Procesos y disputas en la formación del espectador: censura moral y cinefilia en Medellín, 1945-1958

Objective/Context: this paper reviews the strategies and practices through which the Catholic Church and the Medellin Cine-Club (Movie Club) drove specific ways of viewing and judging movies in the mid-20th century in this city. Methodology: with this aim, we draw upon the critique of printed documentary sources such as newspapers, magazines, books, statistical yearbooks, and legislation, complemented with the review of relevant bibliography. Originality: the documentary review allowed suggesting that, as opposed to the traditional vision, the role of the Church cannot be reduced to its intervention in official film censorship and moral censorship it performed through the classification of films. This institution was also particularly active in publishing bulletins and books, creating film fora, and organizing conferences. The Cine-Club, on the other hand, was an entity set up to screen movies not exhibited in commercial theaters because of censorship or lack of mass audience appeal. It made the Church and the city’s most conservative sectors hostile and made it challenging to find members and host regular exhibitions. The meeting between those two social actors evidences a historiographically unexplored dispute within the bounds of movie exhibition. Conclusions: the Catholic Church was interested in exercising its capacity for moral control, but did not limit its activities to the latter, given it also sought to form the faithful in the technical and artistic aspects of the sphere seeking to build a Catholic spectator, understood as a spectator who would watch and judge a movie as a work of art without forgetting Christian morals. At the same time, the Cine-Club was attempting to educate cinephiles, in whom the love for movies implied an independent esthetic judgment supported in a relative split between quality and morality. Both positions came into conflict, which led to the close of the secular institution.