BEATRIZ TADEO FUICA
URUGUAYAN CINEMA, 1960–2010
TEXT, MATERIALITY, ARCHIVE
(first published 2017, Tamesis, Woodbridge)
#CoMoUruguay
the book is an overview of 50 yrs, divided into four parts.
each part contains a description of the political situation, the situation in film in general, and an elaboration on 3 specific movies.
(1960–1973)
1/ La ciudad en la playa AKA The City on the Beach (Ferruccio Musitelli, Sheila Henderson, Juan Noli, 1961)
2/ Carlos: cineretrato de un caminante en Montevideo AKA Carlos: Film-portrait of a Homeless Walker in Montevideo (Mario Handler, 1965)
3/ Refusila (GEC, 1969)
(1973–1985, dictatorship)
1/ El honguito feliz AKA The Happy Mushroom (CINECO, 1976)
2/ Gurí (Eduardo Darino, 1980)
3/ Mataron a Venancio Flores AKA Venancio Flores was Killed (Juan Carlos Rodríguez Castro, 1982)
(1985–2000)
1/ El cordón de la vereda AKA The Kerb (Esteban Schroeder, 1987)
2/ El dirigible AKA The Airship (Pablo Dotta, 1994)
3/ Una forma de bailar AKA A Way of Dancing (Álvaro Buela, 1997),
(2000–2010)
1/ 25 Watts (Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, 2001)
2/ Hit! Historia de canciones que hicieron historia AKA Hit! History of Songs which Made History (Claudia Abend and Adriana Loeff, 2008)
3/ Reus (Pablo Fernández, Alejandro Pi and Eduardo Piñeiro, 2010)
about the "National Office for Tourism", the book says the following...
In 1960, with the objective of promoting Uruguay as a tourist destination, the National Office for Tourism organised a script contest that followed a similar initiative conducted in 1949
The resulting films, which lasted about twenty minutes each, were shot on colour 35mm film stock. Half of them were made in 1961: La ciudad, Punta Ballena (Carlos Bayares), El niño de los lentes verdes (The Child with the Green Glasses; Eugenio Hintz and Alberto Mántaras Rogé), while the other three were produced during 1962: La raya amarilla (The Yellow Line; Carlos Maggi), Punta del este: ciudad sin horas (Punta del Este: Timeless City; Juan José Gascue) and El balneario (The Seaside Resort; Ferruccio Musitelli). All of these films usually show activities or stories by the beach, one of Uruguay’s tourist assets. The directors of these films were all associated with the art world, cine clubs or other filmmaking institutions.
The fact that all these directors were intellectuals and lovers of cinema, who would take advantage of any opportunity to make a film, resonates with the filmmaking practices of the so-called ‘early’ or ‘first’ film avant-garde of the United States.
The difficulty in classifying these films – either as official advertising or independent productions made by cinephiles and intellectuals – is clearly seen in La ciudad.
Analysing the intertextuality triggered by La ciudad, with reference to other avantgarde films, allows us to see its oppositional cinematic discourse, even though it was a film funded by the state to promote tourism.
In 1968, José Carlos Álvarez referred to the initiative of the Office for Tourism as ‘el tiempo de las sombrillas de playa [the time of the beach
umbrellas]’. Álvarez created this label to establish a contrast between these films and Ugo Ulive’s Como el Uruguay no hay (There Is No Place Like
Uruguay), also made in 1960.
besides the "National Office for Tourism", there was one more institution mildly exploited for "different" pursuits...
ICUR was one of the key institutions stimulating the making of educational films.
On 13 December 1950, the University Board approved the project of creating a film institute, submitted by Dr Rodolfo Tálice. According to Talice’s project, the aim was ‘fomentar – por todos los medios posibles – el empleo amplio, regular y adecuado del cine científico, cultural y documentario, y su producción nacional, coordinando los esfuerzos que tiendan a esos fines [to promote – by all means possible – the regular, appropriate and extensive use of scientific, cultural and documentary cinema and its national production, by coordinating the efforts towards the fulfilment of these aims]’. This detailed project explained the importance of cinema both for research and teaching, and also gave examples of the existence of other university film institutes in the world, such as that of the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands). Indeed, Tálice’s idea was inspired by a trip he made to Europe in 1949.
This institute was also ahead of its time in the region. In Santa Fe, Argentina, the Instituto Cinematográfico de la Universidad Nacional del
Litoral (Film Institute of the National University of the Littoral) was created in 1956. ... In Chile, the Cineteca de la Universidad de Chile (Chile’s University Cinematheque) was created five years later, in 1961.
between 1955 and 1965, ICUR obtained more professional results, for which Plácido Añón’s knowledge of cinematography was very
important. The quality of his work was recognised at SODRE’s Film Festival. In 1960, the scientific documentary El comportamiento sexual y reproductivo de Bothriurus Bonariensis (Sexual and Reproduction Behaviour of the Bothriurus Bonariensis) made by Añón and Lucrecia Covello de Zolessi, was awarded first prize in the category Scientific Documentary. Añón died in 1961, and the following year Mario Handler joined the institute.
Soon after Handler joined ICUR, Tálice requested permission from the Chancellor of the university to send Handler to Germany, more precisely to the Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) in Göttingen, as part of a training exchange developed by Tálice himself. In addition to visiting this institute, he would have the opportunity to visit the scientific cinema laboratories of the University Film Institute of Utrecht, the Scientific Film Institute of Paris and – if possible – Czechoslovakia, too. To accomplish this, Handler was to receive three months’ leave and funds from the budget of ICUR to cover travel and living expenses. This initial three-month training trip lasted until the end of 1964. In addition to spending some time in each of the aforementioned places, Handler also attended courses at the Film School in Prague (FAMU), where he made his first film En Praga (In Prague, 1964). The fact that Handler was trained in Europe is not a minor detail given that at that time he was, if not the only, at least one of the very few trained filmmakers in Uruguay. The resulting films would inevitably be the product of the tensions between the local conditions and that knowledge fully inspired by the European New Waves, especially the Czech New Wave.
On his return, instead of making scientific films, Handler started making social documentaries. ... Handler’s social documentaries, in which he neither followed the instruction of ICUR nor achieved its objectives, generated great tension inside the institute.
The first social documentary produced by ICUR and directed by Handler was the medium-length Carlos, about a homeless man in Montevideo. ... When Tálice watched the documentary, he rejected it because he considered that Handler had not done what he should have done. For this film Tálice had offered Handler some books about the clochard in Paris, an action which indicates that he probably expected a romanticised or idealised portrayal of the homeless, similar to that of the Parisian clochard in post-war French literature. However, Handler did not take this information into account and started from scratch his own research into the plight of homeless people in Montevideo. This anecdote about Tálice’s reaction reflects the mismatch between the institutional principles, admiring Europe, and Handler’s own ideas, concerned with showing local misery.
Carlos and Elecciones generated problems in the institute because they both received too much money and none was in line with its aims. Elecciones generated even more problems than Carlos, mainly due to its distribution and exhibition in festivals both inside and outside Uruguay. Indeed, this film was the last straw. After a series of incidents, Tálice started an administrative investigation against Handler.
This institute was supposed to make scientific films, like European institutes did in the 1940s and 1950s, when Tálice visited them. However, the Uruguayan institute never had the budget of European institutes and the filmmakers working there considered that the little infrastructure available had to be used for something else. In a literal action, Handler took the camera from the microscope and used it to shoot what was happening outside the laboratory. While the director of the institute initially supported this action, the resulting film was not approved. Uruguay did not have the Parisian clochards but the Uruguayan ‘caminantes’ (countryside wanderers).
