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Once I had a homeland on the North coast of Africa where the sun and the sea fused with the earth, and in that land there was a city, Agadir. I was born there. On a warm placid evening of February 1960 in fractions of seconds from the infinity of all time, the earth snapped open, and Agadir crumbled into dust and despair vanishing forever into the endless night. I was there, yet I no more existed. History had wiped away my past.
—Jacques Bensimon
Jacques Bensimon's 1971 film, Once … Agadir, begins with statements of fact voiced in soft, neutral tones, arrayed over images of mosques, desert sands, and herds of sheep. "Country: Morocco … City: Agadir … Population: 48,000 … The earthquake lasted twelve seconds … Number Killed: 12,000."1 Shifting abruptly between sequences showing the scope and scale of the city's destruction and scenes of displaced family life in North America, the film is as much a reflection on the location of disaster as on its meaning. The number of deaths, the percentage of buildings destroyed, and images of ruins and rubble linger uncomfortably next to visions of Bensimon's expatriate childhood in Canada. The earthquake struck Agadir, a port city in Southern Morocco, on 29 February 1960, reaching a magnitude 5.7 on the Richter scale. Between ten and fifteen thousand Moroccans and Europeans lost their lives as a result of the shaking that brought down hotels and high-rises as well as nearly all of the buildings in the city's poorest neighborhoods: the Kasbah, Founti, and Yachech. The unfolding of disaster in Agadir also created a contradiction, a challenge to the seismologists and structural engineers of the time: how did an earthquake five thousand times less powerful than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—with a magnitude of 8.2 and around four hundred casualties—lead to so much death and devastation?
Once … Agadir is about displacement and the unmaking of a city