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IMPERFECT ARCHIVES AND THE PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL PRAXIS IN THE HISTORY OF FILM PRESERVATION IN LATIN AMERICA

2013; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5749/movingimage.13.1.0066

1542-4235

Janet Ceja Alcalá,

Photographic and Visual Arts

Imperfect Archives and the Principle of Social Praxis in the History of Film Preservation in Latin America Janet Ceja Alcalá (bio) [End Page 66] Prelude On a walk in Viriato Beach, Cuba, I could not stop imagining emulsions deteriorating on the mass of motion pictures I had seen earlier in the week at the Cinemateca de Cuba’s film archive. The airconditioner at the film archive looked as though it had stopped working a long time ago, and I wondered which titles would survive to be seen in their original format. Cuba’s “special period,” the severe economic crisis that hit the island in the 1990s, is a time to be reckoned with in any future research on Cuba’s history of motion pictures. Since 1962, there has been a nearly complete embargo against Cuba by the United States.1 Starting with the Eisenhower administration, countries that trade with or assist the island are also threatened with sanctions. I was visiting Cuba in 2008 as part of the School on Wheels [End Page 67] program of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film’s (International Federation of Film Archives; FIAF). In 2002, Iván Trujillo Bolio, Mexican preservation specialist and past president of FIAF, Paolo Cherchi Usai, founder of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, and Steven Ricci, founding director of the moving image archives studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles, dreamed up the idea of the School on Wheels as an alternative to the FIAF Summer School.2 The School on Wheels was a response to the fact that the institutions hosting FIAF Summer Schools or offering formal film preservation education programs are almost exclusively based in Europe and the United States.3 The school’s model was meant to redirect this Euro–U.S.–centric situation by reaching out to constituents in developing countries where opportunities for professional training are scarce and financial difficulties often create insurmountable problems. The strength of the School on Wheels is that it leverages the knowledge of its FIAF members by having them travel to other countries to share their expertise and address archival concerns at the host institutions.4 I was asked to give a talk on the School on Wheels initiative and other educational opportunities in moving image archiving. Yet the presentation left me ambivalent because I was promoting educational initiatives in the United States and Europe in an impoverished and blockaded Cuba, from the same privileged position the School on Wheels was trying to transgress. The feeling intensified on my walk at the beach when a woman with a baby waiting at a bus stop approached me. She pressingly asked if I knew what time the bus would arrive, and when I replied no, she revealed that she was searching for milk for her child because the bodegas in her vicinity had run out. At that point, the current deprivations and dehydrating tropics were transforming my own, out-of-place archive fever with this woman’s story. Her urgent search for milk began to replace my images of film emulsions being eaten away by the extreme heat and humidity of the tropical climate. Through the School on Wheels, I came to reason that the circumstances surrounding the films deteriorating at the Cinemateca de Cuba’s film archives and the Cuban mother not having access to food were both linked to the historical violence of a greater social and economic condition that has been starving Cuba for a long time. In 1992, the embargo against Cuba was reinforced with the Torricelli Act, passed just a year after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, and later with the even stricter Helms–Burton Act in 1996. With Cuba’s major ally no longer of assistance, the country was hit with an energy deficit that affected all areas of Cuban life, film archives being no exception, not to mention that only weeks after the Torricelli Act was passed, basic foodstuffs, such as oil, beans, and milk, became scarce on the island as freight [End Page 68] Click for larger view View full resolution Air conditioner at the Cinemateca de Cuba. Photograph by the author. [End Page 69...