De chair et d’acier
Mohamed Afifi
Morocco, 1959, 20 min, DCP, B&W, French-Arabic
Retour à Agadir
Mohamed Afifi
Morocco, 1967, 11 min, DCP, B&N, no dialogue
6 & 12
Ahmed Bouanani, Majid Rechiche, Mohamed Abbderrahmane Tazi :
Morocco, 1968, 18 min, DCP, B&N, no dialogue
Le rocher
Larbi Benchekroun
Morocco, 1958, 11 min, DCP, B&W, French
Sin Agafaye
Latif Lahlou
Morocco, 1967, 22 min, DCP, colour, French
Les tanneurs de Marrakech
Mohammed Ait Youssef
France, 1967, 21 min, DCP, colour, French
La nostalgie du naïf
Mohammed Ait Youssef
Morocco, 1977, 10 min, DCP, B&W, French
This screening stages a confrontation between two parallel schools of documentary filmmaking: 1/ the “brief documentary school” pioneered by Mohamed Afifi, composed of poetic experiments among which Ahmed Bouanani included his own films, as well as Majid Rechiche’s Forêt and Al-Boraq; and 2/ the “sociological” school, whose filmmakers worked with (or were influenced by) Paul Pascon, who is often referred to as the father of Moroccan sociology. The sociological films were aiming for a form of ethnography that distances itself from its colonial roots, in order to re-appropriate and re-describe customs and rituals on local terms. The Afifi school displays formal rigor and suspicion toward commentary. For instance, for Afifi, Retour à Agadir is “not a documentary, much less a tourist film. If I had to recount it, I would say that it is the brief course of a memory presented under the guise of a statue in several movements. If this seemed insufficiently clear, I would add that the stanzas that make up Return to Agadir constitute a closed work. If the viewer finds a key, s/he owns the film.”
