Report: "Generalitat's Museum Project and Image", J.C. Suárez and P.Nogales

(click to see the video)

Last 7^th March the Culture Advisor of the Generalitat, Mr. Ferran Mascarell, launched his Project of the Catalonian Museums in order to organize the management and administration of the Catalonian patrimony. From the starting point, as it was presented at the Cultural commission of the Catalonian Parlament on February, the current administrative structure for the Catalonian museums is unsystemic as a result of the form which museums and cultural centers were created in the past. Afterward, it would be suitable and necessary to build a new strategy to organize the network of cultural centers and the patrimony in Catalonia. An idea that would be welcome by most of you, but if we analyze carefully the project from the point of view of conservation, recuperation, study and diffusion of the fixed image or in movement - ie. from the point of view of the photographic and cinematographic- we would conclude that the opportunity is already lost.

For the future structure of the Catalonian patrimony it would have been necessary a more modern point of view, one with more future perspectives, instead of this one, which is really conservative.

Even it has been built in the 21^st Century, it seems to be from the past one. The project establishes four areas: Art, History, Science and Contemporarity. In the contemporary and around MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) it includes the film library of Catalonia and the cinema in general. However, it does not take into account other audiovisual arts, such as photography, that is dilute in a future national resource centers according to the idea of creating a future photographic collection, while other contemporary arts would be merged shearing space in different centers. The global idea that we get from this project is that the fixed and moving image is not seen as a whole, or that they don't know how to deal with it.

As a consequence, this brings us to think that out politicians are not able to change properly the old structure in order to overcome the idea of the image as an art or as a document, instead of understand the image –audiovisual or photographical– as a human expression of ideas, experiences and concepts that go break the idea of art to enter in the particular world. Finally, it seems that the Generalitat understood the image, specially the cinema, only as an artistic object and they don't care about the transversality of the photochemical image. So we can observe that problems of diffusion and usystematicality –problems that the Cultural Advisor criticizes of the Catalonian cultural structure– appears also in the world of the photochemical image. As a result, we will get that cinema, understood as a contemporary art expression, will be regulated by the MACBA (here it would be better not to discuss if other non fiction productions made by professionals or nonprofessionals that are in the “film library” are art or they are not), but different cinematographic collections are in the archives – the Catalonian National Archive and also local archives– while photographic ones, without any physical space, are understood as a transversal area, and divided in between the two structural axis, the MACBA and MNAC, both with their own photographic collections. But it is curious that in this project, where all the cultural centers of Catalonia are taken into account and also the location of the future Catalonian museums network, there is nothing about centers or archives set for the image conservation, some of them with a long tradition as the Photographic Archive of Barcelona, the CRDI of Girona or others more recently created as the CIMIR of Reus (although this last one with economical difficulties due to the administration reduce of the public income, causing the closured of some services as the “Cinemateca”). For this reason, we think that the Generalitat, instead of building different theories, or look at international centers to emulate their structures, it would be better to look at the internal regions, and help them and learn from them. For example Girona and Reus have developed a conservation plan of their cinema and photographic collections, with their own and specific centers, avoiding the distribution of this material in different museums or archives. This is the model that we ought to follow. This is also the model followed in Tarragona, where a new image center is going to be opened in the old Cigarette Factory. Image has day after day more importance in our society through television, cinema and new technologies. If this is true, why it is not possible building a similar structure in Catalonia? Why photochemistry is considered as a transversal area and not as a whole? Why in this Generalitat’s project it is not considered as a whole area that where we should include the Film Library and a photography reference center as the basis of other centers and collections working on photography and cinema? The answer looks easy, we are in the 21^st Century, buy our politicians keep thinking about conservation and image world as at the beginning of the 20^th Century. We could find the reason in the fact that for the Generalitat it is more important the number of visitors than the number of actual users of the equipments. We should add to this mercantilist mentality the effects of the economical crisis, that lead them to reduce costs and not thinking about efficiency or cultural responsibility. Seriously, the history of Catalonia should not be reconstructed by using grandiloquent speeches, but with documents that we should conserve and preserve for future generations, so that they would understand the difficulties their ancestors go through. Since the 21^st Century, “fixed or moved” image documents, fiction or non fiction, professional or amateurs, national or local...all of them constitute a huge and valuable source of knowledge of the rich Catalonian cultural life. This is the reason why in 1995 we created the Cinema Research Unit in the URV (Universitat Rovira i Virgili), and it is why during decades we have been working on the conservation of the cinematographic patrimony of these regions. After we recovered and collaborated in the recovery of more than 3.000 films and we worked on the conservation of other audiovisual material, our experience allows us to judge the “Generalitat’s Museums Project” as a lost chance, and the whole situation as disappointing and dangerous. During the last decades we have been working with a few resources and, most of time, with a few understanding, but always in the good direction towards the conservation of the cinematographic patrimony, with some good times, as during the inauguration of the Image Center Mas Iglesias in Reus, with the creation of the Memoriatge in Reus, or the cinematographic recuperation’s project started in Montblanc by the Comarcal Archive of Conca de Barberà. Everyone gives big moments with public projections of an unknown material expected to be lost and everything is actually in danger because the crisis becomes the excuse not for question the efficiency of determinates actuations and functionally ways of the political structures or economy, but for cutting in culture because is considered an unnecessary wasting money. Even though, when is in a crisis moments, remember the 1929’s crack, when more culture is consumed, in order to survive mentally and psychically to a negative reality.

José Carlos Suárez and Pedro Nogales Cárdenas

Professors of cinema of the URV

Cinema Research Unit - Classroom of Cinema of the URV

(Extern Colaboration)