The Cultural Center of Spain at #2 Arzobispo Meriño Street in the Colonial City in Santo Domingo presents “Amateur: Identity and Figuration in Dominican Cinema of the 1920s”. “Amateur” looks into how identity was a central issue at the time.
Dominican curator and screenwriter Miguel Piccini, for the Curando Caribe II Curatorial Training Program, seeks to answer in the exhibition: What did the first moving images contribute to the concept of “Dominicanity? What role did the foreign gaze of the newsreel play in the self-perception of the Dominican?
According to Piccini, the events and names highlighted in the narrative of the new exhibition do not follow a chronological order. The exhibition presents images of the first films and insights into the first works of Dominican cinema of the 20th Century, where movement rather than script prevailed.
The exhibition concludes that there was a genuine interest in focusing on what made Dominicans Dominicans. It was not until the second decade of the last century, almost 30 years after the first Lumière brothers film, that the conditions were in place to start producing Dominican films. The first filmmakers, then focused on our identity.
“Amateur” shows the few fragments that are still preserved and, above all, the images of Dominican society filmed for Paramount studios or the Pathé production company, and reflects on the fundamental issue in cinema: the identity value of the image.
The exhibition is open to the public until 24 July 2022 from 9am to 8pm Monday through Saturday.
For more information, see:
Cultural Center Spain