Cinemateca Brasileira

About

The Cinemateca Brasileira is the institution responsible for preserving Brazilian audiovisual production. In July 2021, it experienced a major fire. Since 1940, it has been developing activities around the dissemination and restoration of its collection, with around 250 thousand rolls of films and more than one million documents related to cinema. It is located in Largo Senador Raul Cardoso, São Paulo. The building previously acted as the Old Municipal Slaughterhouse of São Paulo from 1887 to 1927. It had the largest collection of "moving images" in Latin America and is one of the largest institutions of its kind in the world. It preserved a large part of the nation's cinematographic content and houses the greatest collection of Brazilian cinema, with more than 250,000 rolls of film. These corresponded to 45,000-90,000 titles among the works produced since 1895. The library collection consisted of more than 1,000,000 documents, including censorship certificates, invitations and a huge collection containing around 3,000 scripts and 8,000 movie posters, of which 2.6 are related to national cinema. In addition, it possessed a large collection of documents including books, magazines, original scripts, photography and posters. Its database offers online access through its website. The Cinemateca Brasileira project was born when Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, at the time a bachelor of philosophy from the University of São Paulo (USP), emigrated to Europe after escaping his arrest for having participated in the 1935 Communist Uprising. During his stay in France, he worked directly at the Cinémathèque Française, where he discovered the importance of audiovisual work's preservation. Back in Brazil in 1940, he started his project to spread this cinematographic culture in the country by founding, together with colleagues from USP including Décio de Almeida Prado and Antonio Candido, the first Clube de Cinema de São Paulo (Film Club of São Paulo). The Club proposed to study cinema through projections, conferences, debates and publications. However, the project struggled to grow. Created during the Estado Novo dictatorship period under the government of Getúlio Vargas, the first São Paulo Film Club was closed by the Press and Propaganda Department (DIP), forcing Emílio to operate clandestinely at the residence of Emílio Machado and Lourival Machado from 1941 onwards. After several attempts to organize film clubs, the creation of the second São Paulo Film Club was made official in 1946, 5 years after the closure of the first. Directed by Almeida Salles, Múcio Porphyrio Ferreira, Rubem Biáfora, Benedito Junqueira Duarte, João de Araujo Nabuco, Lourival Gomes and Tito Batini, the association brought back Emílio's idea and created the Cinemateca Brasileira. Emílio's experience as a researcher at the Cinémathèque Française and with Henri Langlois - the director of the institution - were partially responsible for his commitment to the creation of the Cinemateca. In September 1947, the Club joined the International Federation of Film Societies (IFFS), which provided access to a small collection of films, but the real construction of the film archive began in 1948, following the club's affiliation to the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). In March 1949, the club established an agreement with the then-recently created Modern Art Museum of São Paulo (MAM) for the creation of the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo. The aim was to strengthen the Cinemateca Brasileira with large exhibitions held in conjunction with other cultural institutions in São Paulo, and to generate spectators with critical capacity. The disbandment of the MAM in search of greater autonomy came in 1956, when the Club became a non-profit civil society of

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.