A positive print fragment from the Cinemathèque française find has tentatively been edited into the Pêche de thon de Sidi Daoud (1905); the oldest Tunisian film known to exist, one of the first films of Albert Samama Chikli if not the very first one, and an outstanding documentary, filmed from a rocking boat in the middle of hundreds of wildly lashing tunas about to be caught and harpooned. Samama screened it in the Casino de Tunis in December 1905 as a highlight of his Cinémato Chikli spectacles made up mostly of short Pathé comedies. (Some of them, incidentally, feature in the 1904 strand: Erreur de porte and Un coup d’œil par étage). And in the following years the film reached a wide audience as it was distributed internationally by Urban and Eclipse. Looking at the negative material newly surfaced at Cinémathèque française with images of tuna carcasses being cut up and cooked for canning, the lingering suspicion that Samama Chikli might have shot the tonnara twice, in 1905 and again in 1906 – or might have edited two different versions from the 1905 footage – was rekindled and became near-certainty.
According to the Urban catalogue and the surviving distribution print, Tunny Fishing in Tunis measured 80m, while the lost La Pêche au thon Sidi Daoud 1906, described scene by scene in Samama’s autograph list “Negatif [sic] ma collection Tunis 1906”, was 225m long. Its final part dealt with the processing and canning of the tuna; the newly discovered negative fragments can be allocated hypothetically to scenes No. 7 “depeçage du thon” and No. 8 “cuisson et preparation”. (For a facsimile of the list see: Albert Samama Chikli, Photographer, Filmmaker, Navigator, Edizioni Cineteca di Bologna, Bologna 2023, p. 264).

Mariann Lewinsky