations from local collectors. The fact, however, should not obscure their importance. On the contrary, these holdings dating from the late 1940s have proven to be more attractive than expected.¹⁴

Cinemateca Uruguaya is still a private institution often identified as the national archive of the country. Its main collection is widely dominated by screening copies of European cinema, classic Hollywood productions, and similar works that nurtured the aforementioned cinephile. In addition to its almost twenty thousand titles, the institution carries immense symbolic capital for the collective memory of Uruguayans as a place that has survived many political crises, namely, the dictatorship that ruled the country from 1973 to 1985.

Up to December 2018, Cinemateca Uruguaya was divided into four buildings in different locations of the city: one downtown Montevideo, programming epicenter—a precarious center of documentation was located in the basement, hoarding valuable materials such as posters, film journals, newspaper clips, photographs, scripts, and programming brochures. User access was limited, and it relied mostly on the knowledge of the librarian rather than on a systematized catalog. A second screening location was located on the busy Avenida 18 de Julio, known as Cinemateca 18; this was the only surviving theater in this former cinema district that was not turned into a Pentecostal church, a phenomenon that has been common in Latin America. A third location was in the well-to-do neighborhood Pocitos, devoted only to screenings. These three places are now closed. The film archives were and are still located in Punta de Rieles, a peripheral zone of the city.

The new building inaugurated in December 2018 has three screening rooms with digital endowment, one of them with two 35mm projectors, one to be substituted by a 16mm projector; all rooms have equipment for electronic subtitling. The new location also features space for the administrative offices, a new documentation center, and a cafeteria. The change has proven positive for the quality of screenings and draw to a larger audience; however, the building was not planned with the express intention of being a cinematheque, much less to expand the possibilities to program other archival activities. The new construction is a wing of the building of the Corporacion Andina de Fomento at the old Central Market, right behind Teatro Solís,¹⁵ in an architectural nod that combines the postindependence history of Uruguay (Theater Solís is located on the side of the Independence Square) with the neoliberal present of the country and the region.

Figure 1.

New building, Cinemateca Uruguaya, 2018. Archivo Cinemateca Uruguaya.

Capitalizing on the momentum of the new building, which stalled after the COVID-19 crisis, the programming introduced variety by showcasing films by well-known directors alongside those kept in the cinematheque’s vaults. María José Santacreu, director, and Alejandra Trelles, artistic director, cite, as an example, screening films by Abbas Kiarostami and Michael Wadleigh. In an article for the Journal of Film Preservation, they also mention activities for children, hosting the Uruguayan International Film Festival and an affective closing of the old cinematheque as exercises to activate the collections.¹⁶

Figure 2.

One of the three new theaters at Cinemateca Uruguaya, 2018. Archivo Cinemateca Uruguaya.

The bulk of the Uruguayan audiovisual legacy is spread among two major archives: Cinemateca itself and the National Image Archive, SODRE. Two minor archives located at the most important universities in Montevideo, the Audiovisual Archive Professor Dina Pintos at the Catholic University and the Universidad de la República Archive (AGU, Archivo General de la Udelar) and its Laboratorio de Preservación Audiovisual (LAPA), render additional components to the audiovisual heritage of the country. The Pintos Archive is part of the School of Communication; it has done intensive work in the recuperation of and education about home movies and amateur productions. Given that most accomplished filmmakers from the so-called New Uruguayan Cinema have graduated from this university (Pablo Stoll, Juan Pablo Rebella, and Federico Veiroj, for example),¹⁷ they have encouraged the creation of an “Alumni Collection.” However, legal deposit is not a requirement in Uruguay; because most of these films are coproductions, this is still a scattered initiative that needs much international collaboration from many international production companies to secure copies of the films.

Figure 3.

Public space and cafeteria at the new headquarters of Cinemateca Uruguaya, 2018. Archivo Cinemateca Uruguaya.

