| Description |
The main question that guides this research project is: what can Europe learn about its past and present film archiving and heritage practices through collections kept abroad? Focusing on Latin America, the objective of this Fellowship is to identify how the dissemination of European film heritage informs past and present archival practices, and the understanding of both European identity and its representations. It will analyse a decade (1948–1959) of circulation of films between both continents shaped by the creation of Cinematheques affiliated with the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). It will concentrate, more specifically, on the film exchanges between the Cinémathèque Française and the Cinematheques of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Nowadays, especially for younger generations, it is difficult to imagine the way films travelled in the 1950s. To gain a better understanding of why these four institutions entered this exchange circuit, it is necessary to analyse the actual corpus, especially now that digital technologies are making these films visible again. Adopting an inter-archival and multilingual methodology, which expands cross-continentally, this Fellowship will emphasise the transnational dimensions of film and to highlight the common connections between archival collections around the world. This innovative approach will demonstrate the value of analysing the history of exhibition abroad to review and complement the European film histories written until now. A thorough study of these channels of European film dissemination will also help to understand past European film archiving and heritage practices in order to assist present institutional and policy-making decisions related to film preservation, exhibition and accessibility more broadly.
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