CANTU VT is TV The History of Argentinian Video Art and Television Archives Preservation
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This document discusses the history of video art and television in Argentina, mentioning several important figures and events. It references the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the military dictatorship in Argentina led by General Leopoldo Galtieri. It also lists several Argentine video artists and their works that helped establish video art as a new form of creative expression during this political period.
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CANTU VT is TV The History of Argentinian Video Art and Television Archives Preservation
- 2. VT is TV: THE HISTORY OF ARGENTINIAN VIDEO ART AND TELEVISION AT RISK Mariela Cantú - Argentina
- 7. Nelson Rockefeller Henry Kissinger Augusto Pinochet King Juan Carlos I João Avelange
- 15. Serú Girán’s footage from Museo del Cine
- 19. Diego Lascano
- 21. Cristina Civale
- 22. Richard Key Valdez, by Jorge La Ferla
- 23. Reconstruyen Crimen de la Modelo, Andrés Di Tella
Editor's Notes
- First of all, I want to thank FIAT IFTA for generously supporting my participation in the Congress, being awarded a travel grant that allowed me to be here today with you. Also, before my presentation, I want to honor the people of Chile and Ecuador, whose deaths, rapes and tortures are not being reported by any traditional media. To their memories and their fight, I dedicate the work I’ll be presenting today.
- In Argentina, TV history is hard to trace. Due to a diversity of reasons –legal issues, disposal of tapes, and lack of proper preservation actions, among others, the majority of this precious legacy has become almost inaccessible to the general public. During the 60 years of Argentinian commercial TV life, its main stations would be administrated by a mix of foreign companies and corporations, national communications oligopolies, and authoritarian governments, in the context of fragile democratic processes. Thus, Argentinian TV was born within a model determined by private initiative and commercial exploitation, which would shape the ways in which we conceptualize, produce and preserve television. In that context, I would like to comment on a couple of independent video art preservation projects, being an artistic practice that has had much in common with the historical evolution of TV in Argentina and that, in some aspects, can be regarded as a way of preserving our TV memory. Argentina is in need of urgent changes in laws referring to intellectual property, media corporate responsibility, archives and public access to information. Also, claims should be made against national and international corporations that seek profit over people’s rights to information and cultural content produced within their own country. But far from elaborating on a series of lamentations and complaints, I would rather try to analyze and understand the reasons for this situation, in order to plan for possible solutions. And to avoid fragmented analysis, I cannot think of a better way than to resort to a little history and the power relations involved in it to provide the necessary context.
- Television broadcasting in Argentina began in 1951, and its first emission in public Channel 7 portrayed Eva Perón addressing the people at Plaza de Mayo, just a few months before her death. However, the true expansion of Argentinian television as a mass medium would begin with commercial TV, a few years later.
- In 1955, a military coup d’etat overthrew Juan Perón from his democratic presidency and, among other authoritarian provisions, it licensed the first three commercial channels: Channel 9, 11 and 13 –while Channel 7 would remain a national broadcaster owned by the government. In 1966, during dictator Ongania’s government, Channel 2 was added to this list, and named TeveDos. All in all, quite a dark scenario for the birth of our TV.
- Law 15.460 would prevent the creation of monopolies, and ban the participation of foreign investments. Still, US networks NBC, ABC and CBS would circumvent the regulation using their production companies as a way of disguising their participation in the business. In the context of a deteriorating profitability of US commercial TV and the reorientation of investments towards satellite TV, home video and cable TV, the three networks would abandon Channel 9, 11 and 13 between 1965 and 1971. Nevertheless, the job had already been done: Argentina was inaugurated as a new market for foreign TV shows, technological equipment and advertising.
- Back in democracy, president Raul Lastiri would sign the 1761/73 decree, through which he would take over the channels, declaring the termination of the licenses, while Isabel Peron would also expropriate the production companies and the channels’ physical assets one year later. Being all those items incorporated as state property, it would be easy for the military dictators following to fully control the stations. In 1976, the last and most cruel military dictatorship in Argentina would torture, murder and disappear more than 30.000 people, taking over the unions, closing down the Senate, eradicating the right to strike, and banning the activity of all political parties, among other tyrannical provisions.
- The so-called “Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional” (National Reorganization Process) would follow a liberal agenda, opening up the country to foreign capitals, while reducing the levels of protectionism of the national industry. For the case of the TV sector, this would translate into an unrestricted market opening, which turned Argentina into an assembling industry of technological equipment, rather than a manufacturer for its own internal market. Also, dictator Jorge Rafael Videla signed the Decree Law 22.285 in 1980, that would regulate national broadcasting for the next 29 years. One of the key elements of this decree was that it only allowed for-profit companies to be appointed as potential licensees, leaving aside any possibility for other social groups to participate in the broadcasting system. Again, guidelines like this would once more reinforce TV as a sphere for commercial purposes only, under the domain of an authoritarian regime.