AGU is a university archive that holds an important audiovisual collection; its highlights are the films from the extinct Instituto de Cinematografía de la República (ICUR), created at the end of 1950 in an impulse to promote scientific, cultural, and documentary films. Upon dissolving in 1973, it morphed into Departamento de Medios Técnicos de Comunicación. The collection features works of important filmmakers, such as Eugenio Hintz,¹⁸ Roberto Gardiol, and Plácido Añón, as well as works by the emblematic filmmaker Mario Handler, who brought a “political and social edge”¹⁹ to the project at the beginning of the 1960s, much in tune with the Latin American revolutionary films of those times.²⁰

As a response to precarious budgets, AGU has been exemplary in designing archival solutions for film inspection, digitization, and micro- and macro-environments by recycling discarded furniture and equipment from other university divisions, adapting former X-ray tables into film inspection units, and making its own polypropylene containers in a do-it-yourself approach. A prominent example of this recycling and sustainable approach resulted in adapting an Old-Rank Cintel-Ursa Gold Telecine, seized by the State Bank from a bankrupted laboratory, into a 2K frame-by-frame scanner.²¹ The first film rescued with this scanner was a nitrate titled Solar Eclipse 1938; the machine serves all the local archives for different minor projects. The scanner project was led by the personnel of AGU LAPA; however, it was one of the outcomes of the Mesa Interinstitucional de Patrimonio Audiovisual, an interinstitutional archival partnership created in 2016 under the auspices of the Uruguayan National Institute of Film and Audiovisual (ICAU), a project that has not been terminated but whose activities are scarce at the moment. In October 2020, AGU LAPA moved to a new house, still in the university vicinity but with improved archival infrastructure.

Indeed, in a small country like Uruguay, with a population of around 3.5 million, working toward common goals could underline the benefits of combining the work of major and minor archives, deter the fragmentation of audiovisual collections, and strengthen audiovisual preservation ventures and dialogue. Latin American and Caribbean archives should, of course, aspire to state-of-the-art technology; however, a conversation on recycling, repurposing, and reengineering can be beneficial to the creation of sustainable archives and to promote good environmental practices. Some of the initiatives of AGU LAPA alone and some of the initiatives of the Mesa Interinstitucional have a lot to contribute to a needed conversation on sustainability and to position Uruguay in a leadership role in green archives in the region.

The Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken is one of the most resilient institutions in Latin America. It holds a gigantic collection that has relocated eight times since its inception in 1971; additional moves are not out of the question as the current location is assigned by the city but not owned by the museum. A prospective building of a nitrate vault is also under negotiation, and successful completion would represent a positive move for the protection of the film assets. The museum is in La Boca, a neighborhood of Buenos Aires, next to the Usina del Arte, a cultural compound functioning in what used to be an electric power plant; however, the museum works independently from the Usina. The museum has space for permanent and temporary exhibitions and a screening room with a 35mm film projector. By 2017, it was able to add a room for magnetic media preservation. The bulk of the archive is located at a building some blocks away from the Usina, at Ministro Brin Street, with public access to the Center of Documentation.

The administrative history of the museum is complex, and a detailed account is beyond the scope of this article. Because it is both an archive and a museum, it belongs to Secretaría de Cultura del Gobierno de la Ciudad, the city cultural administration, and it also reports to the Dirección General de Museos, Patrimonio y Casco Histórico (General Office of Museums, Urban Heritage and Historical District), which oversees cultural heritage institutions in the city. Every year, the museum undergoes budget cuts, demands from two unions of city employees, and challenges from its already precarious conditions of work. As stated earlier, in the absence of a consolidated national film archive, the museum currently fulfills that role. In the same fashion, Buenos Aires has a dynamic scenario of film schools. No less important is the tradition of film festivals in the country. The museum is, perhaps, the major purveyor of services to access not only moving images but also documentation and cinema ancillary materials despite the limitations of its Center of Documentation, characterized by a large number of newspaper clips, film journals, scripts, photographs, and other documents. In addition to an extensive gamut of objects, ephemera, and machines, the museum holds a significant collection of costumes and film props with garments and artifacts from iconic Argentinian films. The complexity of safeguarding all these assets provides a window into appreciating the operating challenges for an important institution that runs underfunded.

