Reading the “Disappeared" Film Censorship Archive in Argentina
Today I am going to talk about three different points:
1. General thoughts on archives and its contradictory nature
2. I want to look at the specific case of a disappeared archive in Argentina.
3. Use this example to think about how this affects our work as film historians and film
scholars
1. Archives
I want to begin with this quote that I found in the Freud Museum in Vienna from Freud’s archive
because it brings together some of the ideas and thoughts from today’s talk
“Freud had little faith in archives: in his psychoanalytic theory they are frequently described as
sites of censorship since acts of remembering are closely related to forms of forgetting”
--Citation from Freud Museum in Vienna
What does this mean?
When we think about archives we think about places that preserve memory, where memory
transitions from an in camera private space to open up to worldwide public access. Archives are
literal and concrete spaces where those involved with historical inquiry engage with material
objects (Manoff, 18). But as acknowledged here in the quote from the Freud museum and as
historian Dominick Lacapra reminds us—there are dangers in fetishizing archives, mistakenly
allowing us to believe that they are substitutes for the “‘reality’ of the past, which is ‘always
already’ lost for the historian” (Lacapra, 92 cited in Manoff, 14). Any recreation of history will
always be flawed. These archives were never really “raw or primary” (Manoff, 16) as we may
have made them out to be, they are always assembled to lead later researchers in certain
directions. While there are always limits to the official record in the best of cases what about in
the worst of cases?
I will come back to this question because the case that I am speaking about is one of those worst
cases.
Already in my introduction we see a strong paradox that is at the very heart of the archive.
Jacques Derrida probably articulated best this contradictory nature in Archive Fever, the most
thorough reflection on the archive to date. If we return to Derrida’s text we can see what I mean.
In his psychoanalytic reading of the archive there exists a struggle between the death drive and
the pleasure principle. On the one hand in every archive there is a destructive force, which incites
forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, but also the eradication of the archive itself.
This contrasts with the acts of collecting, organizing and conserving the human record, which is
part the task of archiving. This dual function is intrinsic to all archives: let’s think about what is
left outside the archive and what makes it into the archive. Archiving already imposes a “poetics
of exclusion” as David Greetham has argued: we want to preserve the best of us for those who
follow. But this best of us may not necessarily be what those who follow may want to know.
Derrida makes clear that to archive is not only to preserve the past, but to affirm the present and
future. Destruction represents for Derrida a failure of the present in its responsibility to the future,
a valid point that establishes the intrinsic connection between past, present, and future.
*Let’s turn to the image of a performance by artist Sophie Calle, Appointment with Sigmund
Freud – which takes place in the Freud museum in London but stages many of these ideas that I
have just spoken about –paradoxes of the archive, what is present and what is absent, the
correlation between past and future as she imposes her own wedding dress on his couch. Her
own imposition on the space of the archive shows how archives are not static places.
As in most of his work, Derrida acknowledges the reproduction of power found in archives.
“There is no political power if not control of the archive, if not memory. Effective
democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and
access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.” (AF)
Access, constitution and interpretation are key points to an informed and democratic society.
This quote also makes us think about how archives are institutionalized? Who builds the archive
and for what purpose? And conversely who destroys the archive and why?
2. The Case Study
The Ente de Calificación Cinematográfica, created in a different version as early as 1963 was the
official body responsible for overseeing all films screened in Argentina until 1984. The work of
the Ente would gain moral and legal ground once the state passed law 18019 in 1968, which gave
this body the authority to make ideological and moral cuts on films. The Ente kept files for each
of the films that were vying for a certificate that would allow them to be screened in the nation. It
was the only way that a film could be shown publically. These files contained details about what
was considered “offensive” along with the filmic clippings of the scenes that were cut. Once the
Ente was disbanded in 1984 these files were moved to the then Instituto Nacional de Cine.
Researchers accessed these files in the early 1990s and as a result we have some very
rudimentary secondary documentation about the process and the types of films that were
censored at the time. Most of this documentation gives a general overview of censorship and
how it functioned, leaving many unanswered questions. Furthermore, the extensive work of two
scholars Paula Felix Didier and Fernando Martin Peña has never been published.
Between 1995 and 1999, during the Carlos Menem neoliberal years, the director of the INCAA,
Julio Maharbiz, wanted to microfilm all the files and then destroy them as they were taking up
too much space. The microfilming process was flawed and unsuccessful and even though
Maharbiz was aware of its failure he continued with the project. Once the microfilming was done
the files were destroyed or so this is the story I have been able to put together. This has meant the
end of the archive, and the destruction of probably one of the most important archives in
Argentine film history.
As we take a close look at the state of archives in Argentina the picture does not look any better.
