https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3997-5182
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ABSTRACT
One of the founding cross-cultural dynamics of the nascent post-colonial Moroccan cinema was that filmmakers had to leave Morocco to study. Some of them chose to attend the legendary Łódź film school in Poland. We examine the numerous facets of this transnational experience. Despite landing in a grey, cold communist country, Moroccan filmmakers still managed to forge multi-national friendships, experience love stories, commit wholeheartedly to politics, discover films from all over the globe and explore and reflect on all forms of art. To what extent did this experience enrich what they imagined for Moroccan cinema? Can their student films be considered as a ‘Moroccan-cinema-to-be’?
Acknowledgement
The results of this paper are based on a series of testimonies, personal archives and student films I have been collecting in 2018-2019 with the complicity of the independent curator Léa Morin (Talitha, Rennes / L'Observatoire, Art et recherche, Casablanca). This paper does not use the voluminous film school paper archives, their inventory and translation being a huge ongoing task.
The author thus warmly thanks Léa Morin for her precious collaboration, complicity and friendship, Dr Gabrielle Chomentowski and Pr Peter Limbrick for the discussions, Omar Berrada and Pr David Roche for the re-reading, as well as the filmmakers Mustapha Derkaoui, Abdelkrim Derkaoui and Abdelkader Lagtaa for the priceless gift of their testimonies and personal archives. Her gratitude goes also to Łódz film school, for its valuable contribution to the filmpolski.pl database, as well as for the unrivaled generosity and efficiency with which Dr Monika Talarczik, Monika Sarwińska and others provided access, digitized and sent to the author the student films mentioned in this paper. Finally, let the anonymous reviewers from the Journal of North African Studies also be thanked for their priceless advices.
The travel to Poland was financed by the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA, Paris) and the earlier travels to Morocco were financed during my PhD by Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Ecole Doctorale 41). Finally, the proof-reading and spell-checking of the paper was made possible thanks to the support of the Centre de recherche en arts et en esthétique (CRAE) – Université de Picardie Jules Verne – and more particularly thanks to Dr Androula Michael.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Carter (Citation2009) is indeed characterised by an aesthetic, institutional and thematic approach.
2 To borrow the title of a series of Conferences organised by an English-based research group composed of Will Higbee, Florence Martin, Jamal Bahmad and Stefanie Van de Peer. See: http://moroccancinema.exeter.ac.uk/en/people/ and Higbee et al. Citation2020.
3 Gabrielle Chomentowski has just started exploring this theme (Gabrielle Chomentowski, Citation2016; Citation2017; Citation2019).
4 The years given here are the years they arrived in Łódz, not the years they started in the Film school.
5 Abdelkader Lagtaa, Même sans espoir [unpublished novel kindly entrusted by the author], 2018, 6–7.
6 Where Abdellah Drissi, Mostafa Derkaoui and Ahmed El Maanouni (INSAS alumnus), were trained (Abdelkrim Derkaoui, personal communication, 2017; Ahmed El Maanouni, personal communication, May 28th, 2019).
7 Lagtaa Citation2018, 8 and 66.
8 Mohamed Abbazi, another filmmaker who came from a modest background, claims that IDHEC grants were attributed only to the ‘intelligentsia’ (Mohamed Abbazi, personal communication, May 1st, 2015). Actually, the IDHEC paper archives reveal that Moroccan students at the IDHEC were mostly the children of traders or civil servants (policemen, preceptors) – not necessarily deprived, with decent means, but not particularly wealthy (whereas, at the IDHEC, other foreigners were regularly sons of diplomats, state officials, or high-ranking intellectuals, who did not need grants to pay for their tuition fees, as opposed to the Moroccans).
9 A professor member of the Communist Party for Derkaoui; for Lagtaa, the editor of a socialist journal (UNFP party) where Lagtaa had published a poem dedicated to a Vietnamese freedom fighter.