The museum keeps a busy agenda of public activities, including participation in Museum Night; conversations and lectures on film preservation; guided tours; children’s activities, such as coloring cinema; working with special effects; understanding analog technology; and more. Its social media are effective in the advertisement of treasures of the collection, “on-this-day” reminders, projects, and programming. Home Movie Day has been celebrated for more than twelve years, and its success and impact have grown over time.

There is no film scanner; scanning for restorations is obtained using a telecine that generates low-resolution files acceptable for web access. The museum makes numerous materials available in its YouTube channel, subject to the content restrictions of the platform. Large-scale digitization projects result from active solicitation of private companies and grant writing. Because of the role European immigration had in the foundational narrative of the country, the collections of the Pablo Ducrós Hicken Museum are both national and international (the finding of a complete copy of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is a now well-known anecdote in the archival and cinema world), which plays to its advantage when lobbying for collaboration with international archives. However, since 2010, there has been a concerted effort to focus on Argentine cinema, which has included increasing the number of acquisitions of national cinematic materials and discarding international materials that have no archival value, to make needed space for other collections and to demand a budget for conservation.

Owing to technical limitations, the museum is frugal in providing digital access to its collections. In lieu of this, the museum has an Education Division that, in cooperation with a constituted Research Team, regularly visits schools, promoting education about the basics of photochemistry, lens-based image formation, and the illusion of motion in film; students also do hand drawing on film and other experimental activities. Priority is given to public schools, but these activities are also planned for senior citizens. With their support, Home Movie Day and workshops in film conservation and preservation and film projection have also been organized in other provincias or Argentinian states.

Figure 4.

Frames from one of the films from Proyecto de Preservación del Cine Antártico Argentino, 2019. Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken.

The museum is attentive to the needs of filmmaking schools in and out of the city, often visiting to provide requested training sessions.

Three highlights that speak to the museum’s interest in activating collections are the multiple projects that stemmed from interventions made into digitized episodes of Sucesos Argentinos, the first Argentinian newsreels, which ran from 1938 to 1978. In an effort to raise awareness of its collections and out of the need to preserve and digitize this important collection, Sucesos Intervenidos invited twenty-five filmmakers to repurpose images from three different episodes and produce short films.²² The final outcome is a series of retellings that range from experimental to fiction, from drama to comedy. A similar project was created with materials from the instructional films collection Cine Escuela Argentino, which dates from 1942.²³ Both repurposing projects were later done with high school students from public schools, and the museum has done screenings of the resulting films. This type of initiative is important to illustrate the elasticity of archival materials; yet, because of budget limitations, continuing to schedule these activities is a challenge.

There is also an ongoing project to rescue images related to the Argentine Antarctica, which has been a cinematic subject since 1902, with countless explorers, travelers, scientists, and filmmakers exploring that territory. In the 1940s, the government was invested in the promotion of the zone, and it became the locus for scientific activity. According to Andrés Levinson, leader of the project, “many films have been lost, and many others have not been identified or cataloged. Some of them are part of inventories, but there has been no process of content verification and diagnosis of the status of the reels. The project aims to organize this corpus of material in order to highlight its scientific, political and cultural value.”²⁴

Another significant project is the recent book on the nitrate collection edited by Carolina Cappa. As described by Paula Félix-Didier, director of the museum, Nitrato Argentino: Una historia del cine de los primeros tiempos is a documented catalog that maps out production (from 1910 to 1930) resulting from a collaboration of the museum Research Team and archivists that occurred at the intersections of historical/aesthetic knowledge and informed/practical knowledge but also aimed to foster reflection and creative curiosity.²⁵ Cappa adds that the motivation for the book follows the steps of similar projects, such as Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema and the Timeline of Historical Film Colors project, now offering a context from peripheral cinemas, and it also raises the alarm that unlike those projects, the Argentine case is about lots of nitrate that has not been digitized.²⁶ The book was planned with a complementary website that, to date, has not been published due to bureaucratic holdups, but mainly because the museum is ascribed to the website of the city’s cultural division (Secretaría de Cultura de la Ciudad). Most activities and summaries are published through a website belonging to the Society of Friends of the Museum. An autonomous online presence, other than the very effective social media, would be an asset to disseminate different projects undertaken by the museum, including not only this research project but also a work in progress on animation in Argentina and Levinson’s project on the Antarctic, which are expected to be published as books.

