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    Tarzan and The Scream of Modernity On TH PDF

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    Brigitta Kuster

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    Tarzan and the Scream of Modernity: On the Post-Colonial in Mohamed Osfour’s Cinematic Works wy Brigitta Kuster 1 Isntlife beautiful? /~ Yes, very So why won't they la vie est belle, n'est-ce pas ? let uslive i? /Thetown - oui, trés belle. = eae ~alors, pourquoi nous empéche-t-on de la vivre? We had aburning desire dreams we devoared” La ville frémit dans notre chair. On était jeunes ou vieux, the town with our quimporte. On désirait ardemment des choses folles, des réves ieee Ghomounaing rem avait bu de toutes les sources, dévalé toutes les montagnes, every ocean, every land traversé tous les océans, toutes les terres, toutes les capitales, srevangulabed te sar vaincu toutes les étoiles. Sans chaussures nous avions tous ee les deux pénétré dans une éternité réglée comme la mort. Et ed comme des arbres d'automne on avait subitement perdu toutes ‘we suddenly lost our nos feuilles." ‘ihmed, “an pays dela thetire" excerpt fom One Saturday evening in September 1941, a film was screened in sus persion" sues the courtyard of the cafe SiRabah in Derb Ghallef in Casablanca. ',ffouthauarter The screening came with an accompanying boxing match to attract ae ‘by Laurence the general public and justify the admission price. The power for the projector came from a bike dynamo. When the screen flickered into life, it showed the first version of Ibn Al Ghaba/L’enfant de la jungle, 1941-1943, a film by the 14 year old Mohamed Osfour. This coffeehouse event with a version of the Tarzan story reconstructed and filmed by a young group of actors and filmmakers was the first screening of a film made in Morocco by a Moroccan. Equipped with a map, dressed in Western safari gear with pith helmets and suitcases, two men and a woman are exploring a path through a wooded landscape. Suddenly, something menacing appears, causing a noise which is not audible but visible on screen: fous, on dévorait la ville en imagination. En imagination on The Post-Colonial Imaginary 273 2 The architect ‘Edmond Brion designed Doth the 1942 Cie des chaux et ciment and the 9ascite ouveierede In Cosumar. The estate for ousriers indigenes atthe Compagnie Sueriére marocaine et eraffinage (Cosumar) founded in 1929 attempted to bind the {indigenous labour, which ‘was highly mobile at that tm. See Cohen, Jean: Louis and Monique Ele, Casablanca: Colonial, Myths and Architectural Ventures, New York, 2002, pp. 241-242; bouhani, Abdelghant ‘La planification urbaine ‘au Maroc: rigueur Chantiors et defis de arecherche sure Maghreb contemporain, Pierre Robert Baduel 41, Paris, 2009, . 294. 3 “Tracer” suggest to mark out outline leave atral, Film stile of ln AI Ghaba/ianfant de fo jungle 1941-1043. images of single bodies gathering for the attack—faces with nose rings, crown-like headgear and feathers, naked male torsos painted with symbols, shields with geometric patterns, rough spears and drums. The shots comprising the next scenes show the ensuing fight as a series of brawls and the white prisoners led away in triumph. A girl dressed in a long shirt plays the native chief. Her face beaming, she points her machete at the white prisoners, who have been tied toa tree—an image evoking a stake. There is a sort of sacrificial dance around the tree. The scene is set for Tarzan’s appearance. While he is attaching his machete to his leopard-pattern loincloth, the camera moves in on him, ending in a torso shot from a sharp angle below. In its accentuated modulations, the focused fall of light as Tarzan cries to the skies highlights the strength and delicacy of his body. Afterwards, Tarzan runs through the improvised jungle in the woods of Sidi Abderrahmane on the edge of Casablanca and the film follows him over a tree trunk and along the wall of a well as he makes his way to free the prisoners. When Madeleine Bernstorff and I were viewing films in Rabat during the research for the Smal! Paths—Complex Stories film programme, part of the In the Desert of Modernity exhibition, and the projectionist in the Centre Cinématographique’s cinema showed Mohamed Osfour's Tarzan film especially for us, we felt that we were about to see something able to tell us more than we could read directly from the screen images. That feeling only became stronger during our walk through Casablanca with Adil Chadli and Anass Haidar, two parkour specialists with the group Accroches-toi ‘Their video clips on YouTube, which we stumbled over by chance, show a way of moving which is all about overcoming borders and obstacles, and we wanted to see where the clips were shot. Parkour, an acrobatic way of getting from A to B, was born in the late 1980s in the Paris banlieue, not