The John Ford film saved from the axe and rediscovered 100 years later in Chile

In the early 1970s, when Chilean academic Jaime Córdova was just four years old, his grandparents took him to the cinema in San Antonio, a port city about 80 miles from Santiago, to see Bambi and 2001: A Space Odyssey. After each screening, the young boy would visit the operator’s booth and ask for a piece of film. He remembers that his first souvenir was a newsreel clip, and as a teenager, he met a particularly kind employee who taught him how to operate the machines, handle reels of tape, and check the material.

Córdova, 51, has devoted his life to searching for and preserving such treasures. His archive now contains more than a thousand titles. His latest find is a 40-minute fragment of The Scarlet Drop, a lost 1918 Western by American director John Ford, starring Harry Carey, one of the first silent film stars.

Córdova, who has authored several books on film history and founded the Valparaíso Film Festival, doesn’t consider himself a collector. “A collector is someone who seeks, hoards, and doesn’t share. I’m a researcher who has an archive, searches for material, restores it, and makes it circulate again,” he explains over the phone. That’s exactly what he did with The Scarlet Drop.

A friend contacted him to say that someone in Santiago was selling a batch of film reels that needed to be cleared out before a warehouse demolition. On January 3, 2023, Córdova took home about 300 rolls of film. His approach is always to acquire entire lots. “You don’t always find what you’re looking for, but you find what’s left,” says Córdova, who is a professor of film history at the Universidad Viña del Mar.

While reviewing, sorting, cataloging, and checking the material, Córdova discovered a film without its opening credits. It was badly damaged, showing signs of heavy use. The perforations had to be repaired, the image cleaned, and the dust removed. The film turned out to be one of John Ford’s early works, made when he was still in his twenties. “It’s very interesting — violent for its time — with a critique of racism and class differences. It allows us to see that John Ford’s talent and vision were present from the beginning. The first 10 minutes are a tribute to the work and aesthetics of the father of cinematic language, David Wark Griffith, director of The Birth of a Nation. Ford was his assistant on that film,” Córdova explains.

Since the film could no longer withstand physical screening, it was digitized in 4K at the Cineteca Nacional in Santiago. It was then re-released on September 30 at the Festival de Cine Recobrado, held at the Teatro Municipal de Valparaíso. In January, it will be shown at the Argentine version of the festival, led by Fernando Martín Peña. Córdova’s goal is to have Getty Images, which holds several minutes of the film (though it has never released any frames), share the material so The Scarlet Drop can be completed.

Córdova isn’t interested in discussing money. He makes it clear that he doesn’t profit from restoring the 35mm and 16mm reels he finds, often in the second-hand market at Persa Biobío in southern Santiago, or from the collections of heirs who no longer want to keep them. He also prefers not to investigate how the films ended up in the hands of those who sell them to him. In theory, these films should not even exist.

The professor explains that at the first World Cinematography Congress in 1909, it was decided that distributors would stop selling copies of films and would instead rent them out. Once the rights expired or the copies deteriorated in quality, they were to be destroyed “with an axe in the presence of a notary public,” says Córdova. This regulation was enforced worldwide until 2014, when analogue cinema came to an end.

“But, historical evidence shows that there were always wine merchants who secretly saved films from destruction and sold them to people with projection equipment, or, according to oral accounts, exchanged them for a bottle of wine or a pack of cigarettes,” says Córdova. He argues that if film studios had paid the wine merchants working for their subsidiaries better, the black market might never have existed — though, in that case, there would be no heritage left to rescue.

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