A year ago, three cans of unidentified material emerged from an uncharted region of the collections housed in La Cinémathèque française. A few Lumière vues and fiction films from around 1904-1905 were easy to identify, but what about the more than 70 very short nitrate fragments of film prints and negatives? They turned out to be snippets of works by Albert Samama Chikli, mostly scraps such as film images with punch holes or badly framed takes of people without any heads – it looks clearly like a sentimental filmmaker’s leftovers and waste bits. A flea circus, but with its stars: outtakes in pristine image quality from Le Bey de Tunis (with Naceur Bey), an entrancing pan over a vegetable market and its population and – family films. See Haydée, Blanche, Flossie the cocker spaniel and see Albert (twice)! These and more discoveries have been edited together into a compilation for screening at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

Mariann Lewinsky