Gabriela Plazas has worked on hundreds of restoration projects around the world, with work appearing at the Festival de Cannes and on Amazon, Netflix, but principally has been fighting for many years to protect Argentina’s filmic heritage. With no support from the government and no centralised archives, she has established the ‘Plan Recuperar’ project to protect Argentina’s film history. Plazas explains to Filmworkz why she keeps fighting, and takes us through some of these films that are now given a second lease of life with the help of Phoenix.
EL PLAN RECUPERAR
Plazas’ company Gotika works with companies all over the world, restoring significant cultural films in Malaysia to France, but she highlights the importance of protecting the heritage of Argentina. She says that 80% of silent Argentinian films are lost, and over 50% of films from Argentina’s most prolific period of filmmaking between 1914 and 1960 is also lost.
What survives is still often in poor condition, thanks to 20 years of military rule and poor general storage conditions. Unlike other South American countries, like Mexico’s Cineteca or their university archives, Argentina does not have a large centralised storage system nor any government subsidies.
Whilst Plazas emphasises the importance of protecting Argentina’s filmic heritage, it’s still “solitary” work; “it’s hard to put a lot of your own money into this and then not get any government support or recognition. But this is the fight that you’ve got to fight”.
Alongside the Directores Argentinos Cinematográficos, Gotika established the ‘Plan Recuperar’ with the objective to recover and restore 100 Argentine films between 1974 and 2010 , with the “modernization and enhancement of the audiovisual works of our cinematography, as well as the preservation of the copyright of films, which due to the technological changes in the exhibition, have ceased to be broadcast”.
In lieu of an official ‘National Cinemathique’ or policy on the restoration and preservation of the audiovisual heritage in Argentina, they restoredare planning to restore 100 titles from directors like Pino Solanas, Carlos Sorin, Aristarain, Subiela, Favio, Renan and many more. Plan Recuperar is already complete, and is being broadcast by different television specials and screenings at film festivals around the world.
The purpose is to create masters with protocols and the highest international standards in 4K/UltraHD, for theatrical sales (DCP), broadcasting, streaming, and Bluray in the North American, Asian, and European market.
Canal de la Ciudad (Buenos Aires’ channel for the city) shows four films from Plan Recuperar a month – “it’s really well received because young people want to see them for the first time and old people want to finally have the chance to re-watch it”.
The project’s ethos is ‘to value our cinema, so that the works of its creators, as audiovisual authors, can continue to exist and compete, on an equal footing, with the other technically updated works, generating the full potential of their cultural and economic benefits on the most diverse screens and media’.
Plazas says that she gets a lot of joy working on these projects: “these forgotten films who are out of circulation for being too old for the current market – it’s another life for that film! Now they’re being shown in festivals all over the world and bought by Amazon, Netflix, and they have a second chance to be seen”.
“Especially in a country like ours which has a very complicated history with politics, it’s important to see how life was like in the past. Many films have been made about this obscure period, and we should appreciate our audiovisual heritage. It’s important to think about film or shorts as part of our culture – it’s not just paintings.” Argentina has only just restored democracy in 1983 – during the previous 50 years, six governments had been overthrown by armed revolutions. In 2018, Plazas restored four hour trilogy La Hora de los Hornos (1973) for the Festival de Cannes’ Classic section – the film is an essay on the socio-political situation of Argentina between the years 1945-1968 during the Cold War and in a Latin America governed by oligarchies and pro-American military dictatorships.
RESTORING A COUNTRY’S LEADING LADY
One of those films was Eva Peron (1996). Revered in the West as well as in Argentina, Eva Peron was an icon in the 20th century. With humble beginnings as an actress, she married President Juan Peron after meeting at a benefit for earthquake victims, but died at age 33 of cancer in 1952. In her lifetime, she was powerful within pro-Peronist trade unions, ran the Ministries of Labor and Health, founded and ran the nation’s first large-scale women’s political party, and founded her own charitable foundation. She was titled the ‘Spiritual Leader of the Nation’ by the Argentine Congress and was given a state funeral, generally only reserved for heads of state. She inspired the musical album Evita, which in turn was used as the model for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical film of the same name, with Madonna starring as Eva.
Eva Peron focuses on the political disputes in the later years of Peron’s life, including women’s suffrage in Argentina, the failed coup attempts against Peron’s government, her own failed bid for presidency despite gaining support from low income and working class Argentinians, and her early death.
“I really enjoyed doing Eva Peron because they were very important in our political history. Even though I am not a particular fan, I really respect her as a figure in the world and her ability to transcend interest across national borders. I really enjoyed the composition and the colour, and working with the director, Juan Carlos Desanzo.”.who is also a cinematographer of several classics of Argentine cinema, although not of this film.
After using a Lasergraphics to scan the original negatives, Plazas also had to find the copies for missing sequences, which were dirty and scratched due to their projections (and even burned in some frames!). The final scenes were very damaged and she had to work through every image and reconstruct around the scratches and burns. Generally the copy is darker and grainier than the original negative, but the main issue was the colour – the footage for Eva Peron was incredibly red and was a real challenge to work with. She used Phoenix for colour correction – “I’m very comfortable with it and I really like all the tools”.
“Over the years, people have tried to convince me to change, but Phoenix works best for my work. Because I am a colorist too, we colour and restore at the same time because it makes a more efficient workflow for us and avoids delays down the line by needing to send footage back and forth between the two departments. Phoenix let’s us do this.”
Plazas recommends DVOs like Chroma and Sharpen to beautifully colour correct your image.
HOW SAN LORENZO BEGAN BY GOING TO CHURCH
Although not quite the oldest film Plazas has ever worked on (that would be Operaciones del Dr. Posadas (1899)!), El Cura Lorenzo (1954) is nearly 70 years old and actually belonged to the Fundación Cinemateca Argentina Collection. Not just for football fans, this beautiful black and white film tells the story of community and companionship, setting the foundation for one of the biggest clubs in South America.
El Cura Lorenzo (1954) is based on the true story of the salesian priest Lorenzo Massa who founded the ‘San Lorenzo de Almagro’ club from Buenos Aires, one of the most popular football teams in Argentina. Historically, it’s said that a group of children were playing football in the corner of México and Treinta y Tres Orientales streets of Buenos Aires, but because of increasing traffic in the area, playing football in the streets became a dangerous game. Lorenzo Massa, the Catholic priest of the neighbourhood’s church, witnesses a tram nearly run over one of the boys, and offered the church’s backyard to prevent any future accidents, on the sole condition that they go to mass every Sunday.
The negative was in average condition but had lots of dirt and black spots, as well as issues with stability, which required DVO Dry Clean, DVO Dust + Fix, DVO Steady 2, DVO Flicker, DVO Scratch Target, and DVO Dirt Map. She also had to clone areas of frames to reconstruct the image with DVO Fix which compares the selected area to adjacent frames and applied motion compensation to recreate missing detail plus grain compensation to blend-in the recreated information.
This film was presented in a Latin film special by UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television to show Spanish heritage and it was “very important for fans of the club to see this film”. Surprisingly, Viggo Moretensen – best known for his role in Lord of the Rings – is a huge fan of San Lorenzo and even wore the club’s logo on his suit to the Oscars!
What made this movie a treat was that Plazas enjoys working with black and white movies most, and explains that “it’s like magic! I love the contrast between the black and the white on the nitrate.”
PLAYING WITH COLOUR IN HERENCIA
The Argentinian drama Herencia (2001), directed by Paula Hernández, was entered in the 23rd Moscow International Film Festival when it was first released. It portrays Peter, a young German, who enters a restaurant in Buenos Aires for directions but ends up having a plate smashed over his head by Olinda, the irritable 60 year old Italian owner. They quickly strike up a friendship and soon learn that both their reasons for coming to Argentina are very similar.
Plazas said it was strange to restore an Argentinian film that worked so closely with colour and cinematography (she emphasises this isn’t a blanket rule but a generalisation!), but highlighted how beautiful it was to play with the oranges, blues, and greens, giving it a more European feel.
The footage had serious instability problems, and had to go through DVO Steady twice and use an AI tool to create the final look. There were also a few shots with severe scratches and mould problems that couldn’t be used in the end, and although the mould was removed with DVO Dry Clean and DVO Fix, the two sequences with severe scratches were replaced.
WHAT DRIVES YOU TO BE A RESTORATION ARTIST?
Plazas’ favourite thing about being a restoration artist is the magic: “sometimes when you start working on a film you don’t think you’ll be able to restore it properly, but then after a lot of work on the colour and the images, you feel really happy seeing a frame that’s completely damaged be watched once more. It’s a challenge, but after a lot of work, you restore life in that film. Somehow you do it, and then it feels like magic…”