FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

Since 2023, a team of researchers, technicians, and fellows has been developing a project titled “Audiovisual, History and Preservation: The Place of Brazilian Newsreels and Television Reports in the Construction of Memory (1946–1974)”, coordinated by Eduardo Victorio Morettin (ECA-USP) and funded by FAPESP (grant no. 2022/06032-0).
The project examines, in the context of Brazil’s democratic period and the civil-military dictatorship, representations of historical events and social groups, as well as the cultural and political imaginaries and discourses conveyed in television reports broadcast by TV Tupi - the country’s first television network (1950 - 1980), whose archive was incorporated into the Brazilian Cinematheque in 1987.
This presentation focuses on processes of audiovisual cataloguing, preservation, and expanded access to these materials, highlighting their transdisciplinary nature. The TV Tupi Collection comprises approximately 180,000 16mm reels (around 8,800 cases), in addition to a substantial set of scripts for national and international news narration. It is estimated that about 150,000 of these materials date from the 1950s to 1974, forming the core corpus of the project.
This work emphasizes the articulation between historical research, critical analysis, and laboratory practices in audiovisual preservation. By engaging with a largely unseen and still underexplored corpus, the project contributes to the recognition and circulation of a significant portion of Brazil’s audiovisual memory, expanding possibilities for research on the country’s history, politics, and culture.