Figure 5.

Still from Mujeres saliendo de la fábrica de cigarrillos “La Sin Bombo,” 1904–11, cover of Nitrato Argentino: Una historia del cine de los primeros años. The reference to La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon is obvious; the title of the film translates as “Women workers leaving La Sin Bombo cigarette factory”; no director is identified. Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken.

The recent history of Cinemateca de Bogotá has to do with the transformation from Cinemateca Distrital to its current name, which, in a metaphorical way, also relates to the acquisition of its own building. Cinemateca de Bogotá is overseen by the Instituto Distrital de las Artes (IDARTES), the city’s cultural administration. Cinemateca Distrital was created in 1971 as an adjacent space to the Distrital Planetarium; later, it moved to a wing of the landmark Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Theater, where it operated from 1976 to June 2019. Throughout all those years, the Cinemateca Distrital ran only with a screening room that, even if iconic for what it represents for the film history of the city, had become obsolete in technology and insufficient in size for the busy and growing audience. In addition to the theater, the main lobby used to serve as an exhibition space, and a hard-to-climb staircase (no access to users with special needs) led the way to the top floor, where the documentation center, or Biblioteca Especializada en Cine y Medios Audiovisuales (BECMA), was located.

Figure 6.

Still from Muñequita Porteña (Buenos Aires little doll) (dir. José Agustín Ferreyra, 1931) from Nitrato Argentino: Una historia del cine de los primeros años. Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken.

The new building was inaugurated in June 2019; it is still located in downtown Bogotá, at the crossing point of various universities and cultural centers and part of the urban revitalization of the zone. In addition to three screening rooms (one hybrid for analog and digital projection), the construction includes a room for expanded projects, workshops/classrooms, a gallery, a preservation lab (which comes with a Cintel scanner), and a room for children’s activities. The diversity of spaces fits the description of “Cinemateca de Bogotá, Cultural Center for the Audiovisual Arts in Colombia.”²⁷ More than a traditional cinematheque, the place was conceived as a “space for the preservation of audiovisual patrimony, creation and circulation of visual arts, new technologies and encounters with audiovisual manifestations.”²⁸

Figure 7.

Cinemateca de Bogotá, formerly Cinemateca Distrital, new expanded headquarters, 2019. Photograph by Henry Caicedo Caicedo.

Yet, this apparent happy ending did not materialize without first having to surmount a political battle that mobilized not only Colombian citizens but also an international film community that over the years had witnessed the intellectual vitality of the Cinemateca Distrital, which has always had a stimulating film exchange with international filmmakers, scholars, and audiences. Detailing the political battle would require parsing through a complex history, but to summarize, it responds to a pattern of administrative management that allows for each incoming mayor to lay off the existing roster of employees in cultural, political, and administrative institutions and replace it with new personnel. In the cultural scenario, the issue turns more vicious because it is hardly based on a system of appointing personnel trained in cultural management or those with the necessary experience or credentials; rather, appointments are often based on cronyism and personal political favors. This system has been in place since colonial times, and it has proven, over the years, to be unproductive for the proper administration of funding, the continuity of projects, and the concretion of public works. Cinemateca de Bogotá was, then, a result of citizens’ ability to impede the discontinuation of the project, which subsequently also turned attention to the need to defend other public works for which tax money was already allocated.