A booklet edited by the Asociación Argentina de Estudios de Cine y Audiovisual titled: ¿Qué he
hecho yo para merecer esto? Guía para el investigador de medios audiovisuaels en la Argentina
laments the sorry state of audiovisual archives in the nation. According to these researchers there
are seven reasons why the situation is so disparate:
1. lack of public policy regarding the preservation of the local heritage
2. absence of a social consciousness about the importance of preserving the heritage
3. weakness of an institutional framework that revealed itself inefficient, inadecuate, and
incapable of adapting to the changes in the are of the preservation of archives
4. lack of a relevant and effective regulations for the protection of audiovisual heritage
5. lack of professionals educated in the areas of gathering, conservation, and preservation of
audiovisual archives
6. lack of instruments and support for the professionals in the areas of recollection, conservation
and diffusion of archives
7. low funding given to undertakings linked to investigation, recovery, preservation and diffusion
of audiovisual materials
But the problem of archival memory can be summarized as follows: funding, a question of space,
and not knowing the whereabouts of some of these collections (9) due to the lack of tradition and
history with archives. If we look at the sorry state of actual collections only 10 of the 300 silent
films made in Argentina exist today and as much as 50% of the sound films have been lost. The
only state supported entity, the INCAA, never has had “preservation” as part of its mandate. As a
matter of fact, when Fernando Solanas attempted to create CINAIN (Cinemateca y Archivo de la
Imagen Nacional) through law 25119, which was meant to preserve filmic memory and to alert
on the dangers of the possible disappearance of film and paper archives, Julio Maharbiz, was the
only director of the INCAA who was opposed to the creation of CINAIN (Solanas, 89).
3. The Future?
There is no coincidence that I started this talk with a quote from the Freud museum. As my own
interest in the work of sexploitation duo Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli has led me to discover this
lost archive and brought me here today to speak about it. I look to the work of film scholar Eric
Schaeffer, who in his quest to bring more rigor and historiography to the study of adult films has
fought to preserve the archives of these films because for him these films “engage a larger field
of contextual issues, religion and morality, social relations, law, biology, psychology, and issues
of identity: politics, power and pleasure.” For me, the work of Bó and Sarli is central to
understanding the history of sexuality in Argentina and throughout Latin America. Therefore the
implication of the loss of this archive is great in my own work.
So where to from here?
I go back to the ideas guiding scholars of archival exclusion, scholars trying to look at different
or subaltern voices within official archives that have silenced those voices. They find or read the
history in the remnants, gaps, silences, and absences. I will use that as an inspiration.
My ruins and fragments are these things. I have not lost hope to find more:
1. Article published by Maria Elena de las Carreras de Kuntz “El control del cine en la
Argentina. (Primera parte: 1968-1984). Gives a very general sense of the context and
some specific examples of the films censored. This is a great overview but the examples
are not extensive.
2. The work of Octavio Getino. He was one of the researchers that did access the files and
managed to take some photocopies of specific film files, which were later incorporated
into Cine argentine entre lo possible y lo deseable (CICCIS and INCAA, 1998). None of
these files are complete but they do give us a sense of what the files contained and how
they worked. They also give us insight into some of the problems with some of the films
he chose to study. These files are available through ENERC (Escuela Nacional de
Experimentación y Realización Cinematográfica).
3. Information from the press clippings at the time, interviews, etc.
4. The films and the different versions that I have found for each.
All of these traces help to begin reconstructing some of that lost history.
To wrap up I want to turn to the work of Susana Draper:
If we look at the different sites of memories within Argentina/Uruguay and Chile that have
popped up within the last 10 years we can see a trend towards what Susana Draper calls
“selective forgetfulness [that] has turned into a surplus in terms of controlled memory.” Again,
another contradiction: on the one hand the production of these spaces where memory thrives but
is still static and reproduced for consumption purposes (museums, torture centers, parks,
shopping malls), and on the other the loss, deterioration, and disposal of artifacts, in this case the
censorship archive that has been censored yet again through an aggressive and violent act
bringing about its disappearance during the neoliberal years when perhaps this was representing
not the best of us, but a failure indeed to our own future.
Bibliography:
Avellaneda, Andrés. Censura, autoritarismo y cultura: Argentina 1960-1983. Volume 1. Buenos
Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1986. Print.
Borgarello, E. Susana, and Francisco Cipolla. Regimen legal de calificación cinematográfica en
la República Argentina: poder de policía jurisprudencia. Córdoba: Editorial Advocatus, 2011.
Print.
de las Carreras de Kuntz, María Elena. “El control del cine en la Argentina. (Primera parte:
1968-1984).” Foro político. Revista del Instituto de ciencias políticas. 19 (April, 1997): 7-29.
Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.
Draper, Susana. Afterlives of Confinement: Spatial Transitions in Postdictatorship Latin America.
University of Pittsburg Press, 2012. Print.
Greetham, David. Who’s In, Who’s Out: The Cultural Politics of Archival Exclusion.” Studies in
the Literary Imagination 32.1 (Spring 1999): 1-28. Print.
Lacapra, Dominick. History and Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Monoff, Marlene. “Theories of the Archive from across the Disciplines.” Libraries and the
Academy 4.1 (2004): 9-25. Print.
Romano, Silvia, and Gonzalo Aguilar, eds. ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? Guía para el
investigador de medios audiovisuals en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Aeseca, 2010. Print.
Schaeffer, Eric. “Dirty Little Secrets: Scholars, Archivists, and Dirty Movies.” The Moving
Image 5.2 (Fall 2005): 79-105. Print.