An Archaeology of Moments

A letter is, in a sense, always written in the present tense; it’s a live impression of a moment in time, bereft of the luxury of a wider context. Letters are inherently erratic, composed of raw thoughts and unfiltered reflections, eschewing concerns of “readability”. A letter meanders through digressions and addenda and mirrors the stream of consciousness that plagues our everyday headspace. The format’s elusiveness has always been its charm, as it assorts and fragments communication emotionally instead of rationally.

Ironically, in cinema, letters are almost antithetical to this spirit. They lean closer to the epistolary novel, where letters appear first and foremost as narrative devices, clear about facts and motives. Letters in film are like any other tool within cinematic storytelling: abstracted and compartmentalised, functional and precise. In films as diverse as Lubitsch’s Golden Age romances to Spielberg’s Oscar winners, they have been effective means of conveying plot and psychology. Letters conceived through film, on the other hand, only occasionally appear in what is euphemistically called “radical” or “outsider” cinema. It’s almost as if their existence itself is an affront to film grammar, crisscrossing between registers and traditions.

Each fragment in Lettre à Mohamed carries the quality of a home video diary, with as its sole aesthetic or narrative intent the safekeeping of a transient memory, capturing the aura of a specific time and place. A handheld Super 8mm camera scans a Tunisian medina, providing the archeological testament of a place that’ll never be the same again. A digital camera follows teenage boys joking around the rubble of a graffiti-covered and desecrated building. Old men drink outside, rambling about how things have changed.

Direct mentions of the ousted dictator Ben Ali are sporadic. The spectre of his reign of terror looms over the film, but this work is truly about the aftermath of his disappearance; the hopes and dreams that arise from a new beginning in a push-and-pull with the open wounds and disillusionment of witnessing history repeat itself again and again. Faces laugh and yearn and mourn. Joyful songs blast from the radio as the cityscape is framed by a dirty car window, like an organic moment of cinematic artifice emerging from everyday life.

By itself, archival footage tends to show an idealised past. Be it official history or colonial gaze, it stands at a distance from lived experiences. In one of the sequences, an idyllic celebration is depicted, with joyful scenes rapidly switching tone when one realises the optimism around change was never fulfilled; instead of a historical record, the scenes live on as something aspirational.

More than recording, the audiovisual letter portrays the unregistrable, the atmosphere that’s not enclosed in any specific frame, but can be felt through their juxtaposition, as a cumulative effect. It becomes the kind of artefact archeologists crave for: an affective time capsule that reveals more with each time one returns to it; the most powerful of letters.