10 Lagtaa Citation2018, 6.
11 As appears in the credits of their respective student films.
12 As appears on pictures provided to Léa Morin by former Polish language student from Costa Rica, Miguel Sobrado.
13 Mostafa and Khadija were allowed to live in a separate apartment, as opposed to university accommodation as they were married and had a child.
14 Mostafa was married to Khadija, already mentioned; Karim was married to a Czech woman.
15 She directed the photography of his first two student films, Realizm nie popłaca (The Filmmaker Does Not Pay), 1969 and Dom Rencisty (Elderly People’s House), 1969, and was the screen writer and dialogue writer for his last student film, Dwukrotnie się przysłużyć (Try Again, 1973).
16 Jerzy Toeplitz. Jerzy Bossak, head of the film-direction department, and member of Derkaoui and Karim’s teaching team (Adopcja, 1968 and Elżbieta K., 1973) were also dismissed, as well as Stanisław Wohl, vice-head of the photography department.
17 Work by Fransesco Rosi who began shooting in 1958 and Constantin Costa-Gavras (Z dates back to 1969).
18 A generation (1954), Kanał (1956), Ashes and Diamonds (1958) …
19 One must bear in mind also that the stipend was insufficient to pay for a plane ticket, and anyway it was paid in zloties, when international or plane tickets had to be paid in an international currency (Lagtaa Citation2018, 10).
20 Pierre Perrault, Michel Brault, Claude Jutra …
21 Jean Rouch, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker …
22 Souffles 4 (last trimester 1966): 49.
23 Mohamed Melehi designed the legendary one-colour cover page adorned with a black sun for Souffles. A painting by Mohamed Hamidi immediately followed Lagtaa’s ‘Poèmes’ (Lagtaa Citation1967, 28).
24 Mohamed Chebaa, for instance, commissioned documentaries from him.
25 In this film, Lagtaa plays a Moroccan soldier fighting on the side of the French army. The other characters are played by non-Moroccan actors. Abdelkrim Derkaoui was cinematographer on the project.
26 Paul Pascon also commissioned Idriss Karim to direct the above-mentioned censored documentary, Les Enfants du Haouz (1970).
27 The ritual of the title consisted of collective libations, the worship of a saint, and the miraculous levitation of a bound victim – all practices sternly disapproved of by Orthodox Islam.
28 A nun un-knitting her robe; a blind man taking pictures; a fakir conjuring up a chicken; an Algerian customer ordering a sewing machine from a dinner-menu; a dog carrying a plate of bones; an old man in a wheelbarrow …
29 Demonstrators in front of the ‘meteorology’ building brandish signs representing Vietnamese, Black and African war victims, or bearing slogans such as ‘Nous voulons du soleil! (We want sun!)’ …
30 The disrobing nun is reminiscent of Mother Joan of the Angels by Jerzy Kawalerowicz (1961); the gloomy character wearing strange thick glasses and electrically-connected iron fingers is reminiscent of the survivors in The Jetty by Chris Marker (1962); a naked waitress is played by the main character of Elżbieta K. (Karim’s previous documentary).
31 Naked bodies dancing followed by the strange above-mentioned demonstration (see endnote 68) with ‘We want sun’ signs seem to satirise the ‘peace and love’ trend, all the more so as the soundtrack is by Joan Baez (Jackaroe, 1963, about a young woman rescuing her soldier of a lover).
32 This is the subject of Dom Rencisty (Old People’s House), 1969, Hamid Bensaïd.
33 At the time when Lagtaa filmed him, in Wacław A. (Lagtaa, 1969), Wacław Antczak was part-musician, part-beggar and part-poet, living on his war hero pension and ‘haunting’ the school (Lagtaa, mai 2019). Initially a tailor, he made some appearances in a popular film (Rejs (Cruise), by Marek Piwowski, 1970) and in a few student films. The members of the ‘Workshop of the film form’ spotted him and had him participate in their ‘artistic actions’, until his death in 1974. See: Forgotten Heritage Citation2019.
34 Mohamed Abbazi studied in UCLA in 1963-65, a few years before the "L.A. Rebellion" film student movement started (Field, Horak and Stewart Citation2015).