The Filmoteca de Catalunya celebrates its tenth anniversary in the Raval this Monday. It was on February 21, 2012, when projections began at the new headquarters, which responded to the need to concentrate all the activities promoted by this cultural institution dedicated to cinema in a single place. Before ending up here, it had multiple locations, among which many still remember the last one, in the old Aquitania cinema, on Avenida de Sarrià, where it was for twenty years. The film archive, library, exhibitions, and educational services, spread across different dependencies, were added to the sessions it offered. "A long aspiration of the Filmoteca was to have its own headquarters that would bring everything together," says its director, Esteve Riambau, in an interview with The New Barcelona Post.
Everything ended up being concentrated in the new building that was built from scratch in Salvador Seguí Square. Only its film archive was moved to another location, situated in the Parc Audiovisual de Terrassa. It is there that more than 40,000 titles and some 200,000 reels are preserved, spanning from the early 20th century and placing special emphasis on Catalan cinema. The choice to focus activity in the Raval aroused the suspicion of some who believed it would drive away spectators. Apocalyptic voices predicted catastrophe, with the certainty that multiple incidents would occur and the police would constantly have to be called. "We have never had any problems," Riambau emphasizes.
The cultural center was also aware that it has never been one of the main needs of the neighborhood in which it is located, but they have tried to contribute to improving the surrounding environment, with sessions in which the Raval was the protagonist of the films and collaborating with its schools and associations. Riambau adds that the square has been transformed in these ten years and, especially, thanks to La Monroe, the bar annexed to the Filmoteca. "They have absolutely integrated into the neighborhood and have managed to create an atmosphere and a pole of attraction for young people. The bar has absolutely changed the square, day and night," he points out.
The Filmoteca cannot be explained without its surroundings, as demonstrated by one of the episodes Riambau recalls when reviewing the ten years in the Raval. On the afternoon of August 17, 2017, Rio Grande, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, was being screened. A few meters away, on La Rambla, a terrorist attack was taking place that left 13 dead. "The decision we had to make was whether to interrupt the screening and evacuate the spectators or keep calm, close the doors, and wait for the film to finish to leave in an orderly fashion," he explains. The second option was chosen, having users exit through the back door and telling them not to go to La Rambla. "Nothing happened, but the van was very close to here and the terrorist passed next to the Boqueria. We were at the epicenter," he adds.
That has been one of the complicated moments the Filmoteca has experienced during these ten years in the Raval, as has been the pandemic, although the good moments have ended up predominating. "There have been many outstanding episodes, most of them good. The balance could not be more positive," Riambau defends. Like when German actress and singer Hanna Schygulla visited Barcelona for the retrospective dedicated to her and did so with the sole condition of being able to sing in the same cinema hall of the Filmoteca, closing her concert with a song from Lili Marleen. Riambau also remembers when a daughter of Orson Welles and Keith Baxter, one of the actors from one of his films, Chimes at Midnight, came. The visit was accompanied by a screening of the film in the church of Cardona, where a good part of the film had been shot.
Another retrospective was the one that brought Maria de Medeiros to the Catalan capital. The Portuguese actress wanted to highlight the smaller films she had made and agreed to include Pulp Fiction, but she thought no one would go to that screening because it's on the internet and was very well known. More than 200 people ended up coming. "Everyone may have seen it and it may be on YouTube, but seeing it on a cinema print, on the big screen, in original version with subtitles and presented by you is only today, here and now ---Riambau told De Medeiros---. This is the difference that we can afford, and there is an audience that knows they will find that extra." Along with Phenomena, they are the only venue in the city that screens analog cinema. They even offer live music to accompany silent films.
And the Filmoteca's audience is, in addition to being demanding, very loyal. With the pandemic, only 25% of spectators have been lost, going from an average of 100 users per session to 75. They also have about 400 annual subscribers, beyond occasional viewers. "There are people you see here every day," Riambau emphasizes. All in all, the Raval headquarters celebrates its tenth anniversary with a history of almost 1.3 million spectators, who have attended more than 13,000 sessions. 2015 was the year with the most public, with 148,768 attendees, while, as could not be otherwise, 2020 was the one with the fewest, with only 66,752.
Despite this, COVID has served to highlight the value of in-person attendance: "A Filmoteca is a physical facility in the double sense of the word. To preserve films, it has to be done physically: you have to be there to receive the cans and hard drives and you have to store them. From the point of view of projections, for us, they are cinema projections in a dark room with the audience present." Therefore, for Riambau, June 26, 2020, will also remain marked in the Filmoteca's historical calendar, being the day they returned to activity after confinement and did so with Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.
Looking ahead to future anniversaries
One of the greatest uncertainties experienced by all film libraries in the world, and the film sector in general, is the evolution of digitalization, which has left analog films behind and opted for digital ones. "While cinema was analog, we knew that by placing films on celluloid reels at low temperature and without humidity, they would be preserved for tens and hundreds of years. When the industry decides to digitize cinema, it facilitates dissemination, but opens up the great unknown of preservation. A digital film is four terabytes, an enormous amount of memory, and the only possibility is to put it on a supercomputer that expands its memory every year and cross your fingers that it doesn't get lost and that in ten years there will be devices capable of reproducing today's technology," explains Riambau. All this, of course, drives up the price of conservation, with a cost between six and ten times higher than reels. "The uncertainty is absolute," he emphasizes.
Not failing in one of its main objectives, the preservation of cinematographic heritage, is one of the future challenges facing the Filmoteca, but not the only one. Riambau also points out the need to digitize its archive, to make it more accessible and achieve greater dissemination, and to gain more legal independence, like that of other cultural institutions, for example, the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (TNC) and the Biblioteca de Catalunya.