Cinematheque exhibits John Ford's film lost for 100 years

The silent film The Scarlet Drop , by American director John Ford, considered lost for a century and found in 2024 in Chile, will be shown in October at the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon.

According to the Cinemateca Portuguesa, the film will be shown on October 20th, as part of the celebrations of World Audiovisual Heritage Day, which is celebrated on the 27th of that month, by members of the International Federation of Film Archives.

The Scarlet Drop is a western film directed by John Ford in 1918 and which, according to the Cinemateca Portuguesa, is marked by themes unusual in westerns of the time: social inequality, class struggle, and marginalization.

The film, starring Harry Carey, "already allows us to foresee what would come to be understood as the Fordian universe: the rituals, the melancholic situations, the social differences, the anti-heroes and that extraordinary photography," says the Cinemateca in a press release.

The Scarlet Drop , which had been thought lost for over a hundred years, was found in 2024, among other old films, in a warehouse in Santiago, Chile.

Chilean academic Jaime Córdova from the University of Viña del Mar purchased a batch of films from a former collector in the Providencia neighborhood of the capital, who was unaware of their contents and wanted to get rid of them after having kept them in storage for more than four decades.

"I don't think something as important as finding a lost John Ford film will ever come up again in my life. Ford's work has always been admired, but finding a film that was lost? It's like finding the Holy Grail," said Jaime Córdova in an interview last December with the EFE news agency.

The copy of John Ford's film that will be shown at the Cinemateca Portuguesa, in a joint session with the film Sansho Dayu (1954), by Kenji Mizoguchi, was digitally restored by the Cinemateca Nacional of Chile.

"I don't want to call it a restoration. Obviously, the film's support was repaired, but the image itself wasn't altered in any way. If you watch the trailer , the nitrate image quality is extraordinary," Jaime Córdova emphasized in the same 2024 interview.

"Nitrate combusts spontaneously at 40 degrees Celsius, as if it were decomposing, but when I opened the cans, the film was perfect. It's a twist of fate that allows some films to survive and others not," concluded the proud discoverer.

The film by Ford, one of the most influential filmmakers in history and author of classics such as Green Was the Valley (1941) and The Missing Woman (1956), preserves the original tones of 1918, pink, blue and ochre tones, characteristic of the technique used at the time to give color to films and avoid the monochrome of black and white.