Moroccan cinema between the I and the Other: Wechma and Sayed Almajhoul

Thesis

This dissertation traces the development of Moroccan cinema between the historical and contemporary context. An important axis of this research is to situate the crisis of Moroccan identity under the cinematic lens between the colonial and postcolonial paradigm. Whereas in the colonial paradigm, this research explores the conditioning of the self with a lens of “othering”; in the postcolonial paradigm, it will unveil the primacy of the cinema in reprocessing the self with a lens of “selfing”. Equally important is the appropriation of the cinematic apparatus as an imperial instrument that legitimized cultural penetration and colonial authority, before and after the French protectorate in Morocco. The findings of the latter will be utilized as a critical approach to address the unsettlement of the self in Morocco’s postcolonial and contemporary cinema. Moreover, this paper will also re-evaluate the dilemma of cinematic authenticity for a third eye who oscillates between the local and the global, the national and transnational, and the “I” and the “Other”. Therefore, with a close reading of Hamid Bennani’s Wechma (1970) and Alaa Eddine Aljem’s Sayed Almajhoul (2019), this dissertation will lead to new theoretical conclusions about the ambiguity of “what Moroccan cinema?.

Authors: El Alaoui, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-7jyqven58
• Type of award: M.St.
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: national and transnational cinema; self and othering; postcolonial studies; cultural appropriation; Moroccan cinema; film theory; self-orientalism; orientalism; contemporary Moroccan film; psychoanalytic film theory; colonial and postcolonial identity; subversive cinema; cinematic authenticity
• Subjects: History in mass media; Motion pictures; Slow cinema; Arts, Colonial