Revolution in Maghrabi Cinema

In the early 1980s, the countries of North Africa began to implement the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programmes. What was initially perceived as a short-term strategy to tackle recession-induced public deficit and soaring international debt transpired to be a decades-long era of privatisations, austerity, high unemployment and low human development rates. Rapid neo-liberalisation engendered deep social and political transformations. Market forces consolidated the regimes’ hold on power while poverty levels soared, public education and healthcare deteriorated, and loss and uncertainty characterised the everyday lives of the people of the Maghreb.This is the world that has formed the region’s new generation; and this is the world that is depicted on the screen.

In the face of the rapid social change, political repression and economic hardship of the neoliberal era, North African filmmakers have resorted to realist representations of globalisation from the standpoint of its victims. With the exception of Egypt, which enjoyed a large film industry in the first half of the twentieth century, indigenous cinema in other countries of the region is largely a post-colonial affair. Upon the independence of their countries in the 1950s and early 1960s, indigenous filmmakers sought a cinema capable of articulating the postcolonial condition. In a seminal essay, Tunisian director Nouri Bouzid contends that the defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 war with Israel brought home to North African filmmakers the need for a new realism in the representations of their societies. As Egyptian directorYoussef Chahine puts it:

Confrontation — there must be confrontation; confrontation with the self... Where has all this started? How have we come to this? How have we been deceived and put in the wrong? How and where have we erred? Only then can we begin to settle the account with ourselves, so that we could possibly begin to accept ourselves, a necessary precondition for others to accept us.

Influential films by Egyptians Chahine (The Sparrow, 1973) and Shadi Abdel Salam (The Mummy, 1969), and by the Syrian Mohamed Malas (Dreams of the City, 1983), for example, found resonant echoes in the Maghreb. Bouzid places his own film Rih Essed (Man of Ashes, 1986) within the genre of New Realism that swept across North African cinema after the debacle of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. He coins the phrase ‘the cinema of defeat’ to describe this new wave of realism

To post-colonial filmmakers across North Africa, 1967 brought home not only a sense of defeat but also, to use Bouzid’s own term, an awareness of the ‘decadence’ of their civilisation. Therefore, they perceived cinema as ‘a social necessity’ and ‘a vehicle for the spreading of awareness and a tool or forum for analysis and debate’.The new cinema’s politics are succinctly outlined by Bouzid:‘Admitting defeat, the new realism proceeds to expose it and make the awareness of its causes and roots a point of departure.’The filmmakers turned their lenses away from master narratives to the everyday life of ordinary individuals. It was a time of transition from the cinema of the collective hero, which prevailed particularly in the Algerian cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s, to a preoccupation with the embattled individual in Maghrebi society. Besides the 1967 disaster, rampant poverty, despotism, illiteracy and gender segregation were among the reasons behind what Hélé Béji calls ‘national disenchantment’ that led to a loss of faith in the meta- narratives of liberation and nationalism. In the film world, disenchantment turned into an uncompromising realism, and cinema became more conscious of defeat.

Bouzid’s debut feature film, Man of Ashes, won multiple accolades on the festival circuit and broke box office records at home. It is also widely credited with sparking Tunisian cinema’s golden decade (1986-1995), marked by internationally acclaimed films, which Bouzid often co-scripted, like Férid Boughedir’s Halfaouine: Child of the Terraces (1990) and Moufida Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palace (1994). However, Man of Ashes is less known and discussed in the Western academy than Boughedir and Tlatli’s feted films.Whether in compliance with the European co-producers’ dictates or out of a desire to break into the world cinema market, many North African filmmakers accommodate the common Western viewer’s preconceptions. Bouzid, in contrast, addresses local audiences first and foremost through a social psychology of pain.

Despite their undeserved obscurity at home and overseas, pre-1990s films like Man of Ashes hold clues to understanding post-colonial Maghrebi societies in the twenty-first century. Their social realism is replete with insights into the dynamics of social and cultural change. For example, looking at the origins and aftermaths of the 2011 uprisings in North Africa, key elements seem to flow straight out of Man of Ashes. North African youth’s struggle for emancipation in 2011 bears affinities to that of Hachemi and his double, Farfat, in Bouzid’s film, set in the provincial town of Sfax. For this visionary dimension alone, Man of Ashes ought not to remain unknown beyond small circles of film lovers inTunisia.

