Ghosts of Tangier

Ghosts of Tangier (French title: Fantômes de Tanger, Spanish title: Fantasmas de Tánger) is a 1997 French documentary-style film directed by Edgardo Cozarinsky that officially premiered in France on March 11, 1998. The 87-minute film explores the cultural history, mythology, and cosmopolitan post-war literary community of Tangier.

Click on the image above for the full movie.

Nass El Ghiwane - Taghounja

Taghounja (1980), Moroccan-Italian filmmaker Abdou Achouba’s ode to Sufi poet Abderrahman el Majdoub’s Qasidas starring Larbi Batma and Omar Sayed, two of the members of Nass El Ghiwane, who will also compose the film’s soundtrack. The film charts a quest for identity by two characters: one, a lyricist and musician (Batma), who strives to immerse himself in his country’s rich cultural heritage; the other, a young boy, who looks at the world around him through the eyes of innocence. Bringing to mind Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Uccellacci e Uccellini (1966), to whom the film is dedicated.

At Omar Sayed’s instigation, Larbi Batma desperately wanders through a mystical Morocco tirelessly collecting oral poetry, sounds and rhythms primarily drawn from popular music and the repertoire of the traditional religious brotherhoods (Gnawa, Aissawa, Heddawa, H’madcha, Jilala, etc.) While classified as fiction, Taghounja is, strictly speaking, a docu-fiction. However, its approach is markedly different from that of Transes (Maanouni’s essay film about Nass El Ghiwane). Instead of a biopic, it dramatizes the group’s lyrics, sometimes literally, within the sociopolitical life of the time. The parallel wanderings of the musician and the child mirroring the state of affairs of late 70s Morocco, a country still alienated by colonialism, neo-colonialism and the perversion of certain customs and traditions. The quest comes to nothing and Abdou Achouba refuses to give audiences an answer, preferring instead an open-ended conclusion.<å> Taghounja was awarded a prize at the Venice Film Festival and the Carthage Film Festival, and was widely acclaimed by French intellectuals and artists. However, the politicised audience of students at the Maison du Maroc in Paris gave Achouba a reserved welcome, reproaching him for not being critical enough of the regime. Moroccan film critic and Abdou’s former philosophy teacher Noureddine Saïl said in his weekly radio program, Écran noir, “You may like or dislike Taghounja, but you have to admit that the film includes certain shots that are on a par with works of art.”

GNAWA, MUSIC AND BEYOND - ENGLISH VERSION

 

Gnawa: Music and Beyond. Jacques Willemont, dir.; Viviana Pâques, scientific direction. Produced by Espaces, 2012; DVD includes English and French versions, both have Arabic with English or French subtitles; color, 58 mins. 

Jacques Willemont's documentary Gnawa: Music and Beyond explores the history, symbolism and ritual practice of Morocco's Gnawa traditions. The Gnawa are a population brought to Morocco from West Africa through a history of trans-Saharan slavery. In some ways mirroring syncretic traditions that grew out of trans-Atlantic slavery, like santaría in Cuba or condomblé in Brazil, the Gnawa fused West African religious and musical practices with Islam to create a musically-driven sacred healing ceremony called a derdba. Following an animal sacrifice, this all-night event moves through a series of spirits who possess adepts through trance. Willemont and his team draw upon years of interview footage to explore both how this ritual works and what its various components mean. To this end, the film relies heavily on interviews and analysis by Viviana Pâques, a French scholar of Gnawa music who provided scientific direction for the production. The film aims to demonstrate what can be a clandestine practice in Morocco by sharing a wealth of footage from these interviews with Pâques (who passed away in 2007) and from a recorded ceremony.

 
Structurally, Gnawa: Music and Beyond is built around the Gnawa ceremony as it has existed in Morocco for generations. To do so, the film layers three central types of content. Interview material with Al Ayachi, a ritual leader called a moqqadem, sits between documentary footage and interviews with Viviana Pâques, who presents an interpretive analysis based on her three decades of work with Al Ayachi and the Gnawa. Partly because of this structural choice, the film presents dual focal points: it aims to preserve and share the secret knowledge held within Gnawa ritual practice while it presents the importance of deep interpretive symbolism as studied by anthropologists like Pâques. She has been a central figure within the study of Gnawa music and ritual, most notably through her two books on the topic, L'arbre cosmique dans la pensée populaire et dans la vie quotidienne du nord-ouest africain (The cosmic tree in Northwest African popular thought and daily life [1964]), and La religion des esclaves: Recherches sur la confrérie marocaine des Gnawa (The religion of slaves: research on the Moroccan brotherhood of the Gnawa [1991]).

 
In the immense conglomerate of African fusions which we can explore today we find a wholly unique case: the Gnawa. The approach to the Gnawa’s musical expression, of profound social and religious implications, reveals to us not only an extremely rich cultural heritage but also one of the chapters that would have greatest effect on the development of North African societies during the last 500 years: slavery.

 
The term Gnawa refers to the brotherhood groupings (and, by extension, to their manifestations) of a minority ethnic-religious group of sub-Saharan origin but with an important presence especially in Morocco and, to a lesser extent, in Algeria and Tunisia, where they are known as Diwan and Stambali respectively. There is no unanimity on seeing the Gnawiya as a Tariqa or Sufi religious path in the way that some of those more rooted in the Maghreb can be, such as the Qadiriya, Issawiya or Hamdushiya, among others, with which, however, it shares an organisational structure and ecstatic and possession rites, in what are considered the limits of Islamic orthodoxy. The establishing of these syncretic expressions took place over several centuries, during which the animist ritual substrate gradually adapted to Islam, with variations which depended both on the geographic area and the social environment to which the different black communities had to adapt themselves.