However, citizens’ support for the transformation of Cinemateca de Bogotá does not relate only to the novelty of the building and the fact that the materialization of the project entailed an appropriation of it. Cinemateca is committed to keeping programs that serve users across the city, even when they can’t access downtown, for example, Cinemateca Rodante (Rolling Cinematheque) and Pelis por Bogotá (Flicks across the City), which had worked to promote creation of shorts, documentary, and fiction in different localities of the city (the first one), and also to run programming out of the cinematheque to make it inclusive of all the cardinal points in a city with a population of almost 7.5 million.

The philosophy of programming at Cinemateca moves in centrifugal and centripetal directions, encouraging diversity and inclusion and facilitating access even to those in peripheral zones. It is a concept that extends programming to creation, circulation, research, and preservation, always showcasing—but not limiting—projects to production resulting from IDARTES grants and research and creations that over the years have generated a strong corpus of publications in moving images, namely, on Colombian production, and an extensive collection of urban audiovisual production in animation, documentary, and short fiction films. Programming also encompasses series and programs such as Cita con el Cine Latinoamericano (CICLA), a series of conversations and screenings on Latin American cinema; Muestra Afro (Afro Cinema showcase); and the Ciclo Rosa, which is the LGBTQIA cycle. In 2019, a partnership with Patrimonio Fílmico and Proimágenes was created to showcase restored films, many of these projects sponsored by these three institutions and other Latin American cinematheques.

With the new digital environment of Cinemateca de Bogotá, the institution is striving to keep a successful connection with citizens and communities of creators, researchers, and archivists by strengthening its specific lines of work: the Media and Experimentation lab and projects such as Formas de Ver (Ways of Seeing) on AV programming; Públicos y Saberes (Audiences and Knowledges) on training, education, and research; Creación y Experimentación (Creating and Experimenting) on interdisciplinary and technical experimentation; Archivo Vivo y Memoria (Live Archive and Memory) on work with BECMA, specialized research, and audiovisual preservation; and another one called Territorio, devoted to production in different areas of the city.²⁹

There are still many aspects to adjust and improve. For example, there is the need for more projects on magnetic media education and preservation. Although both sister institutions Patrimonio Fílmico and Señal Memoria³⁰—the archival project of national television—have carried out significant projects of recuperation of materials in this format, the outreach ratio of the cinematheque makes it the ideal place for engaging citizens in the self-care of tapes and even in recuperating home movies and important social content materials. There is the possibility for analog projection in one of the new theaters, and one of the plans for future improvements involves making it an open booth for training in the art of projection. However, this will have to work in tandem with additional training in analog media preservation.

Figure 8.

Open Source Preservation Master Class at Cinemateca de Bogotá, 2019. Photograph by Henry Caicedo Caicedo.

Since its inception as Cinemateca Distrital, there has been a prolific program of publications with trademark resources such as Cuadernos de Cine Colombiano and the results of most work done with the Grant on Audiovisual Research from IDARTES and some other research resources in print, ebooks, periodicals, and collectible sets. Much work has gone into the creation of KOHA, a cataloging system with extensive analysis of documents and granularity of information. Similar to other Latin American and Caribbean countries, catalogs and information systems that facilitate access are an endless work in progress, each time more challenging due to the increasing number of digital resources and the shifting world of metadata administration. Online access for most materials produced by Cinemateca is still a challenge, not different from that faced by other countries in the region.

An ambitious yet timely plan is to make the Cinemateca de Bogotá a digital hub for Latin American and Caribbean archives. The Cinemateca would promote a region-wide project on media ecology. It would also provide a space for advancing international collaborations in digitization and digital preservation, it would aim to expand the work that initiatives such as the Iberoamerican Network for Digital Preservation of Audiovisual and Sound Archives (RIPDASA) is already doing, and it would catapult the interests of international archives to increase collaboration in Latin American countries and the Caribbean.³¹

As these examples make evident, Latin American and Caribbean archives are working against all odds. These archives face an imparity of technologies as well as lack of generous budgets. Moreover, at times, these archives’ need for more modern systems of administration becomes a challenge, if not exactly an obstacle. I conclude by going back to the FIAF Film and Preservation School in Buenos Aires in 2017. That training opportunity incited a dynamic dialogue and made clear the need to generate spaces to congregate archivists, prospective students of media preservation, and archive enthusiasts. Such regional conversation and the physical space to have it are much-needed for the activation of archives. Because of Colombia’s position as a geographical crossroads, and because of its digital environment, Cinemateca de Bogotá is an ideal location for sustaining such a possibility.

