Some films disappear through mere neglect, but those that vanish after being suppressed bear witness, in their absence, to a challenge to power. So it is with “About Some Meaningless Events,” a Moroccan film from 1974, directed by Mostafa Derkaoui, which was banned by the country’s government before it was shown there, and which was believed to be lost, until the negative turned up in 2016, in an archive in Barcelona. Now, all the more remarkably, the film is being made readily available—it will drop this Wednesday on the streaming platform MUBI (which is also available as an Amazon channel). The sheer fact of its rediscovery incites curiosity—and, often, films rescued from oblivion are less interesting than the tale of their rediscovery. That’s not the case with “About Some Meaningless Events.” The film would be equally noteworthy had it always been in circulation, because it would long ago have been hailed as one of the most original political films of the time, and recognized as further proof (as if it were ever needed) that aesthetic imagination and civic engagement aren’t opposed, but, rather, are mutually reinforcing.
“About Some Meaningless Events,” which takes place in Casablanca, is a wide-ranging metafiction that audaciously fuses drama and documentary, and also passes back and forth, imperceptibly and ambiguously, between its fictional and nonfictional elements, as if its camera lens shifted on a spectrum of window and mirror, transmission and reflection. Moreover, it does so with a sense of style, a conspicuous attention to the tones and overtones of images and sounds that imbue its explorations with a passionately emotional essence. The film begins in a bar, late at night, with a bunch of young men and a few women drinking and chatting, in images that are simultaneously tight closeups and busy crowd scenes. The frames teem with people between, beside, and behind other people, and the edges of the frame seem to strain and bulge with the energy of the shifting, pressing groups.
Then a sound recordist is seen wearing headphones, his assistant holds a microphone on the end of a boom, and a director and his associate discuss why the actors aren’t there—they’ve been told not to come because there’s no money to pay them. Instead, the movie that they’re working on will be made with the people in the café. The crowd features only the café patrons and some extras; the director gathers and organizes them, positions the camera, and calls for action as the assistant claps the slate. Then the talk begins: bar talk, about smoking and drinking, spiced with bluster and insolence. The scene is meandering and inconclusive (though it seethes with subtle hints of conflict and rage); the filmmakers are at a loss for what to do.
This scene is followed by a candid documentary sequence, during the day, in the street, that shows their response to their own uncertainty: the filmmakers question passersby about movies in general and, in particular, about the Moroccan cinema and what it should be. The answers they get are mainly political: one man tells them that it should address unemployment; a young woman says that it should show the country’s social problems; another man specifies that it should focus on “working-class problems”; yet another states that it should address political issues and “the underclass.” Meanwhile, a bus pulls up, a young man gets off, and the camera follows him as he threads his way through the crowd, gets on a motorbike, and rides off. Eventually, the film crew catches up with him, too, at a nearby dock, and asks him what kinds of films they should make, but he’s at a loss for an answer—all he recommends is “realistic scenes,” and, as another man jumps at the chance to answer, the young man walks off and sits by himself, apart from the crowd, at the dock.
Another night, the crew is back in the café, questioning patrons about the Moroccan cinema and both observing and participating in their raucous and flirtatious banter, as tension mounts between several men (including the one from the bus). A fight breaks out, a worker kills his boss, the police get involved, and the filmmakers suddenly find themselves the makers of a virtual genre film, which, in turn, they discuss at length to draw out its manifold political implications and their cinematic uses. Then, the mirror spins even more wildly, as they track down and seek to interview a suspect who’s in custody—only to let circumstances turn the tables on them and put their own cinematic practice in the spotlight.
Throughout, Derkaoui (who wrote, directed, and edited), working with the cinematographer Mohamed Abdelkrim Derkaoui (his brother), transforms these ambiguous intertwinings of prepared sequences and spontaneous events, of investigation and interrogation, drama and discussion, into a turbulent and intricate collage of city life. His editing is as exactingly distinctive as his concepts and his compositions—the development of crowd scenes leaps between the logic of movement, the side business that catches the eye, and the free association of ideas.
“About Some Meaningless Events” has a French connection beyond that of history and language (Morocco regained its independence from France in 1956 and the language is still widely spoken there): the two great interview-based metafilms that are its prime precursors are Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s “Chronicle of a Summer” (1960) and Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s “Le Joli Mai” (1962). If, in ideas and in method, “Chronicle of a Summer” mainly addresses memory and “Le Joli Mai” concerns the present tense, “About Some Meaningless Events,” both in its envisioning of a new Moroccan cinema and in its open-ended, fragmentary sense of form, is turned resolutely toward the future.
It was a future that didn’t quite happen as planned: the government—a monarchy and a dictatorship—deemed the film “inopportune,” and, further, complained that it never showed a portrait of the country’s king, Hassan II. As a result, it was banned and never screened there, and was shown publicly only once, in France, in 1975, prior to its rediscovery in 2016, by the scholar Léa Morin, in the Barcelona archive. (A screening at Museum of the Moving Image took place March 12th, just as the pandemic was shutting New York City down.) With its express effort at cinematic innovation, “About Some Meaningless Events” should have been, in the intervening decades, a beacon for new generations of filmmakers, in Morocco and everywhere. Much of documentary filmmaking remains stuck in unquestioned assumptions of practice and manner; Derkaoui’s work remains, half a century later, ahead even of the present day.