Bouzid was born in Sfax in 1945, and attended the Institut National des Arts du Spectacle et Techniques de Diffusion (INSAS) in Brussels. Upon graduation in 1972, he worked for Tunisian state television and became active in radical politics. He was jailed from 1973 to 1979 for his political convictions, an experience revisited in the semi-autobiographical film Golden Horseshoes (1989).With eight feature films to his credit, Bouzid is one of the most prolific and original filmmakers of his generation. Based on his own screenplay and produced near the end of President Bourguiba’s autocratic rule (1957-1987), Man of Ashes opens on the eve of Hachemi’s arranged marriage. In lieu of the joy which customarily accompanies this rite of passage in North African society, the young woodcarver is unsettled by an outburst of gossip and the enigmatic appearance of the graffito ‘FARFAT IS NOT A MAN’ on the small town’s walls. Meanwhile Farfat, Hachemi’s boyhood friend, is banished from his parents’ home. The scandalous incidents drown Hachemi in acute doubt about his own manhood.When they were ten-year-old apprentices in Mr Levy’s carpentry workshop, he and Farfat were raped by the master carpenter Ameur. Hell breaks loose as painful memories of rape flash back into the present. Hachemi, notes Bouzid, ‘is the baffled “hero” who can neither accept his ordained lot – to perpetuate the practices of his forebears – nor truly resist and reject it by any effective means’. In contrast, Farfat defies his society’s patriarchal homophobia. By Bouzid’s own admission, Farfat is Hachemi’s double. Hachemi wears a wounded gaze whilst revisiting his traumatic childhood, seeking help to account for it from his three fathers: the uncomprehending biological father lashes him with a leather belt for soiling the patriarch’s honour in refusing to consummate the hetero-normative marriage; the second father is none other than the paedophilic carpenter; his last resort is old Levy who, seeing Hachemi’s distress, sings him a song from the latter’s childhood.The task is helped by a bottle of Boukha, the fig brandy dear to North African Jews and Muslims. However, Mr Levy succumbs to sleep just as Hachemi begins to relate his traumatic story. Jacko, Levy’s grandson, was Hachemi’s best childhood friend and his departure alongside mostTunisian Jews after independence is as castrating as the rape at the carpentry workshop.This intertwined story of individual and collective traumas is instructive. Levy dies alone the next day. His demise is met with the indifference of his Muslim neighbours, who have increasingly harboured antagonism towards their Jewish countrymen with the spread of Nasserite Arabism.

The closer the marriage night comes, the more severe Hachemi’s agony becomes. His childhood friends,Touil the blacksmith and Azaiez the baker, suggest a bachelor party in Ms Sejra’s brothel. Hachemi proves his virility with Amina, a prostitute dressed as a bride for the night, and Farfat does likewise with her companion. When the jealous Azaiez reminds Farfat that ‘everyone knows’ (of his and Hachemi’s rape by Ameur), Farfat dashes into his molester’s house. Ameur emerges from behind the crowd of neighbours gathering in the alley. With Hachemi’s complicity, Farfat fatally stabs Ameur in the groin, and takes flight. The next sequence is of police chasing an ecstatic Farfat. He makes an enigmatic exit from the scene by either jumping on a train or being run down by it. Probably a reference to the immortality of freedom rather than to Farfat’s physical survival, the next scene is of him shirtless in his usual blue dungarees running and jumping across the city’s rooftops (‘Farfat’ means butterfly). In acknowledgement of his newfound masculinity and in defiance of patriarchal society, Hachemi seeks asylum in Sejra’s whorehouse, where he has found happiness with Amina. His request is refused. Anis, Farfat’s young companion, proceeds to erase the stigmatising graffito as the final credits appear.

