Online Museum of Autobiographical Cinema in Doré.
That video of vacations on the beach, when you started walking, Christmas, family birthdays... Who hasn't had a father, a mother, an uncle, a grandfather with a camera in his hand chasing every everyday moment that seemed extraordinary? ? Seeking, precisely, the extraordinary in the daily life of images, the cultural project The Cinematographic started four years ago digitize familiar super-8 tapes, to catalog them, order them… and with them create the **Galician Archive of Domestic Cinema. **
An archive that was enriched when they began to see the images with their owners and protagonists and also keep those testimonies. “In general, in home cinema the images are always the same because they almost always portray the same moments: vacations, parties, trips, weddings… But listening to the testimonies of these people, we experienced what was behind each image and, in the end, we were experiencing autobiographical stories, all in the first person”, bill Pablo Gomez Sala, founder of The Cinematographic. And from there came the idea of going one step further and creating the Online Museum of Autobiographical Film (MOCA).
File image Gómez Sala family.
“La Cinematografía and Cafés Candelas meet once a year to think about new projects and they proposed us to do a bigger project around home cinema and the formalization was this: a museum”, he explains.
And why a museum? “For various reasons,” he answers, “because it is true that, within the autobiographical genre, life is the creative engine and, on the other hand, the creation of each one's life is a work of art, in the sense that each one builds it as he wants and can. We formalize it like this to also dignify home cinema which has always been quite reviled by institutions, by film libraries…”.
The MOCA will have “exhibitions of artists, of anonymous people”, will tell stories “from the sincerity”. “Because the autobiographical factor has to do with telling the 100% subjective truth, one's truth, under the umbrella of authenticity, sincerity. That was what we identified with these people after so many meters of films that we have digitized, They were all sincere stories, they did not try to persuade us of anything, they simply told us their memories, experiences, emotions…”, Gomez Sala continues.
Presentation of MOCA at the Cine Doré.
Inaugurated last January, this new online museum (“To experiment with new methods of distribution and exhibition of cinema and lower costs”, he admits) consists of four parts. “The main one, the one that gives it the entity of a museum, is the annual exhibition project. Every year for six months we will exhibit autobiographical films located in different parts of the world”, he counts.
The 1st Autobiographical Film Festival is entitled Toronto in the first person, curated by the filmmaker Xisela Franco, that she was educated and grew up artistically in the Canadian city. “And, in that sense, she is also an autobiographical curator.” She started with the works of Rick Hancox and continued with ** Phil Hoffman, “the father of documentary film there”. Every 15 days the artist will change and new movies will be added.
Gomez Sala family.
“The second part of MOCA is the film archive, the family collections that we have from our four-year digitization work”, she adds that they will be accompanied by oral testimonies as they are recorded. A digitization job that, by the way, due to how expensive and demanding it is, will be restricted to two collections a year that will be selected more carefully for their volume and thematic value.
In third place, MOCA will give scholarships to promote this type of first-person or self-referential cinema. And finally, at the end of the year They will organize a conference around the theme.
“Normally, life is a journey”, concludes Pablo Gómez Sala, always dedicated to the audiovisual world. “Autobiographical cinema is told in the phases of that journey that we all know. He talks about popular things, there is always identification, we all have a similar journey. The paths are different, but the route is similar and the objective is the same, to go a bit calm”.