“Sitting on a Time Bomb”: The Burning of Mexico’s Cineteca Nacional and the Idea of a Self-Destructing Archive
Abstract
The destruction by fire in 1982 of the Cineteca Nacional, the largest repository of art film in Mexico, constituted the lowest point of an era characterized by censorship, lack of funding, and the virtual dismantling of the state cinema apparatus. Nearly 6,000 films went up in flames along with a still unspecified number of human bodies. Discarding the possibility of sabotage, authorities attributed the cause of fire to an act of “spontaneous combustion,” thus transforming the National Film Archive into a cellulose nitrate self-destroying machine. Based on newspapers, official reports, and other documents this paper will analyze the complicated process of mourning for a lost archive, the production and “erasure” of ruins, and the political implications of representing the nation’s film repository as an archive that could not help but to destruct itself.