Archival Spaces 247
Cinemateca Brasileira in Crisis
Downloaded 17 July 2020
Earlier this year in an article in The Journal of Film Preservation (No. 102, 2020), I noted the following: “While archives and libraries are perceived by the general population to be bastions of stability, their existence and mandate to conserve and preserve consciously welded together, the real-world fact is that the operation of an archive is indeed no guarantee that its contents will ultimately be preserved… While factors external to the archive often lead to its demise, internal issues can also come into play.” Sadly, another example of this truism recently made headlines, when the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo was restructured and defunded by the right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro and may now disappear altogether; A tragedy, given this is the largest and one of the oldest film archives in Latin America.
In January 2019, the President of Brazil eliminated the Ministry of Culture, under whose aegis the Cinemateca operated, and turned it into a special secretariat. Throughout the year, the government removed qualified employees from the Archive, in order to place political patrons in those jobs. In December 2019, the government revoked the contract of the privately-owned non-profit, the Associação de Comunicação Roquette Pinto (ACERP), which had been managing the Archive since March 2018, thus eliminating all funding for the Cinemateca. Since then the Archive has been operating without funding from the government. Disaster struck again in February 2020 when a huge flood damaged the Cinemateca’s screening facility in downtown Sao Paolo, causing the destruction of 100,000 DVDs. A meeting between ACERP and the Brazilian government in late May failed to reach an agreement, when ACERP asked to be refunded $2 million for expenses in 2019. According to press reports, ACERP has spent another $ 750,000 on the Cinemateca so far in 2020, without reimbursement. Other newspaper reports indicate that the government plans to close the Cinemateca Brasileira, which would orphan all its valuable collections.
Like many moving image archives in Third World countries, but especially in Latin America, the Cinemateca Brasileira has had a troubled history, moving from feast to famine and back. Founded in 1949 as the Filmoteca do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (The São Paulo Modern Art Museum Film Archive), its Board of Directors created a non-profit organization in 1956, the Sociedade Civil Cinemateca Brasileira (renamed Fundação Cinemateca Brasileira in 1961) to fund the organization. Its greatest public champion in the early years was the internationally known film historian and critic, Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes, who was a friend of Henri Langlois and published an important book on Jean Vigo.
In 1984, the Cinemateca was taken over by the federal government, becoming a public corporation under the Fundação Nacional Pró-Memória (Pro-Memory National Foundation), transferring to the Ministry of Culture’s Audiovisual Secrretariat in 2003. In subsequent years, the Ministry of Culture under the leftist government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva funneled generous subsidies to the Archive through the Sociedade Amigos da Cinemateca (SAC – Friends of the Cinemateca Association), allowing the Cinemateca to expand its physical plant, especially its screening spaces, and personnel budgets. In 2006, the Cinemateca Brasileira hosted the FIAF Congress (International Association of Film Archives). Unfortunately, its visible success also brought criticism from filmmakers, producers, and researchers who accused the directors of a lack of transparency in access policies and expenditures. These issues lead to an audit by the Federal Budget Control Office in 2013, and incoming President Dilma Rousseff’s Ministry of Culture replacing archive leadership and instituting and staff cuts, but failing to deal with the Archive’s systemic problems.
A fire in the Archive’s nitrate vaults in February 2016, caused, according to some by the Ministry’s negligence, precipitated the transfer of the Cinemateca’s preservation activities to ACERP, in essence offloading the government’s responsibility to a private entity. Thus, the Cinemateca’s problems began long before the present government, as noted by Rafael de Luna in a blog on 2 June 2020 (http://preservacaoaudiovisual.blogspot.com/). For example, the Archive had in the well-funded years before 2013 failed to establish a nitrate film preservation program, unlike most other international archives, so that when the fire occurred, 40% of the lost films were unique and irreplaceable. Furthermore, the Cinemateca’s laboratory, which featured analog and digital reproduction capabilities, never worked at full capacity, thus often wasting valuable public funding.
In any case, we can only hope that the Cinemateca Barsileira survives any attempts by the present fascist government to kill it. Brazil has a rich history of moving image production from the early avant-garde masterpiece, Mário Peixoto’s Limite (1930) to the Cinema nuovo movement of the 1960s, including Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Ruy Guerra, and Carlos Diegues, to the telenovelas brasileñas of the 1990s. That history is now in danger of being lost. You can support the Cinemateca Brasileira by signing a petition at this link. https://secure.avaaz.org/po/community_petitions/governo_federal_secretaria_especial_de_cultura_sec_cinemateca_brasileira_pede_socorro/?rc=fb&utm_source=sharetools&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=petition-1021104-cinemateca_brasileira_pede_socorro&utm_term=omAFqb%2Bpo&fbclid=IwAR2k50GZwE4YHe-hFwRiYtf5Nfkg6mly0Nj2gFFR62pEWSxGbcp0j91g8LM
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