Why This Trailer Is Basically Unfindable
The 1928 Spanish-language film Explotaciones de un joven don Juan (released in English as Exploits of a Young Don Juan) directed by Ricardo de Baños is nearly impossible to track down in any official format. The trailer, if one ever existed beyond festival preview reels, is essentially lost media at this point. There are no legal streaming platforms carrying it. No Criterion release. No Netflix, no MUBI listing, no physical media distribution that I'm aware of. What remains online consists entirely of grainy, incomplete clips uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo by archival enthusiasts and old-film preservation groups. If you are specifically hunting for the trailer, your best real-world option is searching YouTube with the Spanish title and "tráiler" or "preview" appended. You will find maybe two or three relevant uploads, none of them high quality, all of them likely pulled from whatever fragments exist in Spanish or French film archives. The most common results are around 30 to 90 seconds long, heavily compressed, and often mislabeled with wrong titles or unrelated footage attached. I spent about three weeks chasing down clips of this film a couple years back for a colleague working on a paper about early Iberian cinema. The frustration came from the fact that almost every snippet online had either incorrect date stamps or was actually footage from a different Ricardo de Baños picture. The one reliable fragment I found was hosted on a obscure French archive site that required creating an account and waiting for manual approval before you could stream anything. That process took roughly four business days. I ended up screening it through VLC's built-in recording function, which saved a 720p rip. Not ideal, but functional for academic use.
What most people don't realize when searching for trailers of films this old is that the concept of a "trailer" didn't really exist in 1928 in the way we understand it today. Studios didn't produce standalone promotional shorts the way they do now. What you'll find labeled as a "trailer" is usually just a newsreel segment, a cinejournal excerpt, or a fragmented scene reel that was pulled together by later archivists. The actual promotional material for this film would have been paper posters and maybe a short press screening clip shown in theaters before the main feature. Those survived. There is a partial print held at the Cinematheque Royale de Belgique and some scraps at the Filmoteca Española, but neither institution offers public streaming access to their holdings. You can request viewing appointments, and both have digitization programs, but turnaround times range from six to fourteen weeks depending on current backlog. If you need this for research and can't wait, the YouTube rips are the only immediate option, though their resolution is typically around 480p with significant artifacts from repeated re-encoding. A workaround that actually works: search for the film's name alongside "restauración" or "restored" on YouTube. Occasionally, when Spanish cultural ministries fund restoration projects, they release preview clips that are noticeably cleaner than the usual archive rips. The quality difference is substantial enough that it's worth the extra search terms rather than just grabbing the first result.
Where to Find What Exists
Beyond the YouTube routes, there are a few institutional channels worth checking. The Archivo General de la Cinematografía in Spain maintains a catalog, but their online presence is minimal. You can submit a formal consultation request through their website, and if the fragment you need is in their collection, they will tell you whether it's accessible remotely or requires an in-person visit. Same situation with the Cinémathèque Française — they have materials, but access is not open internet browsing. Academic databases like JSTOR and Persée sometimes have scanned photographs or stills from the film in articles about Spanish cinema history, which can at least give you visual reference even if full motion footage isn't available. One useful paper by Carlos Aguilar in Cahiers du cinéma d'Amérique latine includes several frame grabs from the film that aren't anywhere else online. Bottom line: don't expect a clean downloadable trailer. Don't expect any legal streaming platform to host it. What exists is scattered across a handful of institutional collections and a few low-quality amateur uploads. The effort required depends entirely on how badly you need it and whether you have institutional affiliation that lets you request archival material directly.
Get the Full Details
