The prestigious journal, Arab Media & Society, has an extremely interesting article on a little known episode in the history of Fez. The article "Politics by Other Screens" is by Elizabeth F. Thompson, associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, and author of Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (2000). Elizabeth Thompson is currently completing two book manuscripts, “Cinema and the Politics of Late Colonialism” and “Seeking Justice in the Middle East.” Here is an edited extract. We suggest you also read the complete article. A link is provided at the bottom of this extract.
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. 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 theatre. They nibbled on melon seeds and Spanish peas while commenting on the action on the screen.
Asmahan serenades in a nightclub.From Intisar al-Shabab (1941)
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 theatres? Which movies should they see, and in what languages? In 1947-48, boycotts, demonstrations, riots and police actions spread to movie theatres 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 theatre 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 inflamed political tensions among Moroccans themselves. In retrospect, the cinema war of 1947-48 was the opening campaign in the decade-long process of decolonization.
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.
In Fez, religious elites were horrified by evolution of the Place du Commerce, outside of the Jewish Mellah. French soldiers had taken it over, and cafes and cinemas had multiplied there, along with brothels. In the eyes of Fez elites, cinemas and brothels alike made the Place du Commerce a scene of moral decadence. Meanwhile, in Casablanca, cinemas caused anxiety as the city became a magnet for poor rural migrants who built its first bidonvilles in the 1940s. Thousands of single men settled in the city, causing alarm to fathers of daughters. Economic stress during the war drove many women into prostitution, and it was noted that Muslim prostitutes watched Rita Hayworth movies to expand their repertoires of seduction. Respectable women dared not go to cinemas unescorted by men, for fear of being mistaken for a prostitute.
Women’s exclusion from cinema became the essential link in the uneasy alliance between secular nationalists and religious leaders. Although they disagreed with religious leaders on the issue of cultural contact, nationalists joined them in the 1930s in blaming foreign influence for the rise of corruption and immorality. Their combined campaign targeted mainly women, in an effort to uphold gender segregation in public as an authentic cultural tradition. Conservative elites in Fez condemned the presence of women in movie theatres as a violation of public morality. The Pasha of Fez banned Muslim women from entering the Boujeloud Gardens, because too many women were circulating the city without proper male escort. The Pasha of Tétouan built a new moviehouse reserved for women only, in order to maintain moral propriety.
The boycott of the Boujeloud Cinema
Two postwar trends—the ascendancy of a popular nationalist movement and the emergence of cinema as a political arena – converged in June 1948 at the Cinema Boujeloud in Fez. The Boujeloud was a third-class cinema whose clientele was 90 percent Muslim and 10 percent Jewish. It was located in the Boujeloud Gardens, a frontier between the old city and the new. Since 1942, it had been owned by a group of modest Frenchmen led by Robert Lente. Their relations with Boujeloud audiences were apparently good.But in 1948 all seemed to change at the Boujeloud. Boycotts against cinemas had broken out in late 1947 in Rabat and nearby Salé. The following spring, the boycotts spread to most major cities in Morocco, suggesting that the general Muslim population supported them.
The boycott of the Boujeloud Cinema began in late May 1948. For weeks, nearly all of its 1,100 seats remained empty. The cinema went bankrupt, and on June 3, 1948, Robert Lente closed its doors. Two weeks later, the group that mounted the boycott bought the Boujeloud for 12.4 million francs. The leader of the new owners was Mohamed Laghzaoui, one of the first Moroccan movie producers and a member of a leading family in Fez. He had more than 20 partners, mostly businessmen and lawyers, all with Arab names. The vendors were all European.
French authorities reacted with alarm and suspicion. The boycott and sale of the Boujeloud became known as the “Boujeloud Affair,” subject of a thick file now stored at the foreign ministry archives in Nantes, France.
The file in Nantes shows that the French were divided not only by their viewpoints, but also by their methods. Some respected the rule of law; others were ready to violate the law in the name of state security. The essential issue concerned the status of Moroccans: under the Protectorate, were they citizens equal under the law to Europeans? Generally, civilian officials in Fez respected the legal rights of the Laghzaoui group. Military officials and higher civilians in Rabat, however, were more aggressive. Resident-General Juin, in particular, pressured civil servants in Fez to impose separate rules on Arabs. For six months, negotiations passed from office to office, to police stations to courts, and into the streets. The Boujeloud Affair became, in effect, a negotiation over the boundaries between colonial privilege and citizens’ rights in postwar Morocco.
Read the complete essay here: Politics by Other Screens.
The View from Fez would like to thank William Ward, The Managing Editor of Arab Media and Society, for permission to reprint the extract.
Tags: Moroccan Morocco Fes, Maghreb news
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