- Two years later, the Malvinas War (called the Falklands War by the English) accelerated the decay of the dictatorship, and an urgent call for tender would be made in order to leave the media in the hands of the dictators’ friends. Needless to say, all TV networks were loss making by the end of this period.
- Back in democracy, Raul Alfonsin’s government interrupted new broadcasting licenses in 1984, and it wouldn’t be until the government of Carlos Menem that licenses for channel 11 (renamed Telefe) and Channel 13 would be awarded, being those the first two privatized companies of all this neo liberal period. Also, a key modification to the 1980’s Broadcasting Law was made: different to previous regulations, national news companies were allowed to be licensed a TV network from this point on, thus legally allowing for the creation and proliferation of multimedia corporations in the country.
- During this privatization process, the liabilities of all national companies were taken care of by the state. Logically, this was a strategy designed to facilitate the entrance of foreign investors, and such was the case of Telefonica -the Spanish corporation that bought Telefe and 7 other channels in 1999, and the Australian group Prime Media, which bought Channel 9 in 1997 (renamed Azul TV).
- De la Rua, Duhalde and Nestor Kirchner’s governments would do nothing but to collaborate with the consolidation of these national and international groups. During this period, licenses to new cable TV operators were interrupted, and licenses of Telefe (owned by Telefonica) and Channel 13 (owned by Grupo Clarin) would be extended in 2004 for ten more years –despite the fact that they were to expire in 2005, the following year. Furthermore, Nestor Kirchner introduced a highly controversial measure in his decree 527: in 2005, he established the suspension of the course of the licenses for ten years, which was applied to all networks –including those licensed before 1980, the privatized ones and those which have just been approved. Although this decree was explained as a way of defending national companies, the truth is that foreign companies were also participating in the business –as a matter of fact, Azul TV was acquired in 2007 by Albavision, property of the Mexican-Guatemalan businessman Angel Gonzalez. However, Kirchner added a very important modification to the law, opening up the possibility of licensing networks to non-profit sectors.
- It wasn’t until 2009 that a new Broadcasting Law would replace the one that was established during the dictatorship period in 1980, during the presidency of Cristina Fernandez. Through public consultation with several social groups, and among other modifications, this new law would assign a third of the spectrum to non-profit contractors –although it would leave untouched current licenses. However, this law would be derogated in 2016 by Mauricio Macri’s government, and during the course of that same year, US multinational mass media conglomerate Viacom acquired Telefe. Last year, Channel 9 announced massive lay-offs and began crisis prevention procedures, in tandem with America TV. All that has been previously presented exposes the creation, reinforcement and protection of foreign corporations and national oligopolies, within a series of legal frameworks designed by dictatorial governments, though later preserved in democratic times. Also, we cannot leave aside the incessant ambition of foreign corporations and multinational conglomerates that have historically dodged regulations, despite of being aware that they were breaking the law. Beyond ethical issues that could be discussed regarding this matter, the activity of such companies would be distant from protecting the Argentinian audiovisual legacy, interfering with public access to TV archives. In that context, it is not hard to anticipate that TV archives in Argentina have not been a priority for a television that was shaped mainly as a commercial activity, from which non-profit organizations have been historically excluded. Within a television that depends on advertising and big audiences to survive, preservation has not be been considered a worthy investment, and the historical value of archival material has been disregarded.
- In this context, countless tapes have been lost. Of course, and depending on specific moments of history, disposal can be said to have been a regular practice, also in other countries: for instance, tapes would be discarded and reused frequently, in a context where it was necessary to make the most out of the material. However, censorship during dictatorship times can be identified as a distinct practice in Argentina and other countries in similar political contexts. For instance, between 1977 and 1978, Channel 7 moved to its actual location, and a lot of film material was allegedly “lost”. Also, the military intervention requested the disposal of the archive of artistic content, and the preservation of news material only.
- In relation to Channel 7 (renamed ATC –Argentina Televisora Color in 1979 and again renamed TV Publica in 2006), a separate though related section should be devoted to Archivo Prisma, the first systematic attempt to preserve and give access to the public station collection. In 2008, a first assessment of TV Publica collection was commissioned, as a sort of a prelude to the beginning of its digitization process, which commenced the following year. In 2015, Archivo Prisma was launched. It consisted of a web site, in which users could browse among 1300 hours of digitized material of Channel 7 collection –which in 2017, represented 15% of the total hours, giving special priority to the digitization and exhibition of news programs, presidential speeches and popular manifestations over entertainment and artistic materials. However, the corporate government of Mauricio Macri, in tandem with current adjustment policies and IMF economic recipes, shut down Archivo Prisma platform in 2017.
