Politics by other screens
Issue 7, Winter 2009
Asmahan serenades in a nightclub. From Gharam wa Intiqam (1944)
At the end of the Second World War, a new battle broke out in Morocco. Not a foreign invasion or tribal revolt, but a war of cinemas. Most Moroccans, it seemed, started going to the movies. Muslims made up half of the moviegoing population in cities, and nearly 95 percent in small towns.[1] A New York Times reporter captured fans’ enthusiasm in a 1949 article:
Almost entirely illiterate, severely bitten by the movie bug, the Arab audiences consider the time which they spend in a picture theatre as a period out of this world. They go to get away from their sordid lot and the hopelessness of their economic condition. They come into the theatre like lambs and leave like lions, exhilarated by the sensuous strumming of music and the momentary transfer into another existence.[2]
Small shopkeepers and veiled housemaids filled the cheaper seats while wealthier merchants and notables would sit in the more costly seats in the rear of the theater. They nibbled on melon seeds and Spanish peas while commenting on the action on the screen.
There was more afoot than the desire for an evening’s entertainment. With no parliament, no elections, and no civil liberties, Moroccans transferred political life to the public, cultural sphere. Cinema became a principal arena for political contestation. Every powerful interest in Morocco sought to control what these new moviegoers saw: the French, the nationalist opposition, religious leaders, and even the Sultan himself. Who should go to the movies? Who should be prohibited, and from which theaters? Which movies should they see, and in what languages? In 1947-48, boycotts, demonstrations, riots and police actions spread to movie theaters in every major city.
The cinema war peaked with the affair of the Boujeloud Cinema in Fez. In June 1948, bourgeois nationalists mounted a boycott against the Boujeloud during the Arab-Israeli war, and then bought the theater after running it out of business. The Boujeloud affair became a veritable crisis of state in the eyes of French authorities in Rabat. It pitted the French against nationalists and enflamed political tensions among Moroccans themselves. In retrospect, the cinema war of 1947-48 was the opening campaign in the decade-long process of decolonization.
Cinema, as an art form and social practice, shaped the political contest. It tilted the politics of decolonization toward battles for the control of the public sphere and for hegemony of political discourse. It also put back into play previous conflicts over cinema, under Vichy. In 1948 as in 1941, Jews played an important, and tragic, role in the battle over the public sphere. The consequences of the cinema war for the future of the public sphere, democracy, and tolerance in Morocco were therefore ambiguous.
The Boujeloud affair was just one field of battle in cinema wars across the late French empire. The French had set the stage for conflict in the 1920s, when they politicized cinemas by using them as venues of propaganda. In response, opposition groups competed for use of the space for their own propaganda, and for control of movie censorship. Their rival claims to responsibility for public morality were part of the larger contest over legitimacy of the colonial state. The French guarded the privilege of the state over movie censorship against such challenges.
The precise nature of the cinema conflict varied across the Franco-Arab colonial world, reflecting the particular political circumstances of a colony and city. In Fez, the nationalists’ boycott brought forth ethnic tensions surrounding censorship: who should be included in the nation, who excluded? In Damascus, Syria, by contrast, it was religious authorities who fought for control of censorship, and it was women’s presence in cinema that was the focus of the battle. This difference reflected the different social and political context of the battle for independence in each country. In both cases, however, the cinema itself became a surrogate for an electoral system in deciding who had a right to representation in the seats and on stage. The battles were indeed politics by other screens.
The boycott of the Boujeloud Cinema in Fez, 1948
The history of colonial Fez
In the 1940s, Fez was a city of about 175,000 inhabitants, mostly Muslim. Ten percent of Fassis were Jewish Moroccans; five percent were Europeans. Jews lived in the Mellah, a quarter separated from the old city (medina) by the Boujeloud garden. The French lived in Fez’s “new city,” built since the occupation in 1912 to the south of the medina. In 1912, Fez had been the seat of Moroccan government. By 1948, however, the medina had become a virtual museum, preserved by French urbanists but emptied of power. The heads of the city’s top families had departed to work in the booming cities of the Atlantic coast: Rabat, the capital, and Casablanca, Morocco’s metropolis. Their families stayed behind in Fez, but social and economic life was utterly transformed. Fez’s artisanal guilds had collapsed due to the depression and competition from imports. The middle classes suffered unemployment because of the government’s transfer to Rabat. And peasants uprooted from the countryside filled the old quarters of the medina.
