IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B
Abstract
This article presents the results of a research project on film culture in Santiago de Cuba, in the framework of a Cuban-Belgian academic collaboration that led to the creation of a website documenting, and valuing the cinemas registered in the city between 1906 and 1986, a period of splendour and decline. The starting point is an understanding of the “historic” film exhibition spaces as sites of social significance (Rizo, 2005) in the past and recent past, as areas that generated consumption/appropriation, meeting points that marked successive generations, and which currently make possible the development of plans and strategies for sustainable reuse by the Ministries of Culture and Tourism (state sector) and economic actors linked to the field of culture (private sector), in a deliberate strategy of appreciation and valorisation of heritage, identity and cultural memory. Although there are recent efforts to document Cuban cinemas such as Los cines de Cuba (Sandretto, 2017) and Los cines de La Habana (Zardoya and Marrero, 2018), the traditional history of cinema in Cuba is written primarily from Havana and few exceptions, such as the Enciclopedia del Audiovisual Cubano (ENDAC), provide an opportunity to explore different dimensions of film culture in the rest of the country and beyond. For this reason, CineMAP Santiago specifically adopts the theoretical and methodological approach of the New History of Cinema (Biltereyst et al., 2019) and encourages the promotion of scientific knowledge through documentation (general data, photographs, video interviews) contributing to the preservation of the cultural heritage of the city.
Daylenis Blanco Lobaina is a part time lecturer, specialist of the Press and Public Relations Department at Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba and Joint PhD in Communication Studies at the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi) of the University of Antwerp, Belgium and University of Havana, Cuba. She is a member of the bilateral Belgian VLIR-IUC-Cuban project “Safeguarding cultural heritage. Instruments and practices for its integrated management in Santiago de Cuba and the Eastern region of Cuba”. She has published on cinema history in Santiago de Cuba in Alcance (2022)
Philippe Meers is a Professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where he is director of the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi) and director of the Center for Mexican Studies. He has published widely on historical and contemporary film cultures and audiences in e.g. Screen and Media, Culture & Society. With Richard Maltby and Daniel Biltereyst, he co-edited Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (2011), Audiences, Cinema and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History (2012) and The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (2019). With Ifdal Elsaket and Daniel Biltereyst he just co-edited Cinema in the Arab World: New Histories, New Approaches (Bloomsbury, World Cinema series, 2023). Meers chairs the Belgian VLIR-IUC-Cuban project “Safeguarding cultural heritage. Instruments and practices for its integrated management in Santiago de Cuba and the Eastern region of Cuba”.
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Monday 15th July, 2024