It is a fact that the death of cinema is intertwined with the prosperity of the medium itself, ever since the father of the Lumière brothers stated that cinematography was an invention without commercial viability, which could only be exploited from mere scientific curiosity. If technological transitions led to the belief that television and home video could displace the place of cinema, the form of exhibition that continues this confrontation is the virtual room. The cyclical nature of historical processes only insists, and this reiteration of the fear of the extinction of movie theaters is crystallized to understand the dilemmas of technological advances. The curious thing is that this fear has been fostered in the possibility of reproducing the experience of theaters from the comfort of home, when this promise of imitation has only clarified the irreplaceability of the physical room, which implies a conception of ritual in the aura that it confers to its experience, both by the appearance of light in the darkness and by the collectivity of the pact during the projection.
The truth is that we have fewer physical cinemas than before, but even at the time when we could not sit in the seats due to the pandemic, we were able to access international filmography thanks to digital platforms. Each viewing mode has a series of irrevocable properties and limitations, why should we conceive an antagonism between these multiple forms of viewing, instead of thinking of them as complementary tools? In any case, if there is one political problem among the many that Uruguayan cinema has, it is its dissemination. On this subject, the coordinator of Cinemateca María José Santacreu states: “We believe that the streaming can extend the life of films, as they find other windows to be seen. We believe that all this generates an ecosystem and that, following a logic that respects it, cinema can go through the different stages of its exhibition.” Santacreu also remembers when RomaCuarón’s acclaimed film, filled the Cinemateca halls even though it had appeared on Netflix with minimal time difference. So the institutional response that she and her team have found to this problem of coexistence with virtual platforms is their own platform called +Cinemateca, which appeared during the pandemic, but continues to move forward. Within +Cinemateca, the Félix Oliver room is a virtual venture that facilitates public access to national filmography from the modest monthly fee of 120 pesos, also offering the possibility that non-member users can pay for the film. payperview of any particular title.
The platform has a catalogue that displays as much as it promises the frequent expansion of a comprehensive selection, in a proposal that poses a question: how is it defined what type of cinema deserves to be represented by this curatorship? This is expanded with the question that Santacreu brought to our conversation: “What makes Uruguayan cinema Uruguayan? […] There are many directors who do not subscribe to the idea of a national cinematography. Is there, for example, a Finnish, Spanish or Italian cinema? And if so, what makes it such? We could say that Italian cinema is made by the emblematic films of that cinema. But it is a cinema that extends across many styles and kinds of films. So could a national cinema be faithfully represented if the inclusion criteria are biased by its most resounding titles or by prefigured aesthetic inclinations? Would this not be a form of negligent elimination in the face of the complexity of the challenge? Santacreu remarks that there is no doubt about the preservation of films like Whiskywhich celebrates its 20th anniversary with screenings every Wednesday in September and which will surely continue to be seen for another 100 years. But what about all those films that escape official canonization? “It is serious to ignore all that production and it is even more serious when it is national production and it is not recorded anywhere because it is not preserved. It is an omission that we want to help correct.” So, if the objective maintains a plural idea of national cinema, the limits of how we conceive it must be opened. “When creating a platform for Uruguayan cinema, what is most important is not to answer what makes a film Uruguayan, but to say what is known as Uruguayan cinema and what problems we have in accessing it; therefore, the criteria is broad.”
The beginning of being able to challenge our limits is, first, the doubt about what we call a film. The name of the platform invokes the director responsible for our first film record, Bicycle race at the Arroyo Seco velodromewhich represents a historic gesture that leads us to the expectation of understanding all national cinema as cinema from its origins – at the press conference, the trailer for a documentary about Oliver’s life was shown –. But the platform also includes works that traditionally do not meet our presumption of what a film is, especially because their inclusion is important for understanding the traces of our idiosyncrasy. There is an archive section with pieces such as the centenary of the burial on Uruguayan soil of the remains of Artigas, but also one with the first short films by directors such as Federico Veiroj or Pablo Dotta, which builds a genealogy of the great feature-length fiction films from Uruguay. At the same time, there are short films by directors without a feature film released: proud short filmmakers and possible feature filmmakers of the future. These are materials that are difficult to project in theaters because there is an economic expectation to validate the investment of a movie ticket, and how could charging for a one-minute material be justified? But theaters require money to circulate, and it is not always possible to generate a block of short films, so these materials become prone to oblivion due to the lack of exhibition. However, “discarding short films would be like throwing away all short stories and keeping novels because they are longer, discarding a whole brilliant genre.”
Of course, we must be careful with utopian optimism, since the absolute completeness of the representation of Uruguayan cinema is impossible. Currently there are films missing from the platform that, perhaps, will never be present. There is a whole dimension of distribution rights that prevents any ideal of a perfect platform where all our cinema is exposed. Although, at least, to combat the unpredictability of permanence in the streamingCinemateca promises that it will not be subtracting titles and that there will be a sustained accumulation over time. But this implies a difficulty that does not exist, for example, in home video: the useful life of the page depends on the continuous maintenance of the web. And it would not be the first perishment of an incursion of such properties: if something is neglected, access to those films is lost. But Santacreu communicates his will on behalf of Cinemateca: “It is a reconstruction that is yet to be done, so, at this point, we are undertaking a project that reflects a beginning and an intention.”