- In other cases, collections have been dismembered, and landed in different institutions and private collectors’ hands. For instance, former Channel 9 owner Alejandro Romay’s collection was given to Archivo General de la Nacion, and some TeleDos (Channel 2) tapes kept by former owner Hector Ricardo Garcia were transferred to Diario Crónica, to be later exhibited in a show called El Archivo de Oro, in Cronica TV. TV presenter Juan Carlos Badia’s private collection was put into the hands of Archivo RTA, and Museo del Cine received two important donations: a part of U-MATIC, MII and VHS Telefe’s collection from 1982-1990; and editor Juan Carlos Macia’s fund, including a TV recording of the mythical Argentinian rock band Seru Giran that was recorded in color and broadcasted in black and white in 1978 by Channel 11.
- At present, one of the main obstacles for access to TV archival material in Argentina is a legal one. On the one hand, the stations’ legal departments have not been concerned with copyright issues in their early days, resulting in a series of imprecise contracts between the channels, their production companies and individual celebrities and authors involved. Later on, when the channels were privatized and sold to multinational corporations, the path to access was in no way easier. In such cases, many of these companies would put their own corporate interests before the right of public access for everyone, turning historical documents of a country into private property, thus preventing the exercise of the rights of the people to its own national memory. On the contrary, a common strategy used by networks such as Telefe is rather that of using its archive to cover for hours of programming, as in the case of the show “Casados con hijos” produced and broadcasted in 2005 and reprogrammed since 2018 to the present. The controversial decision lead actor Guillermo Francella to declare that “Telefe is assisted by the law”, for these kinds of repetitions would prevent new shows to be produced, having a negative impact on the actors’ and technicans’ salaries and the national production in general. Rather, the network’s new approach since acquired by Viacom in 2016 has been the constant reuse of such sitcoms in Telefe, along with the broadcast of content from other channels owned by the corporation (such as Nickelodeon), and foreign –mainly Turkish, soap operas.
- However, Argentina already has a set of laws that could unblock its TV archives, acknowledging them as part of its cultural patrimony. For instance, articles 27, 28 and 31 of the Intellectual Property Law 11.723 liberates the use and reproduction of news and images for scientific, educational and cultural purposes, including events of general interest or that have taken place in public. In the meantime, Channel Volver (a cable TV owned by Artear and Grupo Clarin funded in 1994) would base its entire programming on the exhibition of films and old TV shows of Channel 13, while spending 16 years in violation of Argentinian copyright laws, not paying the actors for the repetition of the shows. Also, the case of the DiFilm archive owned by Di Chiara family is well-known in Argentina and abroad. The archive, funded in 1949 by journalist Roberto Di Chiara, has acquired its material by obsessively recording TV news and shows, to then sell the images to a variety of national and international producers. Off the record, it has been said that even a public official of the current government showed up at DiChiara archive to buy a fragment of a TV speech made by the President.
- In these conditions, in which Argentina is still not fully aware of the type, content and extent of its TV collections, digitization is far from being a solution. In Latin America, decolonizing our societies and our history requires a thorough analysis of the power structures that have shaped and maintained the politics of memory (and oblivion) in our countries. If Argentina’s past is in the hands of a selected group of businessmen; if images of the past can only survive as fantasies and blurry recollections; if my country is not allowed to see its own historical records with new eyes and from new perspectives; if the right for memory has been transformed into a battle field: where can we find our historical no man’s land?
- In spite of being an independent audiovisual practice, video art would (unexpectedly) serve as a preservation strategy to some of these TV archival images, giving access to them mainly in the form of reuse material. Unlike traditional stories from Europe and the US, Argentinean video artists producing within the country during the 80s and 90s did not emerge directly from the visual arts, the performance or the music field. Rather, many of them (whom theorist Graciela Taquini would call “the video generation”) worked under a strong influence from the TV –either because they were TV professionals or because they would manifest a persistent critique of that medium in their works. From this perspective, we can say that, in Argentina, video art was born out of television. Among the people who were trained in TV stations, we can mention the case of Diego Lascano, with a highly prolific career that took him to work in Channel 7, 9, 13 in Buenos Aires, Channel 10 and 12 in Cordoba, Channel 9 in Asuncion (Paraguay), and Channel 12 in Montevideo (Uruguay). Starting in 1984 as a Production Assistant in Channel 13, he would later on work on Digital Graphics for several networks. Interestingly, most of Lascano’s video pieces would deal with archival material, in works such as Arde Gardel and Flight: 101 to No Man’s Land.