 
The Origins The origin of the Gnawa, a word that seems to come from the Berber term agnaw/ignawen (dumb) in reference to their ignorance of Arabic and Berber must first be found in the diverse contingents of black slaves who between the 11th and 13th centuries were taken to the Maghreb strip from the Kingdom of Abyssinia, which occupied a strategic position in the caravanserai routes, and from the old Kingdom of Ghana (which today is part of Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal). The traditional slave trade from the great Sudan intensified because of the conquest at the end of the 16th century of part of the Songhai Empire carried out by the Sultan of Morocco Ahmed Al-Mansur, a trafficking that continued until the early 20th century.

 
The descendants of these slaves, together with other free emigrant black peoples who arrived through the caravanserai routes, mixed with the local population and formed a group that despite its diverse origin acquired its own identity thanks to the figure of Sidi Bilal, the first slave of Ethiopian origin freed by Mohammed and who was the first Muezzin of Islam. These communities would also be known by other names in reference to their geographical origin (Sudani, Bambara), their social status (Ousfan, slaves), their religious affiliations (Bilali) or some of their practices of origin (Bori, in reference to the dance of possession practised by the Hausa taken to Tripoli). The large concentration of the black community in cities such as Marrakech and Essaouira (formerly called the port of Timbuktu) was because both cities had been important slave markets connected to the trans-Saharan route.

From Gnawa: Music and Spirit by Mª Elena Morató

Paul Bowles Biography

“If I am here now, it is only because I was still here when I realized to what an extent the world had worsened, and that I no longer wanted to travel. In defense of the city I can say that so far it has been touched by fewer of the negative aspects of contemporary civilization than most cities of its size. More important than that, I relish the idea that in the night, all around me in my sleep, sorcery is burrowing its invisible tunnels in every direction, from thousands of senders to thousands of unsuspecting recipients. Spells are being cast, poison is running its course; souls are being dispossessed of parasitic pseudo consciousness that lurk in the unguarded recesses of the mind.

There is drumming out there most nights. It never awakens me; I hear the drums and incorporate them into my dream, like the nightly cries of the muezzins. Even if in the dream I am in New York, the first Allah akbar! effaces the backdrop and carries whatever comes next to North Africa, and the dream goes on.” . Paul Bowles

Trances

 

The groundbreaking Moroccan band Nass El Ghiwane is the dynamic subject of this captivating, one-of-a-kind documentary by Ahmed El Maanouni, who filmed the four musicians during a series of electrifying live performances in Tunisia, Morocco, and France; on the streets of Casablanca; and in intimate conversations. Storytellers through song and traditional instruments, and with connections to political theater, the band became a local phenomenon and an international sensation, thanks to its rebellious lyrics and sublime, fully acoustic sound, which draws on Berber rhythms, Malhun sung poetry, and Gnawa dances. Both a concert movie and a free-form audiovisual experiment, bolstered by images of the band’s rapt audience, Trances is pure cinematic poetry.

Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles (1998)

Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles (1998)

Directed by Jennifer Baichwal

(click on the image to be taken there)

Paul Bowles, who lived in Tangier, Morocco and died there in 1999 at the age of 88, was the quintessential iconoclast.  He left the United States for good in the 1940s after building an illustrious career as a composer, rejected the heroic identity requisite to expatriate American writers and buried himself in the culture of North Africa. A writer's writer, his associations span the elite cultural circles of this century. At twenty, he was an intimate of Gertrude Stein and Aaron Copeland; at thirty the peer of Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal; at forty, literary godfather to Beat writers William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. His unorthodox marriage to writer Jane Bowles - both were gay and had significant relationships with others throughout their marriage - is legendary. Together they formed the magnet which drew an extraordinary group of writers and artists to the exotic freedoms of Morocco before independence.

In this definitive film biography, the notoriously laconic and reclusive Bowles finally speaks out on the subjects he has remained silent about over the years. Lying in bed at his home in Tangier and smoking kif with an elegant black cigarette holder, he reflects on his life, his work, Jane, love and his friends with unprecedented candour. His tone is almost omniscient, as though he is surveying both life and death from some lofty interim vantage point. The film is built around this self-revealing monologue, with various voices breaking in to comment, dispute and clarify. Chief among these is William Burroughs, who acts as a sort of commentator on Bowles’ version of his life.

Director Jennifer Baichwal's association with Bowles dates back to her early twenties when she ran away to Morocco, drawn by his dark, sinister prose. Subsequent visits deepened their friendship, culminating in the interview which is the basis of the film. Breathtaking footage of Morocco, from the twisted medinas of Tangier and Fez to the hypnotic beauty of the desert, becomes a metaphor for Bowles' interior world. Diverse archival material evokes the atmosphere of North Africa in the '30s and '40s. 

The film includes interviews with Bowles' late friends William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and David Herbert, as well as analysis -- some of it harsh -- from Moroccan writer Mohammed Choukri. There are compelling scenes of Bowles translating storyteller Mohammed Mrabet from Dharisian into English, exclusive footage of the last meeting of Bowles, Ginsberg and Burroughs in New York and unprecedented footage of Jane Bowles’ lover Cherifa, who is rumoured to have poisoned Jane to death. Filling this out are readings from celebrated Canadian actor Tom McCamus and detailed treatment of Bowles’ work as a composer.

Paul Bowles-An American in Tangier (1993)

Paul Bowles-An American in Tangier (1993)

Paul Frederic Bowles (/boʊlz/; December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with Tangier, Morocco where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life.

 Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making several trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for theatrical productions, as well as other compositions.

He achieved critical and popular success with his first novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, at that time in the Tangier International Zone, and his wife Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was Bowles' home for the remainder of his life.

He came to symbolize American immigrants in the city. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried near family graves in Lakemont Cemetery, in upstate New York.