Collecting Latin America on Film
This article was originally published in the December 2004 / January 2005 issue of CLASnotes.
Hernán
Vera in Library East examining the Latin American films collection in the
video library.
The film collections of the George Smathers Library have received a big boost thanks to the pioneering efforts of Sociology Professor Hernán Vera. Armed with a $40,000 grant from the UF Office of Research and Graduate Programs, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Center for Latin American Studies, Vera has assembled the university’s first Latin American feature film collection to enhance the research and educational experiences of faculty and students.
Comprised of nearly 1,200 titles on VHS and DVD, the collection contains classic Latin American films dating back to the 1920s, as well as contemporary selections. What makes the new collection unique is that half of its contents are films that have never before been imported into the US. “It is not the biggest collection of Latin American films in the nation, but we do have the best selection,” says film librarian John Van Hook, who served as Vera’s counterpart at Smathers on the project. “We have had places like Harvard University call and ask where we were able to get some of our films.”
Due to the scarcity of Latin American films in the US, Vera traveled to Mexico and Chile to acquire the bulk of the collection in person. A native of Santiago, Chile, he was able to draw from personal experiences when working on the project. “A large part of my knowledge of Latin American films comes from the fact that I watched them when I was young,” he says. “I know all of the names of the great directors and actors I grew up with.”
As a law student in Chile in the 1960s, Vera became a cine forum leader and held public discussions on popular films of the day. When he later moved to the US, he was surprised at the paucity of Latin American films imported into the country. “I was astonished to discover our library did not have a collection of Latin American films,” he says. “Over a third of the population of Florida has Latino ancestry, so we cannot, as a university in Florida, not have a Latin-American film collection.”
With the assistance of Van Hook and Smathers Library Director for Technology Services Martha Hruska, Vera spent the past two years building up the UF Latin American film holdings. Jewels in the collection include 22 films by Mario Moreno, better known as Cantinflas, the Mexican comedian who starred in the original version of Around the World in 80 Days. The early films of Argentine actors Libertad Lamarque, Hugo del Carril and Carlos Gardel, Vera says, are also among the most interesting films in the collection. About two thirds of the films have already been cataloged, and can be easily browsed on shelves surrounding the front counter of Library East and checked out for up to three days at a time. The collection can also be searched in the library’s online catalog, WebLUIS, using “latin america” or the name of a particular country as search words.
“They fly off the shelves quicker than possibly anything else in our film collections,” Van Hook says. “We have so many Latino and Latin American students here who enjoy them. Just a few months ago we had a new student who had just moved here from Ecuador come in, and I was able to find him five popular movies—two of which he had never seen and was looking forward to watching. No other institution has anything like this and the library owes a huge debt of gratitude to Dr. Vera for lighting a fire under us and taking the initiative to get this done.”
—Buffy Lockette
Photo:
Jane Dominguez