least as a way to elude the police. The parkour specialists move across walls and terraces, and up and down stairwells. The Accroches-toi !! training takes place in the urban landscape at the Cité des chaux et ciments on Boulevard Gergovie. Now a ville morte, this area was constructed in the 1930s to house European employees at the Roches Noires industrial complex, close to the contemporary development at Cité ouvriére de la Cosumar’, where most traceurs' live today. Starting from the question of what cinema had to do with the production and circulation of diverse spaces of modernity—colonial as well as anti- and post-colonial—we researched diverse archives, looking in particular at settlement policies and discourses on poor city quarters to discover those small paths between metropolis and colony, between “Europe” and “Africa” from 1907 to 2007. In this process, our point of departure was shaped by the coincidences of colonial occupation and the historical origins of cinema as a cultural 274 Colonial Modern narrative. Our hypothesis was that small paths are connective 4 1m 1920, the French Toutes indicating interconnections not mirrored in representative _fisiéen-feneral of narratives. Paths are not constructions. They are made by people aaa cored walking, created as practical short cuts, appropriations or as__—benodaubtabocrthe secret ways shared with others. In the cinema, they belong to the ee ere evocative, not the explicatory. eerie For a long time, Mohamed Osfour was engaged in the rather our charges The fms solitary practice of discovering a cinema “from below” in an era Stlematneneete, when film was a colonial import.‘ In tracing one path in his history pe ee here, I would like to start, first and foremost, from considerations __powerandriches sn not primarily serving (cinematic) historical categorisation but {xe "tzimintllect ot closer to inscription in memories, lived in localities which have ee not been silenced: in the course of this essay, for example, it will land the equipment become clear why a visualisation of Osfour's cinematic art could _{2Toduessandthe well be helpful in decoding the idea of a Moroccan action cinema relnea oat ‘with stunts as hoped for by the Accroches-toi!! parkour practitioners, “La generation des ions: exemple Siveinéma marvcai ‘CinemActionao-11 2004,p. 25 see aso ‘The “cultural biography” of Mohamed Osfour’s Tarzan may contain Leone all the Western attributes, yet at the same time it represents a ‘Maghreb, Paris, 1998, radical appropriation of colonial culture. The bodily configurations» i alveria Rah guide the movements and body language, while at the same time the TeaTieashald the bodies never cease to offer themselves to the image as changeable ‘and London, 1996, p, and polysemantic, This seems to express a multilingual appetite for 170" colonial film and action in westerns—both genres which perform at border spaces and points of collision between differing social formations. Here, the roles of the indigenous tribe as baddies, white people as misunderstood and innocent, the noble savage as solitary hero and liberator are all just as compelling and confining as they are contingent. Like a naive children’s game which is simultaneously mysterious and full of foreboding, Ibn al Ghaba has Jatencies and condensations running through, constantly drawing the gaze to it. As if the film operated with a multi-layered strategy, it persistently demands that “productive look” characterised by Kaja Silverman as an engagement with memory struggling to displace the “given-to-be-seen”.’ Film stils of Amok, fnvincible 1954 The Post-Colonial Imaginary 275 6 de Certeau, Michel, invention du quotidien, aris, 1980, pp. 20-21 7 “The Third Space Interview with Hom Bhabha" Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, Jonathan Rutherford-ed, London, 1990, 211 8 Bhabha, Homi K, “How newness enters the world: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the tals of cultural ‘translation’, The Location of Culture, New York, 1994, p.210, 9 Afterer mother died in 1998, the young Magdaléna went Casablanca totry ‘and ind het father, a ‘Moroccan who had been aaPrench colonial soldier posted to Germany. She ound him and also met Mohamed Osfour After they married, she played ‘central rolein all his fim projects. Fatima Souiria in Amok invincible, 954, Ton ai Ghaba, which Mohamed Osfour and his friends continued to work on for two years, already contains some of the key ingredients characterising his future films—the motif, with its rich horizon, of legendary battles against miscreants and a hero, often personified by the filmmaker himself, defending the weak and oppressed. In this way, in and through film, Osfour relived the “classical”, mythical, Western heroes and recreated their images under, and reflected by, his own social conditions. His cinematic practice developed from a participation in cinema which was a detotalising of cinematic “traditions”. Osfour’s strategy of “cultural extraversion” makes things visible which tradition in itself does not include: ‘Tarzan does not express everything “about himself”.