We present an exclusive interview with Dr. Pablo Piedras, recipient of the Media Studies Grant 2026. His project, “Images Before Disappearance. Camera Rushes from Canal 9 News and the Archival Documentation of Argentina’s Disappeared (1972–1983)”, examines the Canal 9 television news collection held by the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken in Buenos Aires.

In this interview, he discusses his motivations for pursuing this topic, the challenges of working with archival material, the broader impact of his findings, and more.

Images Before Disappearance. Camera Rushes from Canal 9 News and the Archival Documentation of Argentina’s Disappeared (1972–1983)

What motivated you to choose this topic for your research?

My interest in this project grew out of the convergence of two strands of my work: research on audiovisual archives and the study of how Argentina’s most recent military dictatorship has been represented and remembered. The Canal 9 television news collection held by Museo del Cine is an exceptional archive. It contains approximately 16,000 items filmed between 1972 and 1983 and was recovered, in extremely precarious condition, from a construction waste container.

The collection includes unedited footage that was never broadcast or otherwise had only very limited circulation. I was aware of an initiative already under way, coordinated by anthropologist María José Méndez, a staff member at Museo del Cine, to identify footage of people who later became victims of state terrorism. I designed a project that would expand and carry this work forward, drawing on my own expertise as a researcher specialising in Argentine documentary cinema and the relationship between images and memory. These film reels capture scenes of work, political activism, trade union participation and public life, allowing us to see the victims in motion and within the collective spaces to which they belonged. The project’s central motivation is to expand the visual repertoire through which we remember the victims of state terrorism, which is often limited to just a few still photographs, and to recover something of their social presence before state violence sought to erase it.

What challenges have you faced in accessing or working with archival material?

The main challenge has not simply been gaining access to the film reels, but making their contents identifiable. Many cans bear incomplete inscriptions, misspelled names or very general descriptions. In other cases, people appear for only a few seconds, with no voice-over, caption or accompanying document that would make it possible to identify them immediately. We are also working with 16 mm film that must be inspected, cleaned, stabilised and digitised before it can be analysed in detail.

The research requires us to cross-check each potential finding against other sources: Argentina’s Unified Register of Victims of State Terrorism (RUVTE), press archives, trade union records, photographs, and testimonies from relatives and former colleagues or fellow activists. During this first stage, we inspected and carried out conservation work on the contents of around forty cans, identifying several cases that require further verification.

There is also an ethical challenge. A mistaken identification can generate false information about a disappeared person and have consequences for their family. We therefore work with different degrees of certainty and seek corroboration from several independent sources for each identification.

What do you see as the role of archives in furthering your field of research?

Archives are spaces in which the past can be reorganised, interrogated and understood in new ways. In the field of audiovisual studies, they allow us to work with materials that were left out of finished films, television broadcasts and the best-known historical narratives.

This is particularly evident in an archive of raw footage. Segments that a television news programme decided not to use may contain historical information just as significant as what was ultimately broadcast, or even more so. They also allow us to study how television crews worked, which events they recorded, how they framed particular social actors, and which images were selected or discarded. In other words, an archaeology of images allows us to examine both the production of television images and the ways in which cinema subsequently reappropriates this archival material.

For these possibilities to be realised, preservation must be accompanied by research, cataloguing and public access. Exchanges among archivists, researchers, human rights organisations and relatives are essential, because no catalogue can contain on its own all the information needed to identify a person, a place or a historical event.

What impact do you hope your research will have on understanding the value of archives for present-day societies?

I hope the project will demonstrate that the preservation of an audiovisual archive can serve social, political, cultural and artistic purposes, including making a meaningful contribution to the field of human rights.

More concretely, the research seeks to enrich the documentation and metadata associated with the Canal 9 collection, identify materials of particular historical significance and make them easier to consult. We also hope to make a selection of the images and the documentation produced by the project available through the Museo del Cine website for relatives, human rights organisations, researchers and the general public.

The possibility of returning these images to the families holds particular significance. Finding previously unknown footage of a disappeared person can restore to the historical record gestures, movements, spaces and relationships that are absent from surviving photographs; for many families, not even a single photograph survives. In a society that continues to grapple with the consequences of state terrorism, and at a time when Argentina is experiencing a serious rollback in this area as a result of government policies introduced since 2024, archives can help keep memory alive and reaffirm the contemporary importance of human rights and democracy.

What key insights would you like the FIAT/IFTA community to take away from your research?

I would like to emphasise that some of the most valuable documents in a television archive may be found among materials that were originally considered secondary: outtakes, unedited fragments or footage that was never broadcast. Their value is not always apparent at the time of production. It may emerge many years later, when new historical questions prompt us to revisit them.

I would also stress that archival description has social consequences. An image without names or context remains virtually inaccessible, even when it has been preserved. Identifying the people shown, reconstructing the circumstances in which the footage was filmed and connecting the material with other sources are all part of the work of preservation.

Finally, the project puts forward a collaborative model that may be useful to other television archives by bringing together technical preservation, historical research, archival expertise and the participation of communities connected to the images. Archives fulfil their potential when they can forge new relationships with the societies that preserve them.