Beyond Casablanca: M. A. Tazi and the Adventure of Moroccan Cinema

Interlude: Film’s Power and Function

Interlude Film’s Power and Function Looking’s success would indeed lead to a sequel and to a host of problems we will be exploring in chapter 5. For now, the strong contrast in Looking between its overall comic tone and the specter of potential tragedy at the end made me wonder exactly what kinds of experiences Tazi wanted to give spectators and what were his more general notions about the power and function of film. The “Magical,” the “Real,” and the Critical POWERFUL MAGIC, REAL CONCERNS “TO DREAM . . . IN DARKNESS” K. What gives the cinema such power over us, why does the public spend a considerable amount of money, time, and energy, to go see a film? And why do you, the filmmakers, in view of all the difficulties you face, continue to try and make films? M. First of all, I think there is a magical element in film: in the space of an hour and a half or two hours, a person can shed his or her daily concerns and plunge into a magical world. And we Orientals [Fr. nous, les orientaux]—even if this term isn’t an exact one—really need that. When you look at India, which produces some five hundred to six hundred films a year, all consumed in the most 58 Beyond Casablanca natural way, like a habit, like our going to a café to have a morning cup of coffee with friends, you see how important it is to have this rupture from daily concerns. We all need to dream, in poor societies as well as in rich ones. The cinema brings you that: for a couple hours you disconnect from reality and you experience a love story, or a story in Roman times, or a Western, or whatever. There is also the societal level. In some places perhaps the written word dominates and literature has a great impact on people —for example, when I’m in the Metro in Paris or New York, everyone is reading something. But here in Morocco the audiovisual dominates. If I get into a bus or train hardly anyone is reading. Even if someone is holding a newspaper he or she tends to be doing the crossword puzzle. But if you’re in a café or a tea room with a TV, absolutely everyone will be watching the TV— no one will be in conversation or playing a board game, or anything like that. With television, images have become part of our daily lives, and even in countries where the written word is important the audiovisual is playing a larger and larger role. But, of course, there is a significant difference between TV and the movies. It’s not the contrast between nonfiction and fiction, because even on TV somewhere between 70 percent and 80 percent of programs are fiction. The difference lies in the actual nature of the experience. In the early days of TV, the family gathered around, the light was dimmed, and you were very attentive. Now everyone does his or her own thing while the TV is on and perhaps , at a certain moment, it might attract your attention. In the theater you see a film in isolation, in darkness, projected in two dimensions, with all your attention focused on the screen, an experience that plays out in the individual’s unconscious. That’s what makes film magic so powerful and that’s the big distinction between cinema and TV. “YOU CAN RAISE ALL THESE QUESTIONS WITHOUT MAKING IT EXPLICITLY POLITICAL” K. When you make a film, what kind of feeling are you trying to arouse in the spectator? M. I want to put every spectator in the same magical mood I was in as a child when my aunt or grandmother told us stories. These stories always dealt with our lives, our history—they carried a certain Moroccan essence. Some of the stories were very trou- Interlude: Film’s Power and Function 59 bling, like when our Dada—our governess—told us how she had been a slave, how she had been kidnapped and sold to a bourgeois family in Fez. We listened very closely and felt a lot of compassion for the storyteller. We also began to understand something of the problems of slavery, racism, and so forth. When I think back to all the stories and tales these women told, how they conveyed...