Historical Research in Latin-American Cinema: Perspectives and Challenges in the Digital Age

Abstract

The main purpose of this special issue is to reflect on the current state of cinema historical research in the Latin American world, considering the challenges it poses to contemporaneity and existing perspectives. One of the main tasks of film historians is to develop a system for understanding past experiences that link film analysis and production data - in their different manifestations - with contextual issues. We aim to assess the state of new approaches, new objects and new problems in recent historical research and explore the possibilities in articulating theory and practice. As widely known, Latin American audiovisual archives and cinémathèques have been at great risk, most recently, the Cinemateca Brasileira. It is never enough to emphasize the strategic importance of these collections, since they store films, posters, scripts and reports. Articulated by the researcher’s chosen methods, the formation of thematic and conceptual axes or the constitution of a periodization, these documents enable us to build the history of a certain cinematography. In 2020, digital technologies were the privileged form of access to film and documentary sources, which has undoubtedly accentuated the challenges posed since the early 21st century. If our visual understanding of film is changing with its display on cell phones and computers, there is also a growing loss of contact with the materiality of the sources due to the continuous use of digital databases and repositories of documentary sources. To think about the implications of this situation in cinema history is one of the objectives of this special issue.