* This Tarzan film, with Moroccan actors in a film made in Morocco, screened in 1941 to an audience in one of Casablanca’s quartiers populaires, lends these images a significance as a negotiated space between the society of colonisers and the colonised, whose incommensurability Osfour further defined and elaborated in the coming decades. Thus, his adventure film Amok, linvincible, 1954, represents a more refined cinematic and narrative continuation of the project he first started in Ibn al Ghaba, Here, gold digger myths clash with the colonial melancholy of the tropics, native American fantasies with Africa: related primitivisms, creating a kind of “third space”evident, for instance, in an improvised scene created during shooting.’ As the whites arrive in the indigenous village, one of the villagers, played by Mohamed Ladgham, urges the chief's wife, played by Fatima Souiria, to a dance interlude which surprisingly tears open the narrative with “something else besides”and is given extensive space as an independent cinematic supplement.* ‘Mohamed Osfour was born in 1927 in the Safi region. In the mid 1930s, a part of his family joined the exodus of Moroccans to the southern margins of Casablanca, which was growing rapidly at the time. They settled in the kotda (lot) at Ould Aicha, a spreading tent settlement. The building of permanent huts, beginning in the late 1930s, started the transformation of the area into the vast bidonville of Derb Ghallef. Even as a child, Osfour started to do odd jobs to contribute to the family income. Whatever he learnt, from French to filmmaking, he picked up on the streets, augmenting his knowledge with his own inventiveness. His actors and film sets were taken from the real world, primarily from the terrains vagues and the quarters where he lived from the late 1940s with Magdaléna Osfour, his partner in life and in film.’ Aicha Osfour, Mohamed Osfour’s daughter, was also involved in her father’s films until she was 21 years old. She recalls: In Maarif, where my father sold newspapers as a boy, or worked as a sandwich man and waiter, he started to go to the cinema. The first film he saw was in Mondial, the local cinema—a Tarzan 276 Colonial Modern {film with Johnny Weissmuller. It changed his life. He wanted to find out how films were made, and he wanted to make hi own films. He started to save up for a 9 mm Pathé Baby, his very first camera... When he made a film, the entire family was involved—my mother, of course, who alternately worked with my father as camera operator and actor and was responsible for developing the film in the lab, myself and my brothers and sisters, my uncle, our neighbours—even my grandmother acted in his films." Aissa de l'Atlas (Robin des Bois/Robin Oud), Osfour’s second film, was shot in 1951 in the woods at Ain Diab and in the Pare de 'Ermitage near his workshop and home at no. 12 in Derb Bouchentouf. A clear echo of past, present and future anti-colonial struggles can be found in this saga of the righteous outlaws. While King Richard is held captive far away, Prince John, appointed as Richard's regent, has a firm grip on the country with his cruel, suppressive regime." Osfour's film does not show John on a throne but sitting behind a desk placed at random on a village square. Here, in front of a striped screen, is just the kind of desk that became the trademark of the colonial administration. The film uses close-ups of both the victim and the henchman to narrate how Aissa is beaten in prison—a torture scene appearing to echo or anticipate real incidents or experiences in an era of resistance and betrayal. im cig of issa do Pls In Aissa de I'Atlas, the costumes are especially striking—and —__Bois/Robin Oud 1s were all designed and made especially by Magdaléna Osfour. For example, Sophia, Aissa’s sister, appears in an oriental-style costume, hile the local ruler is dressed in a fine cloak and a turban decorated 10 My deepest with jewels. This style is effortlessly combined with a copy of @watchaosfout Nordic knights’ costumes adapted from Michael Curtiz. While $hmasaguestin, the chatelain noir's supporters are characterised by elongated —_Puils in programme headgear, reminiscent of a hangman's cap, and dark materials commentary on lin Al adorned across the chest with the sign of the coveted crown, the eat eae agile Aissa, running across the landscape as the lone hero, is ead to provide me instantly recognisable from a distance by his light-coloured boots generously allowed me and the white stripes on his close-fitting costume, decoratedon ——_Weaiaye nzmemaries the collar, sleeves and coat. However, when he