On May 28, 2009 at 6:09 PM, Bill Brand wrote from MVD:
Hi Dan,
Our visit here continues what we were doing in Buenos Aires. We are advising on archives much more resource and information starved than the Museo del Cine. Mostly, we're seeing personal home movie collections in 8mm & Super 8 but also 16mm. At our workshop we demonstrated inspection, cleaning and repair -- of course without film cement or a tape splicer.
The Uruguayan desire to preserve or recover their visual history is driven by the disruption of their historical memory from the dictatorship and by the fact of a fire in the national film archive that destroyed their largest moving image collection. The people here are embarking on a project to try to retrieve, reconstruct and resume their archive. This includes information and memory of Latin America's first and longest running experimental film festival starting in the late 1940s and continuing into the 60s or 70s before the dictatorship.
Later in the afternoon Katy and I presented a program of our films and videos at the Catholic University. People in the audience were texting friends to come quickly and eventually they couldn't fit in the room. There must have been over 75 people. The interest was very intense and many of the questions were technical in nature. In attendance were students, faculty, artists, curators, and people from the national film archives and SODRE's Archivo Nacional de la Imagen. [SODRE = Servicio Oficial de Difusión Radiotelevision y Espectáculos]
The demand for los archiveros sin fronteras is quite overwhelming!!!
Here's a link to pictures from the workshop: http://facmvd.blogspot.com/
Here are some jpgs from the show. (Fotos de Katy Martin)
