Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour • Presented by Archives on Screen

The Samama Chikli Project

Sunday, February 16 • 5:00pm • Tickets: $12 General (+ $2 online fee), $8 Members (no fee), $8 Students (door)

Introduction by Aboubakar Sanogo

Tim O'Keefe will be accompanying all 8 Chikli shorts in the Sunday, 5pm program. Live music throughout!

The Albert Samama Chikli Project archives the work of Tunisian filmmaker and photographer, Albert Samama Chikli (1872-1933), who made over 100 films from 1905 to 1924. Entrusted to the Cineteca di Bologna by his family, archivists are in the process of ordering, identifying, and scanning the collection of films, photos, and fragments. This project is ongoing in Bologna, and pieces of the archive screen each year at Il Cinema Ritrovato as they are restored and digitized.

In this shorts segment, we’ve curated a selection of Samama Chikli’s early non-fiction films and a fragment from one of his two feature films, Ain El Ghezal: The Girl from Carthage (1923–1924).

ABOUT THE FILMS

Arab Agricultural Industry (Industrie agricole arabe) • 1911 • Tunisia • 5 min • silent

In 1908-1909, Albert Samama Chikli sold his negatives mostly if not exclusively to the short-lived Le Lion company. Shot in 1910 and released in January 1911, Industrie agricole arabe was possibly the first negative he sold to Gaumont, marking the beginning of a long collaboration. Hidden in a longer compilation edited in the 1920s by Gaumont for educational purposes, negative material of the film has recently been rediscovered and identified with the help of frame enlargements and contact prints of film frames in the Albert Samama Chikli Archives. La Figue de Barbarie, the opening part of the four parts of Industrie agricole arabe, is a perfect example of Samama’s filmmaking: informal, lively, direct, human and devoid of orientalism or pictorialism. –Mariann Lewinsky

Sheep Shearing in Tunisia (La tonte des moutons en Tunisie) • 1916 • Tunisia • 5 min • silent

A herd backs into a dusty courtyard. The sheep, on the ground with their four legs bound, are quickly and skillfully shorn. The animals, now without their fleece, leave one by one, leaping over a narrow channel to allow the shepherds to count them. Everything is crystal clear, efficient, encouraging in a sense – and this goes for both the shearing and the film. Except for the final panning shot of the men grinning at the camera and brandishing shears ready to be put to use. –Andrea Meneghelli

Fishing on the Tunisian Coast (Pêches sur les côtes Tunisiennes) • 1914 • Tunisia • 4 min • silent

Since creatures of the sea are one of our vital sources of nutrition, fishing has always been a testing ground for the ingenuity of our species, which is notoriously ill-suited to the water. Before fishing was transformed into an industrialised process, regional variations in practice were a cultural fact. A film such as this, which demonstrates three distinctly different practices, is a precious thing. –Andrea Meneghelli

The Sponge Industry (L'industrie des éponges) • 1912 • Tunisia • 6 min • silent

For centuries Tunisia was the leading producer of Mediterranean commercial sponge, which was one of the country’s most important export goods. When, in 1911, Albert Samama Chikli travelled to Libya to film the Italian-Turkish war from behind the Ottoman front, he shot on his way footage for several films that he later sold to Gaumont. In Zarzis, a peninsula south of Djerba in the Gulf of Gabès he documented the traditional sponge industry, from the diving to the sales negotiations on the market. Sponges! Where have you gone? You were the divinities of our childhood bathrooms, you were in every house. We were washed with sponges and played endlessly with them, marvelling at their marvelous capacity to hold so much water and to release it when pressed. (Christians might also remember a certain merciful sponge playing a role in the crucifixion.) Needless to say that the marine ecosystem of the Gulf of Gabès, for times immemorial one of the richest fishing aeras of the Mediterranean, is now dead, devastated by the emissions of the Gabès-Gannouch factory (phosphate), the untreated discharges of the Gabès Chemical industry (fluoride, heavy metals) and so on (oil leaks). –Mariann Lewinsky

Sousse – Olive Harvest (Sousse – Récolte des olives) • 1910 • Tunisia • 5:09 min • silent

We see views of olive trees, women in the village, a street scene, a mosque, and the central marketplace with many passersby. Chikli's camera captures the narrow streets and whitewashed houses. We move to the olive grove, where children in the trees shake the branches and pick the olives. A boy smiles mischievously at the moving camera but we also feel the difficulty and intense repetition of his labor. A donkey carries baskets of olives. Men stand in line on a dirt road to receive their payment.

