For years, I always wanted to be part of the film archiving community and I never managed to do it. In Argentina, it was simply impossible despite the good will and kindness of the people at Pablo H. Ducros Hicken which I frequently visited when they were still located in Balvanera, because it was closer to my old home than its present location that I have also visited a few times.
But I found better reception and encouragement between tango recording collectors and I became the only idiot in the world that tries to repair those tunes and now, because friends have asked me, I also deal with American Jazz recordings as well.
Still, I wa nted to contribute something and after watching last week, on Filmoteca, the presentation of several, for the most part, silent films I was finally inspired to apply some of the knowledge I learned in all these years and produce an authentic restoration of a film, even if I had to do it from a lousy video of a Carlos Gardel short.
Those shorts were originally filmed in 1930 by Federico Valle to be included in his newsreels. But in 1951, ten of the fifteen shorts were compiled with poor quality keeping all of the flaws from the original versions and altering all of the soundtracks.
That lousy compilation is the only way to watch those shorts that became almost unwatchable in video because all of the versions are poorly done chains from the seventies.
However, I know something about the Argentine film industry: if you restore the soundtracks, you are repairing around 60 or 70% of a film!
For that reason, and because many collectors friends have died and I want my elders to have a last chance to watch an authentic restoration of a Carlos Gardel, I decided to finally come up with a faithful version of one of those shorts as they were originally seen (or at least heard) in 1930.
Somebody else will be able to repair the images and get the whole credit. I don't need that.
This is dedicated to my friend Hétor Lorenzo Lucci, who preserves some of the original Sidetone (Vitaphone) discs of these shorts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqTbCQgr91w
Gracias Peña y Manes por pasar el programa por Internet así lo podemos ver desde el exterior.
