Archival Spaces

247: Cinemateca Brasileira in Crisis

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

Nelson Pereira dos Santos in Los Angeles with author, 2012

246: Fall of France, June 1940

Archival Spaces 246

Lion Feuchtwanger and the Fall of France, June 1940

Downloaded 3 July 2020

Nazi dictated Armistice signed on 22 June 1940 at Compiegne, France

Eighty years ago, the German Wehrmacht began its invasion of France and Benelux (10 May 1940), surrounding British and French forces at Dunkirk, and occupying Paris on 14 June. It was a staggering defeat for the French, whose military simply collapsed almost without a fight, leading to the signing of a Nazi dictated Armistice on 22 June in a railroad car at Compiégne. Adolf Hitler insisted on the location, because it was where the German Imperial Army agreed to the 1918 Armistice, where the nation had been “stabbed in the back.” The terms of the Armistice allowed the Germans to occupy all of northern France, the country’s Atlantic coast and hinterlands, while southern France remained in the hands of a new proto-Fascist French government at Vichy, headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, while the Provence and most of Savoy were occupied by Italy, which had declared war after the French capitulated. The French government had imprisoned thousands of anti-Nazi Germans, Austrians, and other Central Europeans in internment camps as early as September 1939, but the Armistice now called for the Vichy French to deliver these “enemies of Germany” to the Nazis for deportation to Concentration Camps. Among those interned were countless, German-Jewish writers and intellectuals, including Lion Feuchtwanger.

Although most Americans don’t necessarily remember the name today, Lion Feuchtwanger was one of the most successful German writers of the first half of the 20^th century. Born in Munich in 1884, Feuchtwanger came to prominence in 1925 when he published the novel, Jud Süss, translated into 17 languages, and available in English under the title Power (1926). Subsequent novels, including Success (1930), Josephus (1932), The Oppermanns (1933), The Jew of Rome (1935), The Pretender (1936), and Paris Gazette (1940), were all best-sellers in translation for Viking Press. Meanwhile, the Nazis burned all of Feuchtwanger’s books on 10 May 1933, declaring him “No. 1 Enemy of the People,” and ransacking his Berlin villa, destroying his priceless library. Feuchtwanger was on an American book tour at the time, which allowed him to relocate with his wife, Marta, to Sanary-sur-mer, near Toulon in Southern France. With the beginning of World War II in September 1939, Feuchtwanger was interned by the French at Les Milles, near Aix-en-Provence, but released after 10 days, due to international protests. He was imprisoned there for a second time on 24 May 1940. The story of his internment and miraculous escape was published in his book, The Devil in France. My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940 (Viking Press, 1941), which was republished by USC Libraries in 2012.

Rainer Ehrt, “Les réfugiés de Sanary-sur-Mer, Midi”, 2018.
German emigres in exile in Sanary-sur-Mer: On the quay wall on the left Egon Erwin Kisch and Marta Feuchtwanger Sitting in the front row from left: Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Katia Mann, Heinrich Mann, René Schickele, Julius Maier-Graefe, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Franz Werfel In the second row from the left: Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Wolf, Christiane Grautoff, Ernst Toller, Erika Mann, Nelly Man, Klaus Mann, Golo Mann, Hermann Kesten, Joseph Roth.

Given his extremely exposed position, and the certainty that war was an inevitable consequence of Hitler’s lust for power, why hadn’t Feuchtwanger left France sooner? He may have been lulled by Sanary’s amazing community of German exiles that included Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Erwin Piscator, Arnold Zweig, Ernst Toller, and Klaus Mann, among others. His income allowed him to live anywhere, but as Feuchtwanger noted in The Devil in France: “What held me was the pervasive comfort of living in Sanary, the beauty of the place, my well-fashioned house, my beloved library, the familiar frame of my work that suited me and my methods down to the last detail, the hundred little nothings of our life there that had become dear habits which would have been painful to give up.” (p. 30) Feuchtwanger would recreate that environment from scratch, down to the world-class library, in Pacific Palisades, CA., moving into the Villa Aurora in 1943.

The internment camp at Les Milles was nothing more than an abandoned brickyard, where thousands of internees slept on bare dirt floors in a three story factory with broken windows but spent their days and meals outside under the hot unforgiving sun. The latrines were dugouts, there was no place to wash and water was so scarce that it had to be used for drinking only. These conditions worsened, as more prisoners arrived once the French decided to arrest all Czech and Austrian nationals, even those who had become French citizens or had been in the Foreign Legion. According to Feuchtwanger, this horrendous situation was not a product of French maliciousness, or any deliberate intent, but rather the (French) “Devil of Untidiness, of Unthougtfulness, of Sloth-in-Good-Will, of Convention, of Routine, the very Devil to whom the French have given the motto, ‘je m’n fous’ = ‘I don’t give a damn.’ (p. 53)”

Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger in Pacific Palisades, CA.

