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

Chapter Two: Building the National Cinema, Building a Career

Chapter Two Building the National Cinema, Building a Career Introduction: Revisiting the Past Tazi was in secondary school and not yet 14 years old when Morocco regained its independence in 1956 after forty-four years of French (and in some areas Spanish) colonial rule.1 Twenty- five years later, in 1981, as he was approaching the age of 40 and had just finished his first feature film, the Moroccan political system was centered on a strong monarchy, albeit one that had weathered several serious, almost fatal threats to its existence just a decade earlier. These decades saw the training abroad of a number of Moroccans in several basic film specialties and established a foundation, precarious though it was, for the institutionalization of film production. It took until the late 1960s—more than ten years after independence—for Morocco to produce its first feature film, and it was not until the 1980s began that film production gained the systematic, if limited, state financial support necessary to ensure continuity. It is with an overview of these early decades of Moroccan independence and Moroccan filmmaking that we will open this chapter, before we turn to Tazi’s experiences during this period. We have seen how autobiographical Tazi’s Looking for My Wife’s Husband was, how his attachment to memory and his emphasis on the importance of heritage and on bringing into adulthood traces of childhood were prime creative sources. One might even argue that this autobiographical perspective, encouraging what Tazi called “con- 70 Beyond Casablanca structive and positive nostalgia,” was just as central to the film’s great success as setting it in the bourgeois milieu in Fez and giving it the very strong dose of humor. We will begin tracing Tazi’s own career by taking this autobiographical lead and going back with him into his childhood, in search of some of the memories that, at least as he sees them retrospectively, may have influenced his decision to learn filmmaking and his approach to it. We will then follow him as he studies in Paris, works for a number of years at the CCM (part of the time as director of the weekly news review shown at theaters throughout the country), and plays a key role in making Weshma (Traces, 1970), conventionally taken to be the first authentically Moroccan full-length fiction film. Finally we will place Tazi’s first feature film, made in 1981 as state financial support for production was instituted, in the context of Moroccan filmmaking of that time, preparing us for the interlude in which we discuss the film in some detail. Morocco and Moroccan Cinema: The First Decades of Independence MOROCCO: REBUILDING THE NATION At independence in 1956, Morocco emerged from a period of more than four decades of colonial rule, during which resistance had been violently repressed, the best agricultural land had been appropriated by the colonizers, key Moroccans were objects of assassination attempts, French (or Spanish) administrative practices were imposed throughout the country, and ethnic and class differences were deliberately sharpened by colonial policy (with the ironic result that these groups then often came together in their struggle against the common oppressor). To recover from what France liked to call its “civilizing mission” was, for the newly independent nation, no simple task. The country then had a population of approximately ten million, of which about one-quarter was urban, and which suffered from a glaring lack of education, an absence of vocational training, poor health care, and widespread poverty.2 In rebuilding the nation-state it was not only important to provide basic social services and infrastructure—schools, hospitals, roads, training for administrators and other specialties—but on the political Building the National Cinema, Building a Career 71 level the institutions of power and administration had to be installed and routinized. King Muhammad V, a man who had been widely revered and had served as an effective personification of the independence struggle, ruled over independent Morocco for half a decade and upon his death in 1961 was succeeded by his son, King Hassan II, who was to reign for almost four decades, in a system where the palace retained almost all political power. Just as his father had (and as his son who followed him would), Hassan II claimed both a religious and political legitimacy: on the one hand, he was a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and recognized as...