German Prisoners in Tunisia (Les prisonniers allemands en Tunisie) • 1916 • Tunisia • 4:09 min • silent

German prisoners in Tunisia turn around and walk in step through a military camp, with their tents visible in the background. They roll barrels on the ground, spread concrete using shovels, and unload wagons full of earth and stones. The prisoners walk in a row in front of a large door supervised by French soldiers, who nearly approach the camera.

Picturesque Tripoli (La Tripolitaine pittoresque) • 1911 • Libya • 6:13 min • silent

Oasis in the desert: we see palm trees, camels, and a panoramic view of the village. Men exit a mosque. Women and children assemble and the women prepare a meal--smiling and laughing when they notice the camera. A group of men and children emerge with a camel  from an underground gallery. A man harvests fruits from a tree. A woman vigorously crushes the fruit with a stone. A child stomps the fruit with his feet inside a container. The people often look directly at the camera while they work. We see the process of their labor production, followed by views of the old fortress, the citadel, and the village. A woman fetches water from a well in a bucket. A donkey raises a ruckus and causes a scene. A small child smiles and nods while holding the side of his head after a fight, indicating that he did well.

Aïn el Ghezal: The Girl from Carthage (Aïn el Ghezal: La fille de Carthage) • 1923-1924 • Tunisia • 25 min • silent

The bad news first. The newly found film material of Aïn el Ghezal: La Fille de Carthage amounts to nothing, since one minute of moving images and two intertitles make no substantial difference. As before, what remains of the film is more or less the first reel, about 300m or 20 minutes at 16fps. There were no other options for us but to undertake a bricolage reconstruction and use paper documents from the Albert Samama Chikli archives, including photographs, title lists and the script to give an outline of the missing part of the work.

Now the good news. A dramatic change for the better can be announced. Aïn el Ghezal has always posed a problem to spectators who were more than ready to appreciate the film and its creators, but it made for a disappointing viewing experience. Good cause or no, Tunisian film pioneer or no, the film simply did not work. Now we know why. What we have seen was not the first part of a film by Albert Samama Chikli but the very poor results of re-editing, as the comparison of the remaining reel and the scenario revealed. When? Who? There must have been two rounds, one in 1924 by the Maurice laboratory cutting Aïn-el-Ghezal from 1,424m down to 1,014m, and a second one undated but particularly vicious. A devotee of cross-cutting – probably the collector René Charles who has both saved and butchered the precious reel – has minced most of the scenes and several close-up takes into snippets, remixed them and edited them together into sequences of fake shot/reverse shots.

To undo the disfigurement felt like setting free a concealed film, a trapped Aïn el Ghezal. In general, the reconstruction follows the scenario; however, several scenes found on film are absent from the script and two of them are indicated in the dactyloscript in more than one place by handwritten notes. But even with a sometimes hypothetical order, and with gaps and jumps, the fragment now works and it honours the director Albert Samama and the scriptwriter and actress Haydée Chikli. It certainly makes us wish to be able to see the entire film. However, the chances of more material turning up are minimal. Samama’s hopes to sell Ain-el-Ghezal to distributors in France or the US remained unfulfilled, and so the positive print that premiered in Tunis on 23 November 1923 was possibly the only ever struck. The filmmaker had resorted to crowdfunding among friends to be able to pay for it. –Mariann Lewinsky

RESTORATION NOTES:

The Samama Chikli Project: Copies of Arab Agricultural Industry and The Sponge Industry from GP Archives. Restored in 4K in 2024 by Gaumont Pathé Archives from the original negative nitrate. Copy of Ai¨n-el-Ghezal from La Cinémathèque française in collaboration with CNC. Restored in 4K and reconstructed in 2024 by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée laboratory from two 35mm nitrate prints provided by La Cinémathèque française and Département de la Charente (formerly René Charles Collection), preserved at CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée. Documentary and photo materials from the Albert Samama Chikli Archives preserved at Cineteca di Bologna were used for the reconstruction of the missing part..