Before taking his last breath, Ameur uncannily tells Hachemi and Farfat: ‘You’ll always be my apprentices. I taught you everything’. Besides suggesting that the past lives on in the present, we can also read the master carpenter’s words in the context of contemporary Tunisia’s history. The mentor is an allegory of Habib Bourguiba, the autocratic moderniser in power from 1957 to 1987. In a perfect example of ‘the state is me’ syndrome in the post-colonial polity, Bourguiba uttered these words in a lecture to university students in the early 1970s:‘I hope you will know the history of our country better by listening to he who made it’. Under his rule, however, Tunisia benefited considerably from a range of progressive social and economic policies in sharp contrast to other countries in the region.When Bourguiba died in 2000, Bouzid mourned him in a way which echoes Hachemi’s feelings about Ameur: ‘I was arrested and imprisoned from 1973 to 1979. But the day of Bourguiba’s death, I felt as if I had lost my father and I wept. The man handed down positive and interesting changes, such as the Personal Status Code. He hurt me, but at the same time, I respected him’.This filial relationship is vital for an understanding of Bouzid’s semi-autobiographical film. Tunisian academic, Nouri Gana, author of Signifying Loss:Towards a Poetics of Narrative Mourning, contends that the paradoxical modernity of Bourguiba’s rule, which combined secular discourse and autocratic patriarchy, has informed ‘the psychodynamics of manhood in postcolonial Tunisia’. Bouzid himself confesses that the ‘attitude that the father is sacred and the difficulty of ridding oneself of him is present in all the films I’ve made’. Hachemi’s crisis of manhood evokes the embattled situation of contemporaryTunisia torn between secular reforms and authoritarian fathers.

Bouzid’s film is representative of New Realism’s investment in the North African individual’s defeat and solitary struggle for emancipation from societal, economic, and political regimes of oppression. The issues addressed by Man of Ashes – youth, patriarchy, homosexuality and repression – are still prevalent and relevant today. It is thus hardly surprising that the post-2011 transition in Tunisia thrust a sixty-six-year-old Bouzid to the forefront of public attention. In April 2011, he appeared on national television with a bloodied gash above his left ear. He had been stabbed by a young fanatic. The attack did not seem to surprise this film director who had set out ‘to subvert norms, refuse prohibitions and unveil sensitive areas such as religion, sex, the authorities, the “father figure”’. Scholarly interest in Bouzid’s lost film classic can therefore yield nuanced interpretations of the ongoing evolution ofTunisia and other postcolonial societies. The plight of Hachemi in Man of Ashes charts a complex genealogy of postcolonial youth’s disaffection, which culminated in Bouazizi’s self-sacrifice and Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution.

Social and political change in North Africa in the wake of structural adjustment policies implemented in the 1980s was accompanied by the rise of a neo-neorealist cinema in the following decades focused on ordinary people’s daily struggle for survival. The protagonists are often youth in search of agency and meaningful subjectivities in rapidly changing societies and an interconnected world. Of all Maghrebi cinemas since the 1990s, it is the Moroccan one which has been thriving most, thanks to sustained state funding and a young generation of diaspora filmmakers coming home to shoot the new social realities of globalisation. Moroccan cinema has been tremendously popular at home by virtue of its defining focus on ordinary people and everyday life as a counter-archive to discourses of power, on the one hand, and a critical examination of postcolonial subjectivities and the everyday potential for historical change, on the other. The latter is configured on-screen not just as a space of routines, rituals and uncritical everydayness, but also strategically as what French Jesuit scholar, Michel de Certeau, qualifies as an ‘inexhaustible’, and ‘constantly unfinished realm of historical possibility’. Moroccan films mine the everyday’s critical potential in projecting the lived experience of ordinary Moroccans and thereby uncovering spaces of resistance to sundry forms of oppression. Everyday life on screen is, to borrow the words of cultural theorist Ben Highmore,‘inherently resistant’ and‘framed by bodies that are at variance to the machines they operate’. Postcolonial subjectivity or the becomings of the postcolonial subject take shape in the mundane spaces of everyday life on the screen.

