It wasn't even a month ago when Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho made a plea at the Cannes Film Festival for people all around the world to discuss what was happening to the Cinemateca Brasileira (or Brazilian Cinematheque, if you will). As the Bacurau helmer mentioned the 500,000 lives that our country lost due to COVID-19 and how the Jair Bolsonaro administration (if you can even call them an administration) is truly responsible for those deaths, it was inevitable that that neglect would extend to other parts of the society. Which brought him to talk about the Cinemateca. In fascist governments, culture and knowledge are threats, and yesterday, the whole world saw just another chapter of this horror fest as some of our most precious memories caught on fire.
For the past year, the Brazilian Cinematheque, in São Paulo, has been closed. The archives that held more than 240,000 film reels were left to their own luck, as all the workers who took care of that historic treasure were fired...
The abandonment caught the ear of Martin Scorsese. Last November, the director and champion of film preservation wrote that was made public by fellow filmmaker Walter Salles, voicing his worry on the potential losses we could suffer. They are not potential anymore, as, according to Brazilian news outlet G1, the blazes have destroyed films by important directors like Glauber Rocha, some of the earliest Brazilian television programs, archives from institutions like Embrafilme and Concine, documentaries, commercials, student films and film equipment.
This past April, the workers of the Cinemateca published a manifesto, remembering the other four fires the institution had suffered. "The possibility of cellulose nitrate films self combusting and the consequent risk of fire often receives a lot of attention from the public and the media (....). The risk of a new fire is real (...). This collection requires stable temperature and humidity, and, in the absence of such conditions, it suffers a drastic acceleration of its deterioration process", they wrote.
The National Museum of Brazil in 2018
What happened this past Thursday was no accident. Everybody knew the danger that would come with the lack of maintenance of the material kept at that shed. The manifest written by the workers reinforces that, while also remembering the lack of a specialized janitorial staff, security team and firemen. This has happened recently in other places, too. In 2018, the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro was the victim of a similar fate; Fossils, art pieces and thousands of documents are gone.
Unfortunately, we're living at a time where culture and memory are considered to be - as the Bolsonaro followers like to say - a "waste of money". There is no Ministry of Culture anymore. It has been reduced to a smaller structure, led by Mario Frias, a former actor that prides himself on carrying a gun around and with an artistic body of work and knowledge so mediocre that he can show up to the Venice Biennale and say he never heard of Lina Bo Bardi, the legendary Brazilian architect that was receiving a tribute. Artists like Fernanda Montenegro (the center of a brilliant piece written by Claudio earlier this week) and Sonia Braga (a recent nominee here for Best Actress) are insulted daily. Our future is scary and, now, our past is non existent.
There’s no restoring what’s been lost. We’re watching the destruction of a country’s film archives because of bureaucratic neglect and cruelty. This has been happening to cultural institutions across Brazil, per @Ela_Bittencourt’s reporting https://t.co/XDRifsb1ay h/t @bealoayza https://t.co/yDg2tUX1lB
— Monica Castillo (@mcastimovies) July 29, 2021