Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Mostafa Derkaoui's About Some Meaningless Events (1974) is exclusively showing starting January 20, 2021 in the Rediscovered series.
"Everything which the Arab reality offers that is generous, open and creative is crushed by regimes whose only anxiety is to perpetuate their own power and self-serving interest. And what is often worse is to see that the West remains insensitive to the daily tragedy while at the same time accommodating, not to say supporting, the ruling classes who strangle the free will and aspirations of their people."
—Abdellatif Laâb
Shot between January and April 1974, Mostafa Derkaoui’s De quelques évènements sans signification (About Some Meaningless Events) was never actually shown in Morocco, exception being made for a few clandestine occasions over the years, including a “midnight screening” at the Khourigba Film Festival in 1977. The film was immediately banned by the authorities who deemed it “inopportune” for Moroccan audiences. Not only did it go glaringly against the state-sponsored vision of Morocco as a country “between tradition and modernity” that the government was promoting at the time, but it also incarnated the aesthetic and political ebullience rippling through the repressive rule of King Hassan II. Derkaoui’s meta-cinematographic film documents the resolve of a new generation of artists and filmmakers to exceed the boundaries of culture and take active part in the struggles shaking their society. Its collective dimension is not limited to what appears on screen, but related to its very production which was made possible thanks to a network of complicit solidarity. Moroccan artists such as Mohamed Melehi, Kacimi, Hamidi, and Chebâa sold some of their artworks to finance the film, which also benefited from the support of journalists and poets like Mohamed Zafzaf, Mostafa Nissaboury, and Mostafa Dziri, among others. About Some Meaningless Events is a choral fresco where its makers instead of asserting their artistry, question it and measure it against a society they purportedly belong to and yet one that seems unaware of their work and function. It blends documentary, improvisation and fiction effortlessly, without the need of spelling them out.
While militant cinema, for better or worse, is usually built around a thesis that is to be demonstrated, About Some Meaningless Events feels more like a preliminary and skeptical study on the political possibilities of such cinema. In the vein of William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) and the cinema of Alberto Grifi (1938-2007), Derkaoui’s film is fictional cinéma vérité that looks for meaning in its own (un)making. The director and his crew roam the streets of the popular neighborhoods near Casablanca’s port to ask passersby what they think about and expect from Moroccan cinema. Some say that it should be closely concerned with the country’s social problems, some others admit to be too busy working to have time to go to the movies. One tells them to first make Moroccan cinema and then to go back to him to talk about it. When asked what kind of films they like to watch, through the interviewees’ answers we get a glimpse of what the distribution landscape in North Africa was like at the time: kung-fu flicks, (spaghetti) westerns, Indian and Egyptian cinema (the “discouragement” of local production in favor of the circulation of imported products was and still is a crucial function of neo-colonial economics).
One woman claims to be watching only Moroccan cinema, when asked how many Moroccan films she has watched her reply is “none.” In this seeming paradox lies the force of a film that critically interrogates its own existence. The question of national cinema that About Some Meaningless Events forwards and problematizes is not centered on nativist pride, but on political, social, and cultural constructivism. The cinema that Derkaoui discusses, evokes and, to a plastic extent, sketches, is one of collective negotiation, of decolonial possibilities and intellectually honest auto-criticism. The national character of Moroccan cinema that the crew keeps returning to is not intended as a primordial identity to ossify on celluloid, quite the contrary. The film is formally open, soundtracked by the Polish jazz band Nahorny, fictionally receptive to the real eventualities of life, be they genuine or staged. A work that even when ended remains in progress.
When one of the punters of the bar where the crew hangs out during the shooting, tired of being exploited, kills his boss, the film and its makers are suddenly presented with a narrative and political twist. Instead of precipitating the momentum, making this political assassination the meaningful center of their film, the crew keeps debating, abstractly, about how to frame and respond to this event. The director mutinously sides with the young man who killed his boss and against his own film and crew, self-critically exposing the filmmakers’ inability to unite theory with praxis. Even on a visual level About Some Meaningless Events depicts the social cleavage between the intellectual and the working class, divided by a microphone and a pedagogical hierarchy. Mostly consisting of medium shots, the frame is constantly traversed by moving characters, exchanges and discussions but never coalesce into an organized form. Derkaoui’s film portrays an absence: a workable synergy between art and politics, between intellectuals and the working classes, but at the same time summons its possibility. About Some Meaningless Events is not a defeatist film, it’s an aesthetically accomplished prelude to something greater, more beautiful and less inequitable. It spurs to action, not surrender. What the characters do not bring about on-screen, the director seems to insinuate, shall be realized off-screen. The film’s political kernel is an “imaginative presence,” a term Abdelwahab Meddeb, paraphrasing Ibn ʿArabi, suggested in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma (July 1977) when tracing an archeology of Arabo-Islamic aesthetics. The meaning in meaningless is an eloquent void or, to say it with Meddeb, an imaginative presence that the spectator, not the director, is offered to find. Derkaoui’s film in other words is not a political statement but an open process of politicization, radically democratic in that it allows room for the audience to participate in and question it.
Restored thanks to Léa Morin and the Filmoteca de Catalunya, Mostafa Derkaoui’s About Some Meaningless Events was presented at the Berlinale in 2019 more than fifty years after its early flash of inspiration was first captured. The film’s investigative input stems in fact from a roundtable of Moroccan filmmakers that the literary journal Souffles-Anfas had published in 1966. The journal, co-founded by the poet and literary critic Abdellatif Laâbi, advocated “cultural decolonization” and promoted a revolutionary art willing to confront the drags of (neo-)colonialism as well as the reactionary conservatism of the Moroccan ruling class. In the mid 1960s Derkaoui had left for Poland where he studied at the Łódź Film School (whose alumni include Skolimowski, Polanski, Wajda, Kieslowski and Munk), by the time he returned to Morocco in the early 70s repression was in full-blown. In 1965 student protests that had involved other marginalized sectors of Moroccan society were brutally crushed by the authorities causing over one thousand deaths. Following two attempted coups, in 1971 and ’72, the regime of King Hassan II stepped up repression and started arresting, torturing and sentencing to long prison sentences members of the Marxist left, including Abdellatif Laâbi and the Moroccan Jew Abraham Sarfaty among many others. About Some Meaningless Events needs to be placed and considered in this context, one where even the production of a film was a politically charged and contentious act. In his history of Moroccan cinema (completed in 1987 but only published last year), the writer and director Ahmed Bouanani claims that “the shooting of this film will remain in the annals of Moroccan cinema for no other film ever raised so much enthusiasm and mobilized so much energy […] even though the public won’t have the chance to judge for itself.” An ironically bitter fate for a film so passionately concerned with the relation between film and its (supposed) spectators and whose reflections, though contextually dated, are anything but obsolete.