About Some Meaningless Events (1974)

 

Director: Mostafa Derkaoui

Screenplay: Mostafa Derkaoui

Ephemeral Waves

 

In Casablanca, Morocco in the 1970s, we are in the middle of a bar among drinking patrons. The energy is that even a shoeshine boy is encouraged to come in, if just for cruelly getting him drunk and then kick him out. The film itself is a curious historical fragment from Mostafa Derkaoui, who here in this docu-drama makes what begins with a discussion of what Moroccan cinema should be, but ultimately leads to this question having wider implications.

Mostafa Derkaoui with his tiny crew eventually go on to have to question the ethics of filmmaking in this fictionalised documentary. At first however, they follow into the bar and the area in urban Casablanca among the cafes, filming the bar patrons and asking members of the public of what their nation's cinema should be. They will eventually be forced to view their medium and the society in a new light when, during a squabble in a bar, a younger man stabs another man, which forces them to think of how to depict reality, and the implications of this, when Derkaoui wants to talk to the arrest suspect.

Derkaoui's film, scored by Polish jazz for a very unconventional music choice that keeps this film's tone unpredictable, is compelling. What the film is in genre is less important, and apt, for a film whose title, denoting an insignificance, belays that Derkaoui's film completely deconstructs any image for outsiders of his country of Morocco. Even, to not be crass, to see a world here where some mentions a trip to a mosque, but is set in a location where the bar is populated and being drunk is not frowned upon, really offers an image that is distinct, one which undercuts what you would presume this world is. Firmly planted in the seventies, with the up-to-then current fashions, the Polish jazz in the score adding vibrancy, this undercuts any image a viewer not from Morocco can have of the country, including the famous 1942 Warner Brothers film made on Hollywood sets, by showing the real environment of the time itself. Even if clearly fictionalised, this has full verisimilitude we see, helped considerably that, before the ethics comes in, it is not actually a treatise on Moroccan cinema at first but a series of skits which let you listen in on the world, with many amusing moments. Drunken people ramble regardless of their language, and here a man will inexplicably appear to offer a weird fish to patrons to buy against their will, whilst one man is so annoyed a co-worker is drinking there that, at first appearing with a hook, he returns with a giant net to finally drag the co-worker out.

That Mostafa Derkaoui depicts this, played as real but staged, is him showing the ordinary world where the questions he has to ask are in context of, an energy letting one become comfortable to as you love the mood and atmosphere. This is especially in mind that the initial premise and the film itself is esoteric, a film-about-film, specifically a time capsule banned in his homeland, even if Mostafa Derkaoui is dealing with universal themes eventually. The discussion of Moroccan cinema, in casual interviews, continues from this in how the time is reflected, in the segments offering a snapshot of the culture where they are a country who mostly imported genre films from other countries and barely had their own cinema. With a diet of westerns and "karate films" like The Big Boss (1971) with Bruce Lee, Moroccan cinema is not as seen as reflecting the world, or as one female interviewee here suggests is too "intellectual", rather than covering issues for the regular person on the street has to deal with in their lives. One man refers to wanting "intimate" cinema, not wanting Morocco's to be like the commercial cinema of Egypt, and there is a sense in how, with the cinema itself mostly imported, that the voice itself is complex in what will be unique for this nation.

To know this docu-drama was banned by the Moroccan government is a surprise, except that, a literal fragment of life, this does show a bustling world of people who live and yet is one of living a life which is difficult, not hiding the uglier side when the figure who stabs another is introduced and heard, revealed as not a one-dimensional figure. When this figure is introduced, and when Mostafa Derkaoui finally gets to interview him in a jail, the notion of wanting to document even his side is suspect, to the guilty man himself who finds Derkaoui an irritant with no grasp of his situation. This film of some events is itself eventually thinking of how cinema, when thought of, has a lot of difficulty to try to understand the truth. The discussion just after the stabbing has the crew argue of how to depict the guilty party's side, or whether to actually do so, with the fear of becoming the capitalist commercial filmmaking they wish to condemn. That they openly talk of the seventies American cinema of the time, dubbed the true era of innovative and radical American cinema, having just been commercialism appropriating political cinema negatively shows that, in another time, hindsight of politics' virtues of art was less important that the truth being sincere. That the incident is about a disgruntled dockhand having killed his boss opens up the moral issues of how to deal with the subject where, with the issue of transferring a real story a film, you have to except that the figures involved are real people. Finally uncovered by the Filmoteca de Catalunya and scholar Léa Morin, who helped get the film restored, a film like About Some Meaningless Events truly denotes "world cinema" as I want it to be, completely unpredictable even if it was a narrative with conventional plotting in how you cannot predict what the trajectory is, with this as not even being a traditional narrative revealing more in its subject by how unconventional it actually is.