By illustrating how the proposed considerations intersect with the proliferation of institutions and collide into ongoing projects, I invite the reconsideration of notions such as the “Latin American archive” as well as the standard definitions of cinematheque or audiovisual archive in the region. The various examples I have cited offer the possibility to reflect on how distant some Latin American and Caribbean archives are from those that are now well established in other geographical locations. For international archives or film associations willing to help, this should be a call to consider localized training that supports projects, meeting individual needs from institutions to forge specific partnerships. Understanding the heterogeneity of institutions in the region will, it is hoped, lead to more fruitful and rewarding exchange.

CODA: ACTIVATING THE LATIN AMERICAN ARCHIVES DURING THE PANDEMIC

The crisis generated by COVID-19 has brought to the forefront the imperative demands of digital content; the need for institutions to have more robust digital infrastructures, streaming platforms, trained social media managers, and accessible digital storage; and overall, the possibility to respond to disaster by protecting personnel and employing state-of-the-art digital technology. Institutions that already had a robust digital environment were able to program online but not always able to acquire streaming services with more capacity. For online programming, most places have relied on content temporarily licensed by directors and producers, public domain films, and archival material. Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City has mostly relied on its own archive, different from the energizing international offerings that characterize its year-round programming. Filmoteca UNAM gathered not only films but also a wide array of online content ranging from films, a virtual museum of cinema, and memory games to cinema courses and more under the rubric “Filmoteca en casa.” Cinemateca de Bogotá arranged to pay for streaming video hosting and live video streaming services; subsequently, it was able to create a pay-per “sala virtual/virtual room.” Its busy Documentation Center has been able to grant access to digital collections by using Omeka.³²

Other institutions, such as Patrimonio Fílmico, Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador, Cinemateca Municipal de Medellín, and other regional cinematheques, have kept visible thanks to conversations, panels, round tables, and other live programming on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Retina Latina, an online platform to stream Latin American cinema created in 2017 through an international partnership, has been a useful resource for countries to share programming during these times of social distancing.³³

The crisis of the Brazilian Cinematheque was increased with the firing of all the employees during the pandemic. The administrative crisis of Brazilian archives also extended to the Centro Técnico Audiovisual (CTAV); located in Rio de Janeiro, this institution reports to the Secretaría Especial da Cultura (Ministry of Culture). Created in 1985, CTAV holds around six thousand titles, many related to Embrafilme—the Brazilian stateowned film company that worked from 1969 to 1990—and to local television. Currently the government should be held accountable for the fate of unattended collections and the risks associated with the nitrate vault at Cinemateca. On July 29, 2021, there was a fire at the Cinemateca’s storage unit at Vila Leopoldina. This incident epitomizes the intensity of the crisis and the negligence of the government in the proper administration of the institution. It is a cautionary tale of what might happen if this crisis is not brought to an end.³⁴

Institutions with extremely precarious online and digital infrastructures, such as Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken, have hardly been able to do any kind of programming through these trying times. During the COVID-19 lockdown, Levinson has been in charge of a successful online program of short features from Cine Escuela.³⁵ Adding to existing financial restrictions, these institutions need to start budgeting for COVID-19 sanitary controls/supplies and social distancing. The latter involves a reduction of income when box office is part of the revenue. At the same time, there is a reduction of personnel by limiting access to the facilities and also due to reduction of resources.

Given the uncertainty of these times and the complexities of what social life will be like in the near future, the coronavirus has increased existing challenges and created new problems. Considering that the film industry has been affected at large, the way the crisis has affected film archives should be part of the agenda of creative solutions for these institutions to survive.