In the year 1970 a fire extinguished, almost in its entirety, the cinema material of the National File of the Image, Montevideo. It was reconstructed on the basis of collector's donations and private cinema archives, but could never fully recover from the censorship of the dictatorship in Uruguay (1973 -1980) and from the low budget that the successive governments assigned to it. The archive from 1974 collected many works from the film festival in Montevideo set up in 1954 by the SODRE, Uruguay's national radio station and a progressive cultural promoter. Among the film makers attending in 1958, when John Grierson was the guest of honor, were Chambi from Peru, Nelson Pereira dos Santos from Brazil, and Fernando Birri from Santa Fe. Montevideo was the only city of Latin America that sheltered for 2 decades a Festival of Experimental Cinema, which had as protagonists the visit of personalities like Norman McLaren, John Grierson and others. For being Cine of “not commercial” interest, it was not considered of a major importance. Doing an inquiry of the authors of the above mentioned films and reconstructing the movies one to one, we succeeded in reconstructing a new map of the history of the art in the Rio de la Plata. The point of the investigation is to review the cinema’s history in Uruguay (especially regarding the Experimental Cinema from 50s to 70s) and to reflect on the consequences brought by the extinguished period of the 1970s for contemporary generations. The principal way of research is on one side the historical information given by the protagonists of the time (and the subversion that this information produces in the historicity of the image) and on the other the impact from new artistic productions that arise today and as part of the research. The project of reconstruction of the material of the National File of the Image, Montevideo is carried out in the City of Montevideo and relies on the support of the Foundation of Contemporary Art, the National File of the Image and the National Museum of Visual Arts. facmvd.blogspot.com

DISCUSSION IN SPANISH, GERMAN and ENGLISH. The lecture from Spanish to German will be translated by Hansel Sato. Resume of the lecture will be given as well in English.

The screening of 16 mm films from the archive is facilitated by Chistoph Kolar. Ángela López Ruiz is artist, curator and researcher, from Montevideo, Uruguay. Graduate from the Republican University, she is specialized in Cinema and Video. Some of her out-standing curatorships were: Anthology videoperformance of Clemente Padín, Museo del Barrio, New York, www.elmuseo.org; Cine Expandido I and II (Expanded cinema) at National Museum of Visual Arts, MVD, www.mnav.gub.uy and focos/fac realized in the context of the Regional Meeting of Art www.era.org.uy. As artist she has exhibited from 1999 up to today in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Maracaibo, Santiago de Chile, San Pablo, Paris, Barcelona, Seville, Dresden, Berlin and London