The economic crisis in Fez set conditions for the rise of a nationalist movement. The Fassi bourgeoisie built the movement upon the city’s reputation as the most authentic and Islamic city in Morocco, especially in comparison to the new coastal towns and the Berber tribal regions allied with the French. During the 1920s and 1930s, a new generation graduated from the elite schools (madrasas) of Fez, demanding reform and rights equal to those of the French. Hope for equal rights, economic reform, and cultural assimilation was raised briefly by the rule of the Popular Front in Paris, 1936-37. But in Fez, as elsewhere in the French empire, those hopes were dashed. With the threat of war, the power of the French political right prevailed, culminating in the Vichy government of 1940-44. Fez nationalists cast aside calls for equality in assimilation, and in 1944 issued a manifesto demanding complete independence from France. At the same time, they founded a nationalist political party called Istiqlal (independence).[3]
The Istiqlal movement grew quickly in 1945, when a deadly famine pushed the population toward revolt against the French Protectorate. American propaganda, which promised democracy and freedom for all peoples, also fueled nationalist opposition. The Istiqlal party looked for inspiration to the Arab League, founded that same year in Cairo. It promoted a revival of Arabic culture and Arab political solidarity, especially as Palestine moved toward civil war in 1947.
Cinema in 1940s Morocco
Cinema gained popularity alongside nationalism. In 1948, Morocco’s 85 moviehouses sold 600,000 tickets, quadruple the number sold in 1943. New moviegoers were mostly young men. While most of Morocco’s moviehouses were in cities, a quarter of them were located in small towns. Rural theaters and those in the medinas were considered “third class,” meaning they catered exclusively to indigenous Moroccans. There were just a dozen “first-class” theaters, located in the new cities of Casablanca, Rabat, Fez, Meknès and Marrakech. Their audiences were primarily the wealthiest French settlers.
The surge in moviegoing since 1943 overflowed the capacity of the “third-class” theaters. Ordinary Moroccan movie fans began attending the mixed “second-class” theaters that catered to the middle class. In the eyes of the older, Europeanized clientele, their arrival was an unwelcome cultural invasion. Audiences in second-class cinemas liked to watch historical dramas or romantic pictures in polite silence. French civil servants, for example, simply adored the films of Marcel Pagnol like The Baker’s Wife, a 1938 portrait of a Provençal village. But when Hollywood action flicks showed at a second-class cinema, young Moroccans flocked to them. And they enjoyed them loudly. According to a 1943 American marketing report, there was
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[1] Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Nantes, Fonds Protectorat Maroc (Nantes-Maroc), Direction de l’Intérieur (DI), Carton 187, Oct. 15, 1942.
[2] Edward Toledano, “Supercolossal, Arab Style: The moviemakers of Cairo know how the customers want their romance,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 27, 1949.
[3] Jacques Berque, Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 3ème éd. (Paris: Seuil, 1979) 176-99; Daniel Rivet, Le Maroc de Lyautey à Mohammed V (Casablanca: Porte d’Anfa, 2004) 238-43, 344-46, 378-85.
[4] United States National Archives and Research Administration, College Park, Maryland (NARA). Record Group 84, 2997. Box 79, “Motion Picture Questionnaire—French Morocco,” May 18, 1943.
[5] Toledano, “Supercolossal, Arab Style,” p. 51.
[6] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 190, “Enquête sur les salles de cinéma,” 23 juin 1948; Carton 821, Dossier: Films Egyptiens au Maroc,” March 31, 1949.