- Another iconic figure is that of Miguel Rodriguez Arias, who produced works exhibited both on TV and video art festivals, such as Las patas de la mentira and Proteccion al mayor. In the first case, the original 19 min. video released in 1991 would eventually turn into a TV show, broadcasted by America between 1996 and 1997. The program was based on speeches made by Argentinian politicians, religious leaders and journalists, which Rodriguez Arias obsessively recorded from broadcasted TV shows. With a hilarious tone, he exposed countless inconsistencies and contradictions of these personalities’ words, introducing a visionary and renewed way of resorting to the archives on TV.
- Cristina Civale also worked as a video artist, with pieces such as Yo no soy una cualquiera –which analyses exclusion and violence against women, and Indulto no! – dealing with the 1989/1990 decrees that pardoned the military who had been found guilty of Crimes against Humanity in the 1985 Trial of the Juntas. Among other contributions for TV, Civale participated in a famous TV show called Desde Adentro, which contained a nod to experimental techniques in its opening sequence.
- As mentioned above, there was also another group of Argentinian video makers that would refer critically to TV in their works, elaborating on a series of reinterpretations, mainly focused on news TV formats. Such is the case of fictional character Richard Key Valdez, created by Jorge La Ferla, a sarcastic TV interviewer concerned about media corporations and Latin American broadcasting during the 90s, who would venture into a diversity of territories such as Bolivia, Cuba and the US in order to find possible answers to these matters.
- For its part, a different set of works would be directly involved with the use of TV archival material. An iconic piece of this group is Reconstruyen crimen de la modelo, by Andres Di Tella, which resorted to repetition and slow motion techniques in order to expose the sensationalist mediatization of the murder of a woman in 1990. About the reconstruction, it was said by the media to have developed as “a sublime event”, where the judge was acting as a film director and the main witness was performing himself in front of a crowd full of journalists, cops and nosy people.
- A similar strategy was used by Gabriela Golder in Vacas, reusing news TV images, which showed a group of neighbors slaughtering cows after the truck that transported the animals had an accident. In the context of 2001-2002 economic crisis in Argentina, Golder made use of slow motion and zoom techniques to detach the images from the spectacular and even amusing way in which the news was portrayed by several media.
- Finally, 20/12 by Mariano Cohn, inserts the news of president Fernando de la Rua escaping on board of a helicopter from Casa Rosada (the presidential palace), after the killing of 39 people by the police throughout the country. Portraying the character of a man who is at home testing the new video camera he just bought, Cohn exposes the indifference of upper class citizens towards such a key political events in the country.
- Although it is clear that the existence of this video art tendency in Argentina cannot solely replace the scarcity of TV archives images, it can be considered as an indirect strategy for its preservation, taking into account its wider availability for the general public. Different to TV materials, video art pieces in Argentina have circulated more freely in a diversity of platforms, from Youtube and Vimeo sites to more institutionalized projects. Interestingly, it is the same lack of legislation used by multinational conglomerates and national multimedia corporations to prevent access to TV materials that is used by artists to do the exact opposite. Also different to TV, video art production and preservation has been historically the object of independent, small-scale collections, with different levels of instutionalization. Such is the case of ARCA VIDEO, a platform that I founded in 2008, intended to create a first inventory to document pieces exhibited between 1982 and 2015. The results of that research were presented in a web site, which provided access to information about the works and also the pieces, in low resolution quality. During the entire process, there was not a single video artist who would refuse to collaborate and to be part of Arca Video. In the same vein, AREA- Asociacion de Realizadores Experimentales Audiovisuales was created in 2017, gathering more than 50 experimental filmmakers in Argentina. One of Area’s main goals is now to create a database and an archive of our own material, so that not only the works are preserved, but also the testimonies and the context provided by the creators themselves. Although video art pieces and collections are still being discovered, restored and digitized in Argentina, I would like to point at independent initiatives like these ones, which aim at preserving and disseminating the audiovisual patrimony of the country, acknowledging the need to provide public access to key historical moments of our past –including a part of our TV history, as a fundamental dimension of our collective memory.
- At present, we are distant from the times in which TV was a live event, and a medium merely used as a way of transmitting shows, advertising and propaganda. Currently, TV has been increasingly regarded as a record and a depositary of collective representational memory, as well as of historical identity disputes and a territory for collective appropriation. In the case of Argentina, TV is also a testimony of dark historical times and can serve as a constant reminder of a period that should under no circumstances be restaged. It has been widely said that technological obsolescence is planned from the very moment in which an appliance is designed. However, it is my belief that it is not only apparatuses that are programmed to fail, but also that our memory is threatened by the same strategy. In that context, programmed oblivion can take the shape of copyright laws, corporate profitability and every action that result in access blockage. For our biggest desire and our strongest demand is not to commerce with our memory, is not to buy and sell our history. It is simply, and against all odds, to resist disappearing.