Content area
Full text
Backstory and Current Context
Images from the first years of Brazilian television are very scarce, mainly because the majority of local television productions were broadcast live and keeping records of them on film was very expensive. The few programmes that were filmed during the 1950s and 1960s were severely damaged by inappropriate storage conditions.1 In addition, Tupi Network, the first Brazilian Television station, went bankrupt in 1980 and most of its programme archive was lost.2
The introduction of videotape during the early 1960s favoured an increasing production of local contents allowing the beginnings of what would soon become a flourishing telenovela industry. In 1963, the first daily telenovela was broadcast on Brazilian television and, even though it was not a huge success, it served as a clear sign for television producers of the genre's potential to attract large audiences.3 However, despite the growing presence of television in Brazilian society, audiovisual records from the late 1960s and 1970s remain extremely scarce. As elsewhere, television programmes were not considered a valuable product to be preserved for posterity, and the conservation of tapes and films was not a high priority of Brazilian TV stations. The economic hardships faced by most stations during their first decades, and the many controversial fires which have destroyed precious archives, particularly during the most violent phase of the military regime (1968-1974), are among the main reasons for the scarcity of images from the Brazilian recent past.4
In addition to circumstantial hardships, another major barrier stands in the way of archive in the form of Globo Network, the leading Brazilian TV institution. Launched in Rio de Janeiro a year after the coup d'état as a single TV station, Globo TV has held a hegemonic position within the Brazilian market since the end of the 1960s and is considered the fourth-largest television network in the world.5 Generally identified within Brazil as a close supporter of the military regime, Globo Network has invested considerable efforts in rewriting its own history. It established a permanent staff composed of communication researchers, history scholars and archivists, under the name oí Projeto Memoria Globo (Globo's Memory Project), which has published at least three books targeted at the broad public, describing its past programmes and offering a narrative of its...