[7] The literature on middle-class reaction to, and assertion of control over, American movie theaters is vast. For an overview, see Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994). An important, recent contribution is Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema (Berkeley: University of California, 2004). Seminal works on female and immigrant audiences are, respectively: Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) and Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
[8] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 190, Dossier B Films, “Hygiène des salles de cinema,” Aug. 17, 1942; lettre de Rabat sur le Cinéma Colisée, 15 déc. 1943; circular of Feb. 12, 1944; letter from shopowners and residents of the Cinema Riff quarter, Jan. 8, 1945; from Pelletier, April 27, 1945; and from Chef du Service du Cinéma, May12, 1945.
[9] See Rivet, Le Maroc, pp. 224-29, 347-48.
[10] Rivet, Le Maroc, pp. 245-49. Rivet cites a 1951 French report on prostitution in Casablanca. See also Toldeano, “Supercolossal, Arab Style.”
[11] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 187, “Censure Films 1939-1948,” report of Feb. 12, 1946.
[12] Toledano, “Supercolossal, Arab Style,” pp. 53, 55. In Arabic entitled Mamnu` al-Hubb, it was produced by Muhammad Karim in 1942.
[13] Rivet, Le Maroc, pp. 243-45, 307-09; Berque, Le Maghreb, 183, 192-94. Egyptians themselves likely viewed their modernity in different, local terms, as nationally authentic or based on middle-class virtue in opposition to elite corruption. This theme is developed in my forthcoming book, Cinema and the Politics of Late Colonialism. On vernacular modernity in cinema in Egypt see Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 63-115; see also, Arjun Appadurai on “global cultures of the hypereal” in his Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 27-47; Ana M. Lopez on movies as “spectacular experiments” in modernity in her “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America,” Cinema Journal 40:1 (Fall 2000) 48-78; and Miriam Hansen on vernacular modernities in her “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film and Vernacular Modernism,” Film Quarterly 54:1 (Fall 2000) 10-22.
[14] The film’s title was given only in French, Lrs Nuits de joie. The Arabic title is not certain, but is likely Layali al-Uns (Egypt, 1947).
[15] Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Quai d’Orsay, Paris, Série Maroc 1944-55, Dossier 250 “Cinéma 1950-54,” reports of Dec. 30, 1948 and Nov. 28, 1950. Nantes-Maroc, Cabinet Diplomatique (CD) Carton 821, report on Leila la Bédouine, May 7, 1954; MAE-Nantes, Maroc, DI, Carton 187 “Censure Films 1939-1948,” reports of 1940, Feb. 12, 1946, Feb. 10, 1948; on Maarouf le Savetier, May 11, 1948.
[16] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 190, Guillaume au Chef de la Région de Fès, no. 1079, Feb. 25, 1943. Al-Duktur , by the famous director Nyazi Mustafa at the nationalist Misr Studio, tells the story of a middle-class doctor who battles aristocratic values and cares for common Egyptians.
[17] ”Cinéma wa al-Aflam” al-`Alam, 15 août 1947, p. 3
[18] Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1994) pp. 115-17.
[19] “Sharli Shablin al-yahud,” al-`Alam, August 1, 1947, p. 3; “ Laysa al-yahud min bani Isra’il,” al-`Alam, Aug. 20, 1947, p. 2, and the entire edition of June 2, 1948.
[20] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 190, Dossier C/Films “Exploitation Salles de Cinema,” reports dated Aug. 4, 1947; June 6, 18, 23, 1948; July 17, 20, 1948; August 4,14, 1948; Sept. 17, 1948; and contracted dated May 26, 1948, Note de Renseignement, 11 juin 1948, Note sur l’achat par les Nationalists des Cinémas des Medinas, 22 Juin 1948. According to the “Extrait du Courrier du Maroc du 10 Juillet 1948,” the buyers were: Mohamad Laraki, Bensalem Lahlou, Ste marocaine des transports Laghazaoui, Mohamed Ben Mohamed Lahlou, Mohamed Laghzaoui, Abdelaziz Benani, Driss Loukili, Kacem Tahri, Driss Laghzaoui, Ahmed Ben Hadj Tahar Mekouar, S.A. Studios Maghreb (Casablanca), Mohamed Defili, Hadj Omar Sebti, Hadj Thami Lazrak, Abdallah Tahri.
