The Documentary School oF Santa Fe and its founder, Fernando Birri, are inescapable references in the story of the New Latin American Cinema. The school grew out of a brief course offered by Birri in 1956. The young Argentine had...
moreThe Documentary School oF Santa Fe and its founder, Fernando Birri, are inescapable references in the story of the New Latin American Cinema. The school grew out of a brief course offered by Birri in 1956. The young Argentine had recently returned from studies at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and he was asked to help organize a course on film with the Instituto Social at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL) in Santa Fe, Argentina. The course was deemed a great success and, soon thereafter, Birri and the UNL institutionalized their efforts by establishing the Instituto de Cinematografía, which began offering classes in April 1957. In the years that followed, the IC would further consolidate itself, becoming known across Argentina and throughout Latin American for its focus on social issues of the time.
This chapter returns to 1956 and the beginnings of that experience. There, the local converged with the transnational, and an internationally renowned film program was born out of a faith in amateurs—their knowl- edge, their perspective, and their capacity for self-expression. In Part I, we show how Birri’s initial effort—an introductory course on documentary,offered at the university’s margins (as part of its extension program, out of the social sciences division), and counting among its enrollees painters, schoolteachers, lawyers, even social workers—drew inspiration in equal parts from professional and amateur realms. In Part II, we analyze a key aspect to the filmmaker’s early approach: the use of fotodocumentales—photodocumentaries or photo essays—as a first step for those learning to make films. We reconsider this practice of using photography and social surveys as borrowing from the possibilities of the amateur. The act of taking a pic ture or asking a question made the filmmaking effort accessible to enrollees with little or no background in production, and it was an adequate first step given the limited initial resources of the IC. Most important, fotodocumentales helped focused students’ attention on the capturing of local realities and on the social possibilities of the cinema. As such, although clearly part of a certain (socially and politically conscious) professionalization project, these practices belong to the broader field of amateur cinematic cultures for providing an alternative vision of cinema’s social function and an alternative means of institutionalizing nonindustrial cinematic practices. In Part III, we focus on the well-known documentary Tire-dié (1958–1960). We look at the project’s evolution from a student-made fotodocumental to the IC’s first documentary film, finished in 1958. We pay special attention to the film’s deliberately noncommercial character, both in terms of how it was produced and how it was used socially, across informal networks of exhibition, through community screenings and postscreening audience surveys. Finally, in Part IV, in order to show their impact in later professional film production at school, we return to those unpublished surveys. We note that Birri and his team utilized commentaries from nonfilmgoing audiences to assess their successes in film and to develop the next set of films—a series that, as with the others, featured almost exclusively amateur actors.
Birri himself was no “amateur,” and his film school quickly became a point of cinematic reference the Latin America, but the initiative, at least in its origins, stemmed from a bottom-up approach, one that drew inspiration, where not direct investment, from local, amateur practices and bases of knowledge. In many ways, it was the IC’s incorporation of amateur participants, from its students and its film subjects to the neighborhood audiences with whom it shared its films, as well as their association with alternative film cultures, such as local “foto” or “cine-clubs,” that proved an ideal means for training future professionals, thus demonstrating the fluid and productive boundaries between the amateur and the professional. In so doing, the IC’s particular approach charted a new path for the institutionalization of innovative cinematic practices.
In: In: Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla (eds.), Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures. Indiana University Press, 2021; 149-168.
