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During the years before World War II and at least until 1942, Argentina was a disputed territory for the cultural diplomacy of Germany and the United States. In this paper we examine the distribution and exhibition of German films in cinemas of the city of Buenos Aires, as well as their reception by the press and cultural journals. We pay particular attention to the reconstruction of the circulation of the films that had a more preeminent Nazi ideology and the reactions that these produced among critics and intellectuals of the time. The research methodology used was based on the search and systematization of information in hemerographic archives (National Library, Tornquist Archives, CEDINCI). We show that the intellectual surveillance of fascist and nazist activities failed in most cases to detect the ideological and political contents in the German films.
BISSO, Andrés Acción Argentina: un antifascismo nacional en tiempos de guerra mundial (Buenos Aires, Prometeo, 2005). KLICH, I. (Comp.) Sobre nazis y nazismo en la cultura argentina (Gaithesburg, Ediciones Hispamerica, 2002). VANDE WINKEL, R y WELCH, D. Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema (Basingstoke [etc.]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
PhD in Social Sciences (UBA), MA in Cultural Sociology (UNSAM), Full time Adjunct researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET). Visiting professor at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB).
The movie “Inconfidência Mineira” (Carmen Santos, 1948) was awaited for twelve years. Announced in the Rio de Janeiro’s press in 1936, Brasil Vita Filme’s production only debut in 1948, accompanied by the voluminous content of journalistic articles.
The director Carmen Santos faced several problems during production. This proposal focuses solely on the analysis of events during the distribution and the exhibition of the film in 1948. In complaints described in “O Jornal” and “A Cena Muda” magazine, Carmen and other businessmen accused the businessman Severiano Ribeiro to setting up a film trust, dominating production, distribution and exhibition, stifling competition. The consequences of this dispute caused Carmen to strike a deal to screen her film on a smaller competing circuit owned by Vital Ramos de Castro.
Using the research in carioca journals of 1948, the purpose of this communication is to understand the economic disputes in that context and to analyze the impact of the film’s release on movie theaters in Rio de Janeiro, raising questions about the circuit chosen and published by “Jornal dos Sports”. How have movie theaters, architecture and location, as well as their programming, influenced the work’s trajectory, the type of audience, the critics What were the launching strategies designed to face the economic power of Severiano Ribeiro.
From the film object, we are interested in discussing how important the triangulation of cinematographic exhibition equipment, cinema programming and audience experiences are to history, as stated by Biltereyst, Lotze and Meers (2012). It is necessary to have another look to rescue the work’s trajectory, contemplating the optics of movie theaters and the exhibition market, thinking of other research perspectives for the reconstruction of this cinematic past, as explained by Maltby (2011).
BILTEREYST, Daniël; MALTBY, Richard; MEERS, Philippe (eds.) Cinema, audiences and modernity: new perspectives on European cinema history. Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2012.
GONZAGA, Alice. Palácios e poeiras: 100 Anos de Cinemas no Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Record: FUNARTE, 1996.
MALTBY, Richard. New Cinema histories. In: ________. BILTEREYST, Daniel; MEERS, Philippe (orgs.). Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
PESSOA, Ana. Carmen Santos: o cinema dos anos 20. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2002.
Master student of the Postgraduate Program in Cinema and Audiovisual at the Fluminense Federal University/UFF. Bachelor of Social Sciences from the Federal University of São Carlos and Bachelor of Cinema and Audiovisual from UFF. Currently is a public employee, leading and programming a university movie theater, Cinearte UFF.
In the last few decades, a large number of books and articles appeared about the history of movie theaters in Paris (e.g. Lacloche, 1980; Meusy, 1995 / 2002; Frodon and Iordanova, 2016). Despite this extensive bibliography, however, the cinematographic exhibition spaces located in the suburbs of the French capital were almost never mentioned by their authors — for example those in Essone, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine et Marne, Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-de-Marne, Val d’Oise and Yvelines. In seeking to fill this gap, this paper aims at reconstructing the history of cinemas and other exhibition spaces located in the suburbs of Paris, as well as it wants to examine the cinema-going practices of its audiences (especially the portion made up by North African immigrants). Thereby we concentrate this research on the period known as les trente glorieuses (from 1945 to 1973), a time of significant economic growth in France when the movie theaters proliferated in these regions. This paper concentrates on an analysis of film programming in the year of 1952 in one key cinema in each of the seven peripheries mentioned above. The choice of 1952 is inspired by other New Cinema History-oriented projects (e.g. European Cinema Audiences, the Enlightened City project), and will enable us to work in a cross-city comparative manner. This paper, which is a first outcome of a larger research project, developed through an important partnership between the Fluminense Federal University / Brazil and Ghent University / Belgium, is located at the crossroads of New Cinema History, migration and diaspora studies.
Frodon, J.M.; Iordanova, D. (2016). Cinemas of Paris. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies.
Lacloche, F. (1980). Architectures de cinémas. Paris: Éditions du Moniteur.
Meusy, J.J. (1995/2002). Paris-Palaces ou le temps des cinémas (1894-1918). Paris: CNRS Éditions.
Maltby, R. (2007) “How Can Cinema History Matter More?”, Screening the Past 22. http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/22/board-richard-maltby.html
Ryan Brandão is currently doing a joint-PhD at Fluminense Federal University, Brazil (under the supervision of João Luiz Vieira) and at Ghent University, Belgium (under the supervision of Daniel Biltereyst). He recently co-edited Cinemas de Minas Gerais (2020, with A. Brum).
Daniel Biltereyst is Professor in Film and Media History at Ghent University, Belgium. Besides exploring new approaches to historical media and cinema cultures. He recently co-edited Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (2019, with R. Maltby and Ph. Meers), and Mapping Movie Magazines (2020, with L. Van de Vijver).
This paper will examine programming carried out by the non-commercial institution the Highlands and Islands Film Guild in Scotland during the post-war period. It will compare the time between the initial release of feature films in cinemas on 35mm throughout the rest of the UK and their appearance in the Highlands and Islands on the substandard gauge of 16mm. Programming policy sought to include the views of representatives of the audiences from the areas served on programming committees, and management of the institution also endeavoured to know and predict the generic preferences of different communities across the areas they served. Critical summaries of forthcoming features were also included in parts of the local press to help to encourage interest in films. The advertised films were not always the latest releases but reflected a pragmatic decision-making process based on negotiations with distributors and budget. Discussion of decisions taken on programming will be combined with audience responses and memories of their cinema-going experience.
I argue that while the feature films programmed were not insignificant and became more important as the novelty of the cinema wore off from the middle of the 1950s onwards; audiences attended and took pleasure in the cinema for reasons that included the visiting attraction of the improvised, intimate and communal non-theatrical cinema, and for youngsters – the negotiation of permission from their parents to go to the film show.
Peter Bosma, Film Programming: Curating for Cinemas, Festivals, Archives, London, Wallflower Press, 2015.
Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson eds. Useful Cinema, London, Duke University Press, 2015.
Richard Maltby, Daniël Biltereyst and Philippe Meers eds. Explorations in New Cinema History, Approaches and case studies, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Joe Kember, ‘What is an exhibition culture’, Early Popular Visual Culture, vol. 8, no.4, 2010, pp.347-350.
I am a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies. My current research is concerned with the history of non-theatrical exhibition and rural cinema-going experience during the post-war period and the overlap between the 16mm film apparatus and broadcast television.