[21] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 90, Dossier C.
[22] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 190, Arrêté municipal temporaire no. 186, 3 aout 1948; Bulletin de Renseignements, “Note pour le Résident Générale,” Aug. 23, 1948; Juin to Chef Région Fès, July 15, 1948.
[23] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 190, Laghzaoui to Chef du Service du Cinéma, Rabat, August 4, 1948;Verlet/Le Général Laparra, chef region Fès to Directeur de l’Interieur, Rabat, August 4, 1948; Avis de M. le Chef de Bataillon Verlet, August 4, 1948.
[24] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 190, Note de Renseignements, Georges, no. 1404, Oct. 22, 1948; no. 12842, Michel, Oct. 16, 1948; Chef region au Directeur Interieur Rabat, Oct. 12, 1948; Note à l’attention de M. Vallat, Oct. 7,1948; “Note sur le cinéma Boujeloud de Fès, Sept. 27, 1948. The Arabic titles of the films are Sallamah and Tahya al-Sittat.
[25] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 190, LaParra to Général d’Armée, Rabat, July 21, 1948; Matte to Chef Région Fès, Delegation aux Affaires Urbaines no. 589, Dec. 7, 1948. The Vichy precedent was the Arrêté Résidentiel of August 14, 1941.
[26] Alain Dewerpe, “State Violence in Twentieth Century France: Charonne, February 8, 1962, A Political Slaughter in Paris during the Algerian War,” presented at the University of Virginia, Oct. 13, 2004, later published in Alain Dewerpe, Charonne, 8 février 1962 (Paris: Galliard, 2005).
[27] Mohammed Kenbib, Juifs et muslulmas au Maroc 1859-1948 (Rabat: Université Mohammed V, Thèses et Mémoires no 21, 1994) pp. 641-46, 668-71; Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Quai d’Orsay, Paris, Série Maroc 1944-55, dossier 65 “Nationalistes 1944-45,” report of April 18, 1947.
[28] MAE-Paris, Série Maroc 1944-55 (Paris-Maroc), dossier 75, Parti communiste marocain à conseil supérieur du Parti de l’Istiqlal, July 5, 1948; see also reports on Oujda and Djerada, from June 8, 1948 to Feb. 25, 1949; Kenbib, Juifs et musulmanes, pp. 668-86.
[29] Paris-Maroc, dossier 75, Juin to Paris, June 18, 1948 and “L’Affaire du ‘pogrom’ d’Oujda,” Feb. 12, 1949.
[30] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 190, dossier l’Affaire Boujeloud, Dec. 3, 1948; Bulletin de Renseignements Spécial, no. 96, Aug. 24, 1949.
[31] Rivet, Le Maroc, pp. 245-49, 398.
[32] Kenbib, Les Juifs et Musulmans, pp. 630-38, 668-83. On responses to fascism in eastern Arab lands, see Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); Peter Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 2006).
[33] Rivet, Le Maroc, 373; Kenbib, Juifs et Musulmanes, 640, 650, 661-672.
[34] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 190, dossier C/9a “Films. Exploitation salles de cinéma,” “La vie politique,” Sûreté Rabat, June 6, 1948; dossier “l’Affaire Boujeloud,” Bulletin de Renseignements Special, no. 96, 24 août 1949.
[35] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 190, dossier “l’Affaire Boujeloud,” Note sur l’achat par les Nationalistes des Cinémas des Médinas, June 22, 1948.
[36] In the 1930s, several French famous French movies were made in Morocco, including Itto (1934) about a Frenchwoman among the Berbers, by Jean-Benoit-Levy, and orientalist colonial adventures like La Bandera (1935) by Julien Duvivier and L’Appel du Silence (1936) by Léon Poirier. On Moroccan co-productions of the 1940s, see Moulay Driss Jaïdi, Le Cinéma colonial: Histoire du cinéma au Maroc (Rabat: Almajal, 2001) 79-160; on earlier French productions, see David Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919-1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2001).