gathers the other 11 1n19S3.iwo outlaws for the attack, their shabby and ragged everyday clothing ——_avlas was finished, is less evocative of Medieval Anglo-Saxon or Oriental fairy tales Homan Nie ‘deposed by resident than images of the contemporary urban proletariat in Casablanca, _general Guillaume and Moreover, the film directly references the Battle of Bougafer __incorsicaand/ater in 1933, where the Alt Atta anti-colonial resistance, led by Aissa —.jyariwencar ts waali Nath U-Ba Slam, confronted the superior forces of 82,000 November 1655an French soldiers and 44 planes. The references, though, are not Onfour was to capture invoked through historicised images but through the protagonists’ names. This interlinking of disparate spaces and times to a specific coexistence is anchored in the playful and imaginative approach of staging a social drama as a costume drama. The Post-Coloni Imaginary 277 12 Fertat, Ahmed, Une passion nomnice cingma: Vie et eure ddeifohamed Oxfour, Tangiers, 2000, D128, 131 13 Fi Khodari, Khalid “La génération des pionniers: exemple ‘ducinéma marocain", CingmAction no. 111, 2004, p. 25; Boulanger, Prerre, Le cinema ‘colonial, Paris, 1975, p.1sett 14 InLe cinéma colonial au Maghreb, ‘Abdelkader Benali considers a renaissance ofexotifations tobe the ‘reason for the failure, and Moulay Driss SJaldi—in combination with defcitsin acting, ‘music and production techniquesspeaks of ‘an “absence of social realism Jaf, Moulay Driss, Histoire du cinema au Marve: Le cinéma colonial, Rabat, 2001, pp. 153-1 1§ Pierre Boulanger's localisation of colonial film in Maghreb relates, firstly, tothe period between 1911 and 1962 and, secondly, the ‘quality ofthe“bizarre and tendentious” view fot Afrique lord”, which expressly comprised French and foreign lms. Boulanger, Le cinema colonial, p.l-16.Abdelkader ‘lnali takes a different view in Le cinéma colonial au Maghreb, not investigating colonial cinema in Maghreb as collection of images fod nds buts cinematographic distinguished from cinéma exotique, while Tinting his researen object tothe period of French colonial ‘secupationand French Productions. In both ‘Cases, however, with regard to the category of colonial fms, i seems tome thatthe questicn ‘snot fully considered of who, in each case, the ‘addressees were and how the distribution contrast tothe type of colonial discourse they Dromoted~was steered, Controlled and limited. See, for example, the ‘statement by Algerian ‘lmmaker Mferenk Allouache: “When people talk about this colonial ‘cinema, we don know It establishes a path for an interpretation of difference which Pursues its own independent production of history, leaving far behind a colonial culture with its ambivalent coding of, on the one hand, leading the indigenes to civilisation and, on the other, preserving their original, non-corrupted culture. The film Joha/Charlot, 1952, reveals a similar spatio-temporal “alchemy” in crossing the popular and well-known figure of Charlie Chaplin with the similarly much- loved J’ha, a character from Arabian fairy tales and stories who is kind-hearted and inventive but pretends to be dull-witted. With the lead role played by Mohamed Ladgham, the film is structured around a sequence of episodes reflecting the contemporary everyday life of the quartiers populaires. In my view, while it is crucial to focus on the locality of cultural expression in Osfour’s works for the cinema, it is far more difficult to name their location. For example, in the 1960s, the term quartier populaire emerged as a positive reference to social spaces beyond the European urban conurbations or civilian towns, though this did not remotely change the perception of these areas as minority quarters. Today, although often used as a synonym. for quartiers chauds or quartiers sensibles (so-called problem quarters) as class-specific poor quarters, quartier populaire is simultaneously used in the residents’ current everyday language to describe relations of proximity. This notion typically has more to do with the vibrancy of a much-visited neighbourhood than with class affiliations. Hence, the quartier populaire is a highly imprecise location. For that reason, it seems to be perfectly suited to update the “in-between—in the middle of” (Bhabha) in Osfour's cinematic works. Rather than Osfour’s film oeuvre addressing descriptions of place, it is concerned with the practices of shared lives. The films articulate this insight in a way that can be regarded, as in Homi Bhabha’s works, as post-colonial modernity since the moment emerges in them when the reality of the quartier populaire’s everyday life becomes an element in their own fabulations (and not their sociologisation). Osfour nearly always had one of his cameras with him when he travelled across the city and some of the moments he captured on film can today be regarded as exceptional historical documents. For example, from a terrace he filmed the i French colonial soldiers’ massacre of the general population in Ben M’Sick on 8 April 1947, the evening before the renowned independence speech by Sultan Mohammed V in Tangiers. These images are supposed to have been shown by Istiqlal emissaries at numerous locations but, first and foremost, in the context of tricontinental solidarity in Latin America.'