More Information
Successful Planning Grant
The team at the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken completed a successful MEAP Planning Grant which catalogued the museum's Clippings Collection and surveyed materials related to the Ente de Calificación Cinematográfica (Film Censorship Committee) that was in charge of the revision and approval of scripts, films and releases in Argentina (1969–1984). The Planning Grant resulted in item level description of of 2,238 clippings as well as surveys for 139 Folders, holding 8895 clippings. This work also resulted in organization around three subsets: Topics, People and Films.
The description and organizing completed in this first phase allows the project team to jump into digitization and ensure that all digitized materials are described accurately and consistently across the collection.
Explore the collection inventory and surveys online(opens in a new tab)
New Project Phase: Digitization
As the project team at Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken moves into phase two of this project, they are working to digitize multiple media types simultaneously. What does that look like?
Thank you to the Museo team who have shared Behind the Scenes photographs documenting the full life cycle of a digitization project: training, digitization, file processing and metadata creation. In the images below, you can see the team engaged in two types of training: (1) metadata creation and translation; and (2) print digitization. You can also see the team working to digitize film reels.
Even in the early phase of the project, the team has already identified remarkable findings. Starting with the collection of scripts, the team found some notable cases of censorship, including:
- Multiple versions of the script for Proceso a la infamia (Alejandro Doria, 1978), written by Ulysses Petit de Murat and César Tiempo. Several annotations reflect edits to address notes from the Film Rating Authority. The scripts reveal that in some scenes a greater "presence of the Federal Police" was added at the express request of Miguel Tato (director of the ENTE) and that events in the film were explicitly described as "events that remained in the country's past" and were overcome in the present.
- Three versions of "Una mujer" (Juan José Stagnaro, 1975), by Aída Bortnik and Osvaldo Soriano, were identified. There is a 36-page difference between the first submitted version and the approved version. The film tells the story of a woman who, after spending a long period in prison, tries to reintegrate into society. The recognition of the new reality she must face alongside her husband and other members of her family is very complex. We assume the script was shortened by removing scenes that could not be shown explicitly in the years prior to the 1976 military coup.
- Of particular interest is the rejected script for Matar al ángel, by Antonio Cayro and Héctor Olivera from 1977. It includes a note from the production company Aries addressed to the Film Rating Agency that begins: "This is not a story of kidnappings, but of the fear of kidnapping." During those years, the military government that took office in 1976 was already kidnapping and detaining people, so the phrase could have been alluding to the political reality of the time.