[37] Nantes-Maroc, DI Carton 187, “Censure films 1939-1948, dossier “Controle des Films/Correspondance Diverse,” Alfred Pose à MAE-Paris, 14 oct 1948; Directeur d’Afrique-Levant/Paris au Résident Générale Rabat, Nov. 9, 1948; “Rapport sur le projet en vue de la création d’un cinéma marocain de langue arabe,” Nov. 22, 1948; Chef Service du Cinéma au DI, Nov. 23, 1948. Paris-Maroc 1944-55, dossier 250 “Cinéma 1950-54,” Oct. 15, 1948; and dossier 868 Renseignements, Sept. 6, 1947, Dec. 13, 1947.
[38] Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) and Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
[39] Abu Riyad Hamdi, interview, October 8, 1992; Yusuf Wahbeh, interview, Damascus, October 29, 1992; Jan Aliksan, Tarikh al-sinima al-suriya 1928-88 (Damascus: Manshurat Wizarat al-Thaqafa, 1987) 14-17; Elizabeth Thompson, “Sex and Cinema in Damascus,” in Middle Eastern Cities 1900-1950, Hans. Chr. Korsholm Nielsen and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, eds. (Damascus: Danish Institute, 2001) 91.
[40] Hasan, Tarikh Dimashqi, 213; MAE-Paris, Série E-Levant 1918-1940, Vol. 109, HC to Pichot, Feb. 6, 1919; MAE-Nantes, Service des Oeuvres françaises à l’étranger, carton 467, “Cinéma au Levant,” HC to MAE, May 12, 1933; Fonds Beyrouth, carton 440, Pila/MAE to all embassies, June 23, 1931; HC, Beirut, Arrêté no. 2684, July 17, 1929, on censorship.
[41] Anne Collet, Collet des Tcherkesses (Paris: Correa, 1949) 128.
[42] Le Reveil, Beirut, June 22, 23, 26, 1928; Nazira Zayn al-Din, al-Sufur wa al-Hijab (Beirut: Matabi` Quzma, 1928).
[43] Aliksan, Tarikh al-sinima al-suriya, 23-29; Salah Dehni, “History of the Syrian Cinema 1918-1962,” The Cinema in the Arab Countries, ed. G. Sadoul (Beirut: Interarab Centre of Cinema and Television, 1966) 99.
[44] MAE-Nantes, Fonds Beyrouth (Nantes-Beyrouth), Sûreté générale, carton 53, “Censure cinématographique, 1941-42.”
[45] Nantes-Beyrouth, Cabinet politique, carton 440, Ostrorog to Syrian prime minister, July 20, 1938; carton 606 “Politiques musulmanes, “ Sûreté reports 133 and 163K, Jan. 6, 1939.
[46] “al-Sayyidat fi al-sinima,: Bayrut,” Oct. 29, 1936, p. 3; Nantes-Beyrouth, carton 606, Sûreté report 1025, Hama, March 4, 1938.
[47] Nantes-Beyrouth, carton 592, “Statut personnel—dossier general,” Puaux to MAE, March 22, 1939 and memo, Feb. 15, 1939.
[48] Nantes-Beyrouth, carton 53, “Censure cinématographique 1941-42,” Couton to secrétaire général, March 14, 1942 and secrétaire générale to Cinema Empire, March 17, 1942. See also Sherifa Zuhur, Asmahan’s Secrets (Austin, TX: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2000) 78-109.
[49] Nadida Shaykh al-Ard, interview, Damascus, October 9, 1992; Thompson, ‘Sex and Cinema,” 105.
[50] Great Britain. Public Record Office, Foreign Office archives, 684-15-1-1, memos dated May 21, 23, 25 and 26, 1944, and Beaumont memorandum, May 26, 1944; Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 610-12; Johannes Reissner, Ideologie und Politik der Muslimbruder Syriens (Freiburg: K. Schwarz, 1980) 87, 90-91, 429.
[51] Nantes-Maroc, Carton 190, dossier “Enquête sur les salles…,” “La vie marocaine: Inauguration,” Le Petit Marocain, Aug. 12, 1950; dossier C/9a, Sûrete no. 7578, May 16, 1955.
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