Many will not even know that 80 years ago they made three-dimensional films. Few were made, in fact: 3Daren was a failed attempt in the 1930s, compared to more successful technical advances in cinema, such as sound or color. However, now that it has been discovered, among the experiments that were carried out, the Basque Country has its place.

Let's go to 1936: Director René Le Hennaff recorded a folkloric production called Euskadi, in which you can see the streets of Bayonne and Biarritz, showing more recent themes such as tourism, as well as the romantic image of the Basque Country at that time.

“It’s impressionable,” Josu Martínez explains when we asked him what he felt when he saw the film. The film will be screened for the first time in the Basque Country, 81 years after its premiere in Paris.

The discovery will be announced this Wednesday in Bilbao by Martínez himself, Bea Narbaiza of the Nor research group of the UPV/EHU, the Vice-Rector of the Bizkaia campus of the UPV/EHU, Patxi Juaristi and the coordinator of the Loraldia Cultural Association, Mikeldi Uribe Etxebarria.

Trying to spark the new technique

Although it cannot be fully confirmed, it seems that Le Henaff made the Basque Country on request. The inventor of the cinematographer, Louis Lumière, who had already advanced in age, had been trying for years to bring relief to films, Martínez explained. And the Basque Country is a demonstration of this relief: its objective was to extract the “txispas” from the innovative technique and for this reason, it constantly plays with the depth of field.

Le Henaff was an industry director, having worked as an editor, a young promise and who in subsequent years became difficult to make secondary commercial films, directing popular actors such as Fernandel. In the 1930s and 1940s he worked tirelessly, but there are no great traces of his career since then, Martínez says.

It is also a pity that he died not long ago, in 2005, at the age of 105, without the possibility of giving an explanation about the film now found.

Rescuing Gems from the Archives

This is not the first discovery of its kind by Martinez. The discovery of André Madré’s documentary Nuestra Sor Lugar and the intricate process of searching for it, later narrated by Martínez himself in the documentary Nuestra Sor Lugar, was the sounding.

He says that the new discovery presented this Wednesday cannot be compared to him: “This is not going to be one of the biggest films of our cinema.” In any case, he points out that there is a continuity between the most important moments in the history of cinema and its filming in the Basque Country: “The Lumière brothers recorded it in Biarritz and the first French sound film also took root here, perhaps because it is a place that seems exotic to them without going far.”

As for Euskadi, Martínez had few references and pulled one of them, from José María Unsain’s book El cine y los vascos. He said that Le Henaffena was a three-dimensional film; indeed, Unsain had spoken to the French director in 1983, although he could not give him much clue to find the film.

“I started looking for Paris and found the reference in the files of the producer Pathé,” he explains. They kept a copy of the nitrate film. From there, the incidents began: the production company does not cede this type of film as a legacy, it performs its commercial management, and it was proposed to rent the film.

Martínez, “cheating a little” on the product, managed to extract the original from the archives and digitize it. When he saw what it was, he spoke to the institutions and Loraldia came into play: for a month’s rent, the film will be screened at the Basque culture festival in Bilbao on 15 March. The date is in the Alhóndiga de Bilbao and Martínez’s explanations will accompany this premiere.

Previously, it can be seen on March 11 at the Punto de Vista festival in Pamplona; and, accompanied by the Filmoteca Vasca, they have organized a performance at the Tabakalera in San Sebastián (March 23), as well as at the Atalante cinema in Bayonne (March 24), in this case with the support of EKE.