On the day the Armistice was signed, Feuchtwanger and other internees were put on a train, which traveled to Toulouse, then to Bayonne on the Atlantic (where it was rumored they would be handed over to the Wehrmacht), then back East to Nimes, where they were deposited in an open field surrounded by barbed wire and kept there for months in makeshift tents. With the help of the American Consul in Marseilles, Hiram Bingham, Feuchtwanger flees and is hidden in the Consul’s home, while his wife, Marta, escapes from an internment camp at Gurs and joins him. After an attempted escape by ship from Marseilles fails in August, the Feuchtwangers travel to Cerbère on the French Spanish border in September 1940, accompanied by Waitsell Sharp, an American Unitarian minister with Red Cross papers. From there, the party climb by foot over the Pyrenees, illegally cross the border, and then make their way to Lisbon. Even though Lisbon is crawling with Nazi spies with orders to kill the novelist, Lion Feuchtwanger manages to board a ship for New York with an American visa under the name of Wetcheek (a literal translation of his last name). Marta follows two weeks later on another ship.

After World War II, Lion Feuchtwanger was hounded by the FBI as a supposed “premature anti-Fascist” with leftist sympathies and denied American citizenship in 1948. Feuchtwanger died in Los Angeles in 1958, followed by Marta in 1987. Feuchtwanger’s Villa Aurora is now a German Cultural Center.

German writer Walter Hasenclever was not so lucky. He committed suicide in Les Milles the day the Armistice was signed, while Walter Benjamin, fearing being returned to France after being arrested by the Spanish police in the Pyrenees, hanged himself on 26 September, a week after the Feuchtwangers had passed the very same location. Robert Liebmann, Weimar Germany’s most successful scriptwriter, was arrested in Paris by the French police, sent to the Drancy Internment Camp, and eventually transferred to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in July 1942. Nearly 75,000 French, German, and Polish Jews were deported by the French to Nazi Germany and almost certain death. Not until 1995 did the French government apologize for its role in the Holocaust.

Rounded-up foreign Jews in Paris in August 1941, Courtesy Bundesarchiv, Berlin.

245: Strawberry Statement’s 50th

Archival Spaces 245

50^th Anniversary, The Strawberry Statement (1970)

Downloaded 19 June 2020

The Strawberry Statement (1970, Stuart Hagmann), based on a bestselling book by James S. Kunen, premiered 50 years ago on 15 June 1970. That academic year I was a college freshman in Athens, Ohio, when reading the novel was de rigeur. as were other youth movement favorites, including One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest (1962, Ken Kesey), Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966, Richard Fariña), Getting Straight (1967, Ken Kolb), and Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968, Tom Wolfe). I read them all, was active in the peace movement, traveling to Washington in November 1969. Early March saw large demonstrations at Ohio U. against a planned tuition hike, where local farm boys were given badges and billy clubs to beat up students. Two months later, the University closed prematurely, due to four days of partially violent anti-war demonstrations, in the wake of the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State killings at our sister school. Naturally, I had to see the movie, The Strawberry Statement.

Starring Bruce Davidson, Kim Darby, and Bud Cort, Statement’s locale was moved by Hollywood from Columbia University, the site of book’s action to a fictitious university in Stockton, CA, representing San Francisco State, a hotbed of student radicalism at that time. In the film, an apolitical male student joins campus protests, because he is getting a lot of sex meeting young women at demonstrations. Even though the film won a Jury Prize at Cannes, The Strawberry Statement flopped miserably, attacked by American critics, and shunned by under 30 audiences as completely inauthentic. With a production budget of $ 1.5 million, the film’s domestic gross amounted to $ 804,274, a $ 2 million loss, if you add advertising costs. For me and my friends, the film was a typical Hollywood cop-out, which disappointed as much as the studio adaptations Getting Straight (1970, Richard Rush) and Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1971, Jeffrey Young) would be. In truth, I remember very little about The Strawberry Statement, except for the climactic scene which featured John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band performing “Give Peace a Chance,” while riot police toss tear gas and beat up students.

