Toward a Global Film Preservation Movement? Institutional Histories of Film Archiving in Latin America Rielle Navitski (bio) Upon its founding in 1938, the world’s oldest organization dedicated to audiovisual preservation announced its global ambitions in its choice of name, the Fédération internationale des archives du film (International Federation of Film Archives, FIAF). Yet only European and US institutions participated in its creation, namely the United Kingdom’s National Film Library (now the British Film Institute), the Cinémathèque française, Germany’s Reichsfilmarchiv (shuttered in 1945), and the Film Library of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). US and European members still dominate FIAF’s ranks today despite initiatives targeting Global South archives, including its School on Wheels, which traveled to several locations in Africa and Latin America between 2002 and 2015, and the editions of the Film Preservation and Restoration Workshop held in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City between 2015 and 2020.1 As of 2020, under a third of [End Page 187] FIAF’s members and associates were based in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East.2 This essay makes the case that media scholars must attend to both the structural inequalities and the mutually beneficial exchanges that mark the global history of the film preservation movement—a history that has long been framed in Euro-American terms—in order to understand their reverberations in the present. Long-standing global imbalances within the archiving movement fuel regional disparities in preservation, compounding social and environmental factors. These include climate (heat and humidity accelerate the deterioration of film emulsion and magnetic media such as videotape) as well as periodic institutional crises due to financial precarity and political shifts. As I was drafting this text in summer 2020, Latin America’s largest audio-visual archive, the Cinemateca Brasileira, teetered on the brink of closure. The archive had yet to receive any of its yearly budget due to the federal government’s abrupt termination of its contract with the nonprofit charged with administering the Cinemateca, the Associação de Comunicação Educativa Roquette Pinto (ACERP). In August, the Brazilian government took possession of the Cinemateca’s facilities, symbolically confiscating the keys in the presence of federal police. Shortly thereafter, the archive’s forty-one remaining staff members were summarily dismissed. ACERP never received the funds for their wages—they had gone unpaid since early April—and it seemed clear no agreement would be reached. While the government announced it would award a temporary contract to the Sociedade Amigos da Cinemateca (Society of Friends of the Cinémathèque) to administer the archive in December 2020, at this essay’s press time the contract was still unsigned and the Cinemateca remained closed. Unmistakably a manifestation of the right-wing Bolsonaro administration’s onslaught on the cultural sector, which included dissolving the Ministry of Culture and freezing state subsidies for Brazilian film production, the Cinemateca’s state of emergency was partly due to decades of inadequate financial support and precarious infrastructure, which contributed to the nitrate fires that struck the archive in 1957, 1969, 1982, and 2016. Considering how earlier moments inform these contemporary dilemmas, I identify the archives that emerged in post–World War II Latin America as a key site for examining the successes and limitations of the film preservation movement’s internationalization, given that Latin American institutions were the first outside the United States and Europe to participate in the movement’s expansion. Over a dozen cinémathèques were founded in the region between 1945 and 1965, typically through close contact with FIAF and with the organization’s secretary-general, Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque française, in particular. In addition to shedding light on long-standing disparities within the film preservation movement, attending to this institutional history can help us incorporate the values and practices of working archivists into academic discourse on “the archive.” Although they have [End Page 188] offered important correctives to approaches that treat archives as neutral repositories, media scholars often give short shrift to the theory and practice of professionals in the field, instead favoring sweeping declarations about archival configurations of knowledge...
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Dec 2, 2022
Ivana Zrinski + 6
Open Access
