2023 Mexico City Symposium
Session 3 : "Achieving the Impossible: Pioneering Women and Game Changers in Archival Practices"
Mexico, 17 April 2023
Figures such as Lodoletta Lupo, Marie Epstein, Thelma de Souza Mello, Susana Schild and Lúcia Lahmeyer Lobo give an account of the founding role of women in the configuration of national and international collections. Through this session we will approach those responsible for forging some of the most relevant archives and give them direction, developing other ways of doing and thinking about safeguarding the film heritage.
Please do not publish or re-use in any way any of these documents without prior permission of the speakers.
Women in the History of FIAF: A Statistical Survey
Christophe Dupin is the Senior Administrator of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), the Executive Publisher of the Journal of Film Preservation, and a film historian. Previously, he worked for the British Film Institute (1999-2004), and at Queen Mary University of London (2004-2010), where he co-led a research project on the BFI’s history which resulted in the publication of The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933-2004 (Manchester University Press, 2012), co-edited with Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. His current research topic is the history of FIAF and the international film archive movement. He is co-editing a book on that subject, to be published by FIAF in 2024. Over the last decade, he has also led the ambitious project of cataloguing, digitizing, and making accessible the FIAF Historical Archive.
Barbara Robbrecht is the FIAF Historical Archive Assistant. After finishing a Master’s degree in History and Archiving, she first joined FIAF as an intern, then as a junior assistant while completing a Master’s degree in Gender Studies. In September 2021, she started working as a full employee for FIAF, managing the archive on a daily basis, cataloguing, digitizing, and providing online access to large quantities of archival documents, and providing support for the researchers involved in the FIAF History Book Project, for which she is due to write a chapter on women in FIAF’s history.
Women Directors of the Bogotá Cinematheque, a Pulse of 52 Years
Henry Caicedo Caicedo is a Coordinator since 2019 of the Living Archive and Memory macro-project of the Audiovisual Arts Management of Idartes – Cinemateca de Bogotá. Member of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) and of the International Council on Archives (ICA). Candidate for the Master’s Degree in Libraries, Archives and Digital Continuity at the Carlos III University of Madrid. Graduated with a Bachelor of Built Environment (Architecture Studies) from the Queensland Australia University of Technology (QUT) and a Diploma in Documentary Production from the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University of Bogotá. Specialist in audiovisual heritage, university professor in cinema, television and heritage, with specific training and experience in audiovisual recognition, identification, management and preservation. He was advisor to the Memory, Circulation and Research Group of the Cinematography Directorate of the Ministry of Culture between 2013 and 2017, and Academic Coordinator of the Diploma in Audiovisual Heritage Management at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University of Bogotá in 2014 and 2017.
A Woman of Cinema. Marie Epstein at the Cinémathèque Française
Chiara Tognolotti is a professor at the Department of Civilizations and Forms of Knowledge at the University of Pisa, where she teaches Film Aesthetics and Italian Film History. She studies French cinema of both the silent and the classic period and Italian modern cinema from an historical perspective and with a specific focus on gender. Among her latest works, the books La caduta della casa Usher (Jean Epstein, 1928); Fotogenie, superfici, metamorfosi (Mimesis 2020); De la photogénie du réel au cinéma au-delà du réel: l’archipel Jean Epstein (Kaplan 2020, with Laura Vichi); and La bellezza delle cose. Il pensiero e la pratica del cinema di Louis Delluc (Edizioni ETS 2022). She is part of the research network FAScinA – female scholars of film and audio−visuals.
Lodoletta Lupo, the First Female Conservator of the Cineteca Nazionale
Valentina Rossetto holds a MA in Humanities – History of Film and is specialised at the School of Archival Science. Since 2019 she works as film archivist at the Cineteca Nazionale and as Adjunct Professor of Film Restoration. Before she was a film archivist at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, RAI TV film archive and she was the film collection manager at the Archivio Nazionale Cinematografico della Resistenza. She participated at two research projects of the University of Turin and she is author of studies on the technical history of silent cinema, film digitization and restoration.
Women Archivists in the 75 Years of the Cinemateca Do Mam
Drika de Oliveira is chief of film collections at Cinemateca do MAM. Film preserver, cinematographer and researcher, she graduated in Communication and Cinema at PUC-Rio. At the Cinemateca do MAM, Drika also organized the “Retrolâmpago de Amor Visual” film club throughout 2019, showing American silent films. She manage the Sérgio Bernardes Collection, has worked as a film analyst at the CTAv collection and has analyzed film copies for the CCBB and Caixa Cultural. She was audiovisual director at Redes da Maré, where she directed the Mostra Maré de Música (2021), the Brazilian programming for WOW Global (London 2020), the Festival Mulheres do Mundo 2020. In addition to the documentaries “Brejal”, “Se esse rua minha” and several short films, Drika produced and directed the photography of the film “Umana Divina Geometria” for the Italian Institute of Culture in Rio de Janeiro (2021), directed
the photography of an educational series for Escola Eleva (Alameda Produções), among others. She was a production and research assistant for documentary filmmaker Beth Formaggini at 4ventos Produções. She taught classes in a Cinematography course in Nova Friburgo (Arturius Filmes). She writes about visual arts since 2020 for Dasartes magazine.