The Strawberry statement would hardly be worth a mention, much less a blog, except for the fact that the film had a strange afterlife. In the Communist German Democratic Republic, of all places, a dubbed version became a huge box office hit, a symbol of resistance for young people living under East Berlin’s authoritarian regime. I first heard this story from Prof. Jörg Schweinitz, who had grown up in East Germany and I met at a conference in Leipzig in 2016. He later sent me an article, published in 2010 in an anthology on film reception, “Ein amerikanischer Spielfilm als ‹Kultfilm› in der DDR” (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278749912_Ein_amerikanischer_Spielfilm_als_Kultfilm_in_der_DDR_1968_The_Strawberry_Statement_und_die_Dialektik_der_Rezeption). According to Schweinitz, the West German synchronized version of Strawberry, Blutige Erdberren (Bloody Strawberries), premiered in the GDR on 3 March 1973. While West Germans have no cultural memory of the film, hardly any East German who entered adulthood in the 1970s has forgotten it, many having viewed it multiple times. Even after German reunification, the “cult film” remained popular in the East, a worn out 35mm print playing weekly for years in an East Berlin cinema. As late as 2003, the German distributor purchased a new print, specifically for screenings in East Germany.

For Germans born in the GDR in the postwar period to 1960, The Strawberry Statement became a part of their collective imaginary, identifying them as a community, much as The Rocky Horror Show (1975) functioned for British and American kids coming of age around the same time. The question is why? Schweinitz notes that the GDR under Erich Honecker was going through a particularly repressive period, during which the Communist government rigorously controlled all aspects of daily life, especially public media. The Strawberry Statement offered youth there a vision of sexual liberation, “a playfulness, desire to break out, youthful romance, moral commitment, and gentle irony” (Schweinitz, p. 459), so completely different from the humorlessness and prudishness of Stalinist bureaucrats. The film’s soundtrack alone, featuring rock stars John Lennon, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Neil Young, Buffy St. Marie, and Thunderclap Newman, presented songs that were unavailable for purchase and could only be heard on West German radio.

Like Cat Ballou (1965), To Sir With Love (1967), and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), The Strawberry Statement was one of the few American films purchased by the Communist state film distributor for screening in the GDR. One can speculate that the government thought the film’s unflattering view of the United States fit in with its anti-American policy. But as Schweinitz notes, the reception context is everything. Whereas American youth saw the film as a disingenuous product of Hollywood fantasy, East Germans viewed the film in an environment of a repressive regime. East German youth clearly identified with the students in The Strawberry Statement, seeing their (sexual) revolution for the hell of it in stark contrast to the tired, old revolutionary slogans of their elders, and offering them a powerful fantasy of liberation.

Kristen Van Buren and Bruce Davison in *The Strawberry Statement* (1970)

Given the film’s importance in the collective imaginary of his generation, Schweinitz makes the final theoretical point that we must modify our parochial notions of national cinema, including not just domestic productions, but also widely distributed foreign titles, if we are to understand how cinema enters into our cultural memory. I would add that moving image archivists should probably be preserving dubbed versions of foreign language films that have had a demonstratively similar impact on the collective imaginary, a practice that is rarely implemented at the moment.

244: Orphan Film Symposium 2020

Archival Spaces 244

Orphan Film Symposium Online 2020

Uploaded 5 June 2020

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s Orphan Symposium, which was to be held in Amsterdam from 23-26 May, was moved online via Vimeo, beginning Tuesday, May 26^th and continuing for four days. The original interrelated Symposium themes, “Water, Climate, and Migration” were kept for the live streamed version, although I’m assuming the event was slightly abridged, given time constraints and rights issues. For Orphan founder and organizer Dan Streible, Professor at New York University’s Moving Image Archive Program (MIAP), however, it was no small feat to move online, after almost a year of planning with the Eye Institute in Amsterdam, the Symposium’s announced host. Thanks to former MIAP students, Paula Suárez, now Director of the Mexican documentary group, Ambulante, and Walter Forsberg, the Symposium was able to piggy back on Ambulante’s online film festival infrastructure, ably assisted by Edgar Domínguez and Manuel Guerrero. As a result, the Orphan Symposium ran like clockwork, except for a few minor streaming glitches, and was rewarded with an online audience of usually more than 100 participants for any individual event.

Being on West Coast time, I missed the first morning’s live stream, although I didn’t actually know it initially, because I mistakenly watched a couple pre-recorded presentations, including a 1911 Thanhauser film about death and destruction caused when the Bayless Damn broke in Austin, Pennsylvania. By the afternoon session, I had gotten into the groove, although it wasn’t until the next day that I figured out how to get into the simultaneous chat room (on the left side of the screen), which was a really great feature, because it allowed all the participants to comment, ask questions, and communicate with each other, as the presentations were unfolding, making for an extremely lively and interactive experience. For those that missed the Symposium, some of the films and presentations are still available (https://vimeo.com/user5490513).