A central theme in Maghrebi cinema since the early 1990s is the struggle for control over urban space. The city is a site of conflict because it is shot through with society’s power relations. Different interest groups are embroiled in a constant struggle for spatial control and, by extension, power distribution in society. In neoliberal Casablanca, for example, the cityscape is ostensibly under control by an urbanism that panders to the interests of the upper classes and banishes the poor and disproportionately young multi-million population to the margins. However, this account would be remiss if it were to write out the practices of everyday resistance among marginalised youth and ordinary people in urban space. In his theory of everyday life, de Certeau distinguishes between the strategies of power and the tactics of resistance. Unconscious and repetitive, everyday life in the city is a battleground for the ‘clever tricks of the “weak” within the order established by the “strong”, an art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf, hunter’s tricks, manoeuvrable, polymorph mobilities, jubilant, poetic, and warlike discoveries’. This critical framework of power and popular resistance can account for the strategies invented by youth in their quest to reclaim the city as postcolonial subjects living under globalisation. Subversion is as omnipresent and multipolar a force as is domination in the North African city on the screen. The city is a space of memory, calculations, manipulations, signals and codes.

For an example of how Maghrebi cinema has been cognitively mapping an unevenly globalising society, look no further than Abdelkader Lagtaâ’s groundbreaking Hub Fi Dar el-Beida (A Love Affair in Casablanca, 1991). The protagonist Salwa is an eighteen-year old girl in search of liberation in a sprawling metropolis. Heartbroken after her decision to end their love affair, the middle-aged Jalil arranges a meeting of reconciliation in the last sequence of the film. He disarmingly tells her, in words which ironically echo the Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s desperate speech in colloquial Tunisian rather than his customary Modern Standard Arabic on 14 January 2011:‘Ana fehmtkom’ (‘I have understood you’). Salwa laughs him off before deserting the scene.This fateful encounter takes place in a downtown park, a strategic site prefiguring public space in the neoliberal city as the battlefield of generational clash and youth’s revolt in twenty-first-century Maghreb. Salwa rebels against the tyranny of the father figure as would millions of youth in 2011. Shocked upon discovering his father’s relationship with Salwa and hence the reason he was prevented from having a relationship with her, Jalil’s son Najib runs home and seizes a knife in his fury. He symbolically kills his absent father in the bedroom before taking his own life in the bathroom. Looking back at this dramatic ending from the vantage point of the youth-led 2011 uprisings reveals Lagtaâ and cinema’s perceptive cognitive maps of North African society’s evolution and fraught social and political landscapes. Like Najib in Casablanca two decades earlier, stifling oppression pushed the street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, to take his own life by setting himself on fire – the seminal trigger event of the Arab Spring – in Tunisia, where Lagtaâ’s film was released to wide acclaim in 1992.The final credits of Love Affair roll up against a freeze shot of Najib in his bloodbath. Salwa blames Najib’s suicide on Jalil. The viewer can hear them fiercely fighting off-frame with Salwa, knife in hand, threatening to kill the father. The film closes on this suspenseful moment with Najib’s frozen frame still filling the screen. In this sense, the 2011 events had somehow already taken place, and centre stage on North Africa’s film screens.

