Book Reviews Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film In A Changing Society

Scholarship about Moroccan cinema is arguably scarce despite the steady growth in thenumber and quality of films produced over the last two decades. For this reason alone,Valérie Orlando’s latest book is a welcome introduction to a burgeoning and extremelydiverse tradition of filmmaking whose social history and aesthetics await original research todivulge their secrets and make critical contributions to postcolonial film studies, a disciplinewhere the thematics and modes of production of North-western African cinema are underrepresented. Despite questions about the sustainability of state funding for national cinemaand the ever-present spectre of censorship, Moroccan filmmaking today represents a goodmodel of postcolonial film production in both qualitative and quantitative terms.

Orlando’s study is focused on the place and politics of cinema in the ‘new’ Morocco,that is, the country since 1999 when the king died, his son ascended the throne andexpectations for political and socio-economic change were said to be high among theMoroccan populace. Feature and documentary films made between 1999 and 2010 are, asOrlando puts it in the preface to the book, ‘significantly more critical and candid about. Moroccan socio-cultural and political issues than in the past’ when, ‘[d]uring the Lead Years[1961–99], films would metaphorically or symbolically criticize the social situations, butfilmmakers learned never to be overtly critical’ (p. xii). Expanding on the general theses of Manthia Diawara on African cinema, on the one hand, and on her own interviews withfilmmakers and the body of local film journalism, on the other, the author affirms that thepredominant social realism of Moroccan cinema has both registered and contributed tosocio-cultural change in the country.

The book’s introduction briefly surveys Moroccancinema’s evolution in different stages after independence in 1956: the heyday of shortdocumentary films between 1958 and the early 1970s, the emergence of feature filmmakingand national cinema in the late 1960s, the political and social climates in Morocco duringKing Hassan II’s authoritarian reign (1961–99), and the increasing number of films producedin the last decade. Orlando also invokes ‘Francophone cinema’ in relation to the book’ssubject, and suggests that the deployment of this conceptual framework for film analysis iscritically unproductive in a country where the French language is only eclectically part of thecultural landscape (confined to a tiny polyglot elite as film dialogues often demonstrate). After this historical sketch, Chapter 1 introduces some dominant themes and debates inMoroccan postcolonial cinema while situating them within the post-independence era aswell as within the larger history of the Maghreb countries and the rest of the ‘Third World’. Frantz Fanon and Third Cinema questions are smoothly brought in despite the fact thatMoroccan cinema in the 1970s and 1980s was far more auteurist than engagé in the tradition of Third Cinema.

Although the scope of this book does not allow for an exploration of thepolitical economy and a close analysis of the films made during this important decade,Orlando rightly surmises that filmmakers began to adopt a more audience-focused politics ofsocial-realism in the 1990s (p. 32). The next chapter sees the author at home in the newmillennium and her primary research focus; this chapter looks into the place of language andtransnational connections in post-1999 cinema, which is largely in Darija (Moroccan Arabic)and/or Tamazight (Berber) with the presence of French and other international idioms infilms made by cineastes from diasporic backgrounds. Orlando also discusses three films bydomestic filmmakers to show how daring the last decade’s cinema was in tackling burningBulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 3. 1 (Spring 2012)20issues in Moroccan society and politics. Chapter 3 is devoted to close analyses of films whichhave tackled social questions in cities, where over half of the population lives today. Taking aselection of four films made after 1999, Orlando argues that these works ‘draw on the ills ofurban milieus to study the unravelling of the sociocultural fabric of the country’ (p. 73).

Thefollowing chapter is entirely devoted to a burgeoning sector of Moroccan cinema: memoriesof the Lead Years and the wounds that refuse to heal. Orlando deals with five films whichhave delved into the history of torture and the ‘disappearance’ of thousands of politicaldissidents under King Hassan II’s reign. She focuses on how these works remember the pastwhile engaging with the present of a country whose transition to democracy has beenhindered by political stagnation and socio-economic problems. The last chapter of the bookzooms in on five women filmmakers and shows how their often social-realist cameras havereframed many of the same issues tackled by their male peers yet through more gendersensitivelenses ‘by focusing on once taboo and controversial topics, from rural poverty andprostitution to divorce and repudiation’ (p. 152).

Despite Orlando’s conviction that history is a crucial element for an adequateunderstanding of film, her investigation of the historical framework in which post-1999Moroccan cinema has evolved its forms and thematics is confined to a few general referencesand reportage in Morocco’s Francophone press, which, by its very nature, can be opinionatedand never subtle enough for in-depth analysis. While the author never fails to put her fingeron the large issues that have defined the historical evolution of this cinema, her coverageremains rather cursory and leaves us with the conviction that more research would haveyielded even more incisive film analyses. Moreover, a full account of the productioncircumstances behind every film discussed in this book (funding schemes and censorship, tocite but two) would have enriched the factual and contextual coordinates of Orlando’s bookand supplanted her wide range of critical insights.

However, given the large scope of thisbook, these points of criticism are probably not deficiencies but rather cleared spaces forfuture research in postcolonial film and cultural studies. Orlando’s Screening Morocco is essential reading to anyone interested in Moroccancinema in the new millennium. It is also a useful reference book, full of insights for studentsand researchers working on the shifting landscapes of postcolonial cinema where up-andcomingfilmmakers have been creatively screening changing societies through a mediumwhich is in flux in its own turn.