**If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt?** **(1929, Fox Newsreel)**

One of the most iconic images of the Symposium, seen repeatedly in the opening trailer, was of the Statue of Liberty sinking into the ocean, an image taken from a 1929 Fox newsreel outtake, If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt?, introduced by MIAP students Shiyang Jiang, Zoe Yang, & Zhen Lai. Apparently never published at the time for being too phantasmagoric, 90 years later the image has become very real. Water as both a life-sustaining and hostile force informed other interventions, including Thanhouser’s Thirty Leagues Under the Sea (1914), William Beebe’s Bathysphere in Haiti and Bermuda (1927-1934), Heinrich Hauser’s The Aran Islands (1928), and Les Blank’s The Ways of Water (1971).

Ironically, Tuesday afternoon began with Linda Tadic of Digital Bedrock discussing the adverse environmental impact of digital archives (and by extension) the digital infrastructure that made the Symposium possible. While we often assume that digital is “clean,” it in fact leaves a huge carbon footprint from tons of ewaste containing heavy metals to extreme energy needs for cloud servers. Digital technology does come at a cost to the planet, just as previous forms of modernization have.

**Becoming Ocean (2018, Scott F. Foley)**

In just how the present ecological disaster is taking its total on all forms of human life was visualized by Eiren Caffall in a brave and shocking film. In Becoming Ocean (2018), she maps planetary climate change onto her own body in painful detail: she has a rare kidney disease and is “drowning” from within. That Caffall has outlived doctor’s predictions for decades, suggests a ray of hope for the earth.

That became clear watching Jennifer Lynn Peterson’s presentation of two 1927 National Parks Service films on road building, Wheels of Change and Roads in Our National Parks, which both still exuded optimism about future development. The Public Health Service’s Sources of Air Pollution (1962) and Countdown to Collision (1972) offered nearly apocalyptic and surprisingly prescient visions of our present ecological crisis. The latter film contains an ingenious scene of someone peeling off layers and layers of packaging, capturing in a visual nutshell our religion of waste. Equally prescient, if more depressing, was Rolf Forsberg’s short fiction film, Ark (1970), in which a man attempts to create a sustainable biosphere in an industrial wasteland, where survival is only possible with a respirator and a clear plastic hazmat suit, only to have it destroyed by other humans. Wildlife conservation and the Anthropocene was also the subject of a group of silent-era German nature films (Bird Images at Feather Lake, Around the World in 2 Hours, 1914-15), the former title featuring Lena Hähnle (1851-1941), an early leader in nature conservation,, as well as Western Greenland (1935) .

A completely different perspective on water was offered by Charles Musser and Walter Forsberg who presented the Union Films production of The Case of the Fisherman (1947), a previously lost film, recently found in the Pearl Bowser Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Shot in San Pedro, CA. for CIO’s fisherman’s union, the film countered the government’s suit to convict the union of Sherman Anti-Trust violations, claiming the fisherman were businessmen, rather than workers engaged in collective bargaining. Given the virtual disappearance of fishing industry in San Pedro, the film seems as anachronistic as the following film, the Soviet Let’s Get Acquainted (ca. 1972), which visualized fresh water fisherman in a pre-industrial never-never-land. On the other hand, Fisherman’s discourse on labor issues is as relevant today as ever.

**Case of the Fisherman** (1947, Carl Marzani, Union Films)

Labor, but also migration, informed the somewhat strange, industrial film, Hands Across the Border (1963), made by the Great Western Sugar Company about the so-called “Braceros,” Mexican workers imported by the agricultural industry from the 1940s to 1964. As presenter Jessie Lerner noted of this new digital restoration, the film is tinged with racism, even as it tries to assuage the white fear of brown people. Equally disturbing for their revelation of subconscious societal racism were Polish Settlements in Brazilian Wilderness (1933), which treated aboriginal people as fauna, Schwertmühle (1967-69), about migrants living in Germany in temporary displaced persons housing from the 1940s, and the Swedish, Medical Age Assessment (2017), whose subject were Middle Eastern émigrés.

*Polish Settlements in the Brazilian Wilderness* (1933)

However, the Orphan Film Symposium 2020 offered not only darkness, but also light in the guise of a series of remarkable avant-garde films, including Helen Hill Award winners Martha Colburn and Jaap Pieters, as well as the films of Tatjana Ivančić, Zora Lathan, and a sneak preview of Bill Morrison’s in progress The Village Detective. Apart from the films still available on line, I should mention the great Orphan Symposium blogs, which can be read at https://wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/.