? Osfour was in close contact with representatives of the independent movement's militant wing, which often acted clandestinely. He sold photos and filmed weddings, worked as a chauffeur and car mechanic to earn a living and finance his increasingly 278 Colonial Modern elaborate and expensive films which, from 1956, started being shot in 16mm. From 1946, Osfour was working as a technician in the newly-founded Studios Cinéphone in the Ain Chok district. Here, from 1944, in the wake of the post-war break with colonial urban design, a major new residential area was constructed which was intended for Muslim residents. Mirroring this new orientation in urban planning, the studios founded in Ain Chok as well as Souissi in Rabat were supposed to create a foundation for a “North African Hollywood” under the auspices of the “directeur des affaires politiques”. This project not only drew funding from the French state and the Résidence, but also from civil society in the shape of numerous production companies such as the Société ‘Maghreb Films or the Société immobiligre marocaine des projets cinématographiques."’ Between 1946 and 1948, a dozen feature films were shot here, decidedly non-Western, nationalist and mass oriented, many of them in Arabic with French subtitles. However, none of them were popular with audiences, which preferred films from Hollywood, Cairo and Bombay." After this political and financial fiasco, the protectorate established itself in the following years as a location for shooting major foreign productions—which one may read as colonial films or not. Mohamed Osfour was also involved in the development of this industry and worked on over 100 productions for directors such as Orson Welles near Marrakech (Othello, 1952), Alfred Hitchcock (The Wrong Man, 1956), Robert Aldrich, who transformed Quarzazate into a vast film set for Sodom and Gomorrah, 1962, David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, 1962), Henri Verneuil, Claude Chabrol (Marie-Chantal contre le Docteur Kha, 1965), Pierre Paolo Pasolini (Epido Re, 1967) and Youssef Chahine (Rimal min dhahab, 1966/1971).'* The Post-Colonial Imaginary 279 ‘what i'll bout, We Know that important directors eame to im fn Algeria That there ‘were all sorts of fms, from the most racist the most elaborate, the ‘most paternalistic. ‘The problem is that we wen’ seen these films. (Or athest, very few fof tem." Armes, Roy, Posteotonial mages: ‘Studies n North African Film, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2008, p-6 16 Por Henri ‘Vemeull's Cent hile Dollars au Soleil 1964; English title: Greed inthe Sun) Mohamed sfour worked as sistant director and rent to France where, in the Boulogne Studios in the Paris banliew, Scenes set in Morocco ‘were timed with Moroccan immigrants, “Shénerazade, Pierre Gaspard-Huit, 1962 was fimod in Marrakech, Arama and Zagora For this Freneh alia Spanish ‘corproduction Mohamed Oslour worked fas 8 stage drectr (lat next tothe Scnpl-gt) and gave instructions fo the extras on sol whie himself dressed a5 an extra (ight. Left two photographs: During the shooting Sodom und Gomoraty Robert Alin, 1962, ia Ouarzazae. Besides instructing i000 extras (photo fon le) Monamed Ostour also worked as 4 che! operator and sound engineerin the phot onthe ight he i standing next to Stewan Granger Right photograph: Film shoot of Marie:Chantal cane le docteur Kha CCaude Chabrol 1966, The llustation Shows Mohamed Ostourin a scene with Mario Laforét asa jewellery pedcer in the mecina of Marrakech Fim shoot of sos.00 dollars au sole, Henn Verneul, 964. Mohamed Osfour n frot ofthe garage in etd Bouchentout From: Ahmed Fess, Une passion nommee cinéma, Vie of axon de Mohamed Ostour Tangiers, 2000 17 AlTim AL Adgis aparablen the pride ‘and allot a wayward Son in contemporary Casablanca, inspired ‘equally by Neorealism, Egyptian films and bythembod afanew dawn in the wake of independence: The poster announcing the frst sereening of Alon Al qin 1956 called it “the Hest sociat ‘lm treating typical ‘Moroccan problems. Idea, realisation, image, Sipures and setting itsall completely Moroccan," Fertat, Une passion nommée cinema, p87. 18 Aifin Ai Ada, Osfour's first fullegth feature, opened the tenth Festival National uF in Tangiers in. 2008, shown ina newly restored version and ‘mith the soundtrack ‘fone of Osfour's live 19 See Foucault, Michel, "Des espaces ‘ures? 1957,

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