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That’s a good question. Probably given to them out of respect.
Have you reached out to Ben for confirmation? He might remember more details?
1 more question, teddy, and to anyone reading this. If you were offered footage, on the condition that you didn’t share it, would you you accept. Who is great enough to resist that kind of temptation, especially if it’s family related.
Is there an "or else" attached to that condition? Because what happens if I accept the condition to not share it and then share it anyway for the world? 🤷♂️
depends on how you look at braking trust and under what circumstances the trust was given. if it was just some dude in a bar, i'd say "yeah, sure i won't share it!" (fingers crossed behind my back), but if i was invited into the home of a reinhardt relative who sincerely asked not to share and took a risk in sharing with me, then I might reconsider the level of the commitment to my word.
That said, at this point, I think the footage should just be released, so i'd say fuck it and put it on youtube. i think it's more important for the entire world to have access than people's altered egos would otherwise like. maybe this isn't a popular opinion, but when i hear django, i hear an individual, not tribalism.
If there is more Django footage surviving somewhere, I'd expect that it's truly lost/forgotten - some film sitting in a pile of junk in a hoarder's garage somewhere covered in dust. There is no defensible argument for owning unreleased Django footage and refusing to share it, so the idea that someone's sitting on a cache of this stuff, like a dragon hoarding gold, sounds like a fairytale to me. Occam's razor.
it does sound like a fairy tale, but i saw it. so did ben, ask him.
Ben replied to my email a little over a year ago where responded to my question asking if he had a copy. he said no, but he remembered it. i have his email response in my inbox. he's on the forum. send him an email for validation.
it's not like a dragon sitting on gold, it's more like christians with the shroud of turin. django is like jesus to some people. he swung for my sins.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but it could just be that they had access to footage that at one point wasn't publicly available, like the 1946 Epiphone clip which was in Paul Paviot's 1957 Django documentary with "Swing 42" overdubbed. There were people claiming they saw a clip of Django playing Swing 42 and that could explain it.
The Bal Tabarin clip also circulated probably before the ina.fr website was set up, and the 1946 Henry Hudson footage was also supposedly mailed around the US back in the day with a piece of it getting lost somewhere. In the "Trois Doigts de Génie" documentary a few more seconds of footage showed up.
"Jazz Hot" also supposedly circulated on copied VHS tapes with GJ players quoting the solo in recordings before it was more publicly available.
It's possible Sacha Distel and others had access to this before the days of the internet, and that's where the claims come from.
The color footage you mention seems enigmatic to me, colorizing videos in 2004 wasn't a thing yet, I believe that software's only been around a few years. The earliest color videotape is from 1958 and the earliest with music is an episode of the Dinah Shore show from 1959 with Louis Prima & Keely Smith. So a color TV performance is out of the question, it'd have to be on film for cinema. But I can't imagine anyone filming Django sitting down and performing á la the Andrés Segovia "Paris Film", especially in color.
Of the films Django were in, "Claire De Lune" was found and "Village de la Colére" we know he wasn't in.
Django's live TV performances were made too early to be saved, the BBC didn't start saving Kinescopes until after 1948, and I don't think France has any from the early 50's either.
However I do think more exists out there. While I don't think we'll be seeing Django in color or a full performance, there's possibly a few seconds from a newsreel, like "Last week the famous guitarist Django Reinhardt played at our local theatre..." This could have been filmed in other countries Django toured, like Algiers and Italy, where he'd be more worthy of mention in a newsreel. Something akin to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKlZ5sqL7YM If Django spoke to Norman Granz 1 year earlier about joining JATP, he would be in this clip.
Another thought I've had is perhaps he was filmed by a WW2 photographer in France, so much was photographed and filmed. Another possibility is he was filmed by fans in the US like the Harry Volpe footage. But that is also unlikely since he had a translator with him who kept an eye on him as he wasn't allowed to record anything in the US.
It looked like footage that was filmed in black and white and had some color added to it later. the colors were not great, but it was better that balck and white.
similar to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbGGP_YGAi4 but not as good, but close. i'm telling you, it's not online.
Ben, if you are reading this thread, would you mind chiming in?