The Cine Club de Colombia and Postwar Cinephilia in Latin America: Forging Transnational Networks, Schooling Local Audiences

Abstract

Founded in Bogotá in 1949, the Cine Club de Colombia exemplifies the transatlantic character of Latin American cinephilia after WWII, when film societies, archives, festivals, and film schools flourished in close contact with European cultural institutions with global aspirations, including FIAF and UNESCO. Dedicated to ‘improving the taste of the movie-going public’ in a rapidly growing metropolis, the Cine Club de Colombia (CCC) served as a source of cultural legitimacy for an emerging middle class. The organization worked to institute an imported model of the film society, both in terms of programming (films from an emerging canon of art cinema or judged historically significant) and audience (imagined as discerning and actively engaged, an ideal indebted to the French cineclub movement). The CCC’s efforts were hampered by members’ resistance to these spectatorial norms and difficulties obtaining suitable programming within the local infrastructure of commercial distribution, which prompted its leadership to connect with an international network of cultural institutions to access prints. Drawing on programs and internal documents, this essay expands on recent scholarship on noncommercial exhibition beyond Euro-American contexts, arguing that the CCC’s history signals the tensions between institutional norms established elsewhere and locally entrenched tastes and practices in postwar Latin America.