When the mass protests of 2011 erupted across the region, Maghrebi cinema was again at the rendezvous with history. Hicham Lasri’s feature film They Are the Dogs (2013) opens in the main square of Casablanca, where a large crowd of young protesters are shouting slogans against corruption and calling for the fall of the regime. A TV crew is also in the public square desperately looking for an interesting news story. An emaciated man stands out in the crowd. He looks not only lost but out of time altogether, like an alien from outer space. As we learn later, he has just been released from jail after thirty years.When all the surviving detainees from his cohort were released in 2001, he was not, because his existence was forgotten even by his jailers. He was imprisoned during the Bread Riots which engulfed Casablanca in June 1981 when thousands of young and unemployed people took to the streets after the government’s decision to lift subsidies on essential foodstuffs. Hundreds were killed and thousands jailed, dumped in nondescript burial grounds or ‘disappeared’ by the regime. Our freshly released Unknown or 404, who remembers his matriculation number but not his name anymore, was arbitrarily arrested after he went out to buy stabilising wheels for his kid’s bike and flowers for his wife. Upon his release in 2011, he gradually discovers how much the world and Casablanca have changed. Hungry for a sensational story, the TV crew accompany him around the city in search of his wife and children. In one scene, 404 visits his grave in the cemetery, where he was buried after the authorities informed his family of his death in the Bread Riots. Most of his friends have died and the surviving few have metamorphosed from ardent socialists in the last century to plain mouthpieces for the neo-colonial regime in the twenty-first. 404 ultimately finds his wife and children, but they refuse to accept him back. For them he is dead and should have never returned. In leaving the house, he runs into his grandson, who has just been released from the police station, where he was detained and tortured for taking part in the 2011 protests. Perhaps 404’s detention was not in vain after all, and the flames of resistance will be kept alight by a new generation of disaffected youth.

In Lasri’s low-budget film, the handheld camera of the TV crew with its extreme close-ups and shaky frames makes the journey in urban space intensive, intimate and full of violent suspense. The cinéma vérité footage captures the everyday effects of uncertainty and arbitrary violence which characterised the 2011 protests in Morocco and around the region. In the film, radio and TV coverage of the revolts acts as the soundtrack for 404’s search for his bearings. The speed-fire movements of Lasri’s guerrilla camera render the urgency of the historical moment. It maps out Casablanca as a totality of stark socio-economic disparities and rampant psychological violence, which erupts or threatens to do so at any moment. The camera also runs (often literally) into the ordinary man on the street. The Unknown, who was left on the margins of history for thirty years, suddenly finds himself at the centre of history repeating itself. Thirty years have gone by, but the same symptoms of poverty, anger and desperation are visible in Casablanca. The world has changed, Casablanca has experienced three decades of physical and social transformations, but the roots of oppression and its victims are still the same. In the course of two days, 404 rises back from the ashes to put these transformations to the test. After exposing the violence and resilient structures of oppression in his own city and country, the ghost of history goes back whence it came.The film ends here and now, but history continues its course. By bracketing the story of an ordinary Casablancan unknown subject between two pivotal moments in the history of contemporary Morocco (1981-2011), Lasri’s film and Maghrebi cinema continues to chronicle Moroccan societies. Over the last few decades, this cinema has offered a realist critique of the neoliberal present and a critical repertory of ordinary subjects’ small acts of resistance against daily regimes of oppression. Cinema is thus one of the contemporary Maghreb’s compelling postcolonial archives and, in decades to come, a source of social history and perhaps lessons and seeds for change at the hands of a people yet to come.

Citations

The quotations from Nouri Bouzid are from his article,‘New Realism in Arab Cinema: The Defeat-Conscious Cinema’, (translated by by Shereen el Azbi) Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 15 (1995), pp. 242-250; the quote from Youssef Chahine is also taken from this article. Habib Bourguiba quote is cited by Nouri Gana, ‘Bourguiba’s Sons: Melancholy Manhood in Modern Tunisian Cinema’, The Journal of North African Studies 15.1 (2010), pp.105– 126; and Bouzid comments on Bourgabia appear in Jeffery Ruoff, ‘The Gulf War, the Iraq War, and Nouri Bouzid’s Cinema of Defeat: It’s Scheherazade We’re Killing (1993) and Making Of (2006)’, South Central Review 28.1 (2011), pp.18–35; Ben Highmore quotation is from Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London, Routledge, 2002), p.148; and Michel de Certeau quotations are from The Practice of Everyday Life (translated by Steven Rendall) (University of California Press, 1984), pages 239 and 40.

Nouri Gana’s Signifying Loss:Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning is published by Bucknell University Press, Lewishberg, PA, 2011. See also: Roy Armes and Jamal Bahmad, ‘Casablanca Unbound: The New Urban Cinema in Morocco’, Francosphères 2.1 (2013), 73-85; and David Murphy and Patrick Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema:Ten Directors (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007).