The streaming service that offers gems of Mexican cinema protected by the UNAM film library
It was the turbulent year of 1968 and Leobardo López Arretche was studying at the UNAM University Center for Cinematographic Studies. Students from half the country mobilized, fed up with the tight rope with which the PRI ruled Mexico, and demanded system change, freedom and an end to government corruption. There were strikes, demonstrations, university takeovers, harsh repression and massacres like the one in Tlatelolco. Among the places where this wave of liberation was experienced most strongly were the halls of the UNAM. López Arretche took advantage of the resources provided by his school and filmed many of these expressions in which he was fed up. The product of this work is “El Grito,” which is considered the only filmic testimony that tells this revolution from the inside out. The documentary is part of the collection of the UNAM Film Library – which includes more than 50,000 titles – whose specialists have restored it and made it available to the public through a streaming service that is already an alternative to large companies such as Netflix.
López Arretch's film is not the only jewel in the treasure trove of the film library, but it may be the most emblematic. Not only because it represents a solid testimony to what the students' call for freedom was – joined by intellectuals, professors, workers, housewives, merchants and farmers – but also because it survived government oppression and censorship . “The film represents a turning point in the university's film production because the impact that El Grito had was extremely powerful,” says Hugo Villa, head of the film library. Villa remembers that young people of his generation loved the film, which was studied in film clubs, shared on VHS or distributed in pirated versions.
Digitization process of cinema materials at the Unam Film Library in Ciudad Universitaria on March 5, 2024. Aggi Garduño
The film was restored to mark the 50th anniversary of the student movement in 2018, thanks to the magical hands of a technical team working under Villa's leadership to save Mexico's film heritage. “The restorations in the film library are not only aimed at improving the damage to the material, because of course many things happen over time, but it is also about making the era and environment of the director known,” explains Villa.
Hugo Villa Smythe, Director General of Film Activities of UNAM at the UNAM Film Library in Ciudad Universitaria on March 5, 2024. Aggi Garduño
López Arretch's film went through a process that seems like alchemy. It all begins in the film library's restoration workshop, a spacious and bright place where there are mountains of cans in which rolls of film are stored. This is the territory of Ignacio Sánchez, workshop manager, and Manuel Mendoza, restoration technician, who carefully check each volume. The men work diligently, placing the reels in a device that tensions the tape and using a special lens to see each frame of the film. They check the images, repair glue, document damage and point out the special features of the films – a journey through time, to images, spaces and people from other times, immortalized through the lens of makers who have captured a piece of Mexican history, both real and fictional.
From this workshop, the reels go to the digitization process, where the images are stabilized, the color is adjusted, the tone is corrected and the damaged material is “cleaned”. This is where the technology shines and at the head of the entire team is Gerardo León, a thin man with a friendly smile, who explains that the tapes are inserted into scanners that, through what he calls Clutter Lights, digitize each frame of the film. “Here we analyze what the scenes and the frames are like. In addition, extensive restoration work is being carried out to save the footage, which will be available online,” explains León.
The digitized films are stored in a system called CLAF, which stores 1,600 titles (52 million images, 795 hours of digitized material) that can be accessed by film library experts or researchers and filmmakers with permission to view Heritage. Films presented at film festivals can come from here, but they do not go out so freely, but have several “blocks” that limit their use to prevent piracy and protect copyright, explains Gustavo Lucio José, head of the Digital Laboratory Department. Therefore, according to the agreement made with Filmoteca, a film can only be shown in a specific city and at a specific time. Not only Mexican jobs are stored in the system, but also those from France, Spain, the USA, Canada, Colombia, China and Japan.
Not all of these films are available on the streaming service organized by Filmoteca. So far there are only 103 titles that represent an alternative for those who want to immerse themselves in the history of cinema in Mexico. This treasure includes works such as the 1926 feature film “The Phantom Train,” directed by Gabriel García Moreno, which tells the misdeeds of some train robbers who spread fear among the residents of Veracruz; “Two Monks” from 1934, directed by Juan Bustillo Oro, the passionate story of two priests who confront each other out of love for a woman; or Tepeyac from 1917 by directors José Manuel Ramos and Fernando Sayago and tells the adoration of a young woman for the Virgin of Guadalupe, who believes that she has lost her fiancé in the shipwreck of a ship bombed by a German submarine. The film “mixes fiction and documentary reality with great ingenuity, allowing us to take a look at the Villa de Guadalupe in 1917, with its popular, religious and pagan customs,” explains Filmoteca.
This online cinema service also allows you to navigate between materials such as the propaganda with which the Mexican government called on the population to vaccinate, footage that narrates social movements or great figures from the era of the golden Mexican cinema, such as the actress and the director Mimi Derba. “She was a brilliant filmmaker, but also one of the first people to think about creating film archives,” Villa says. Among the titles that those responsible for the film library are most proud of are those that are part of the cinema of the Mexican Revolution, declared an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO.
A restoration technician reviews material in the film library. Aggi Garduño
The Filmoteca film service is intended to be not only a platform for watching films, but also a space where viewers can immerse themselves in the history of these creations. Behind López Arretch's “The Scream,” for example, there is a whole story of persecution and oppression. “The film was not completed until 1971 because Leobardo was arrested and imprisoned in Lecumberri prison. [denunciada como centro de torturas] and by the time it comes out, the project is complete. But here too, in the school, the political police came to harass, they checked everything the students did, so Leobardo had to work tirelessly and the materials were kept under a different title,” explains Director Villa.
The film was kept in the Filmoteca's vaults for decades, which made it possible to save it from unfortunate events for Mexican cinema such as the fire at the Cineteca that occurred on March 24, 1982, an inferno that lasted 16 hours in the flames destroyed posters, cassettes, films (including some by Luis Buñuel) and documentaries as well as historical documents of the cinema and devoured one of the largest film collections in Mexico. “The journey of this Leobardo film has been a long one and represents a milestone in cinema,” says Villa. Thanks to this conservation work by the wizards of Filmotelca, the film can reach our eyes restored and we can enjoy the wave of freedom that the student movement of 1968 unleashed.
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