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 Aïnel-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