Tuesday, April 2nd, 7:00pm
El último malón
Alcides Greca, 1917, 63 min.

New digital restoration!

Four years before Robert Flaherty premiered Nanook of the North, writer Alcides Greca mounted his own early documentary experiment in Santa Fe, Argentina, thus anticipating, like Flaherty, both visual anthropology and the fictionalized representation of vanished cultures and events. Divided into two sections, in its first half, El último malón describes the immiserated conditions of the mocovíes natives in northern Santa Fe. Its second half reconstructs, in part with the same protagonists, the mocovíes’ attack on the town of San Javier in 1904.

El último malón was rescued from oblivion in 1956 by documentary filmmaker Fernando Birri and the Santa Fe Documentary Film School with their exhibition of an original tinted 35mm print supplied by the Greca family. In 1968, the film club Rosario commissioned a 16mm reduction, made by technician Fernando Vigévano. Today, the 35mm print is considered to be lost. This 4K version was extracted from the 16mm reduction print, preserved by the Film Museum Pablo Ducrós Hicken, Buenos Aires.

With an introduction by Andrés Levinson, curator at the Museo del Cine de Buenos Aires.

Piano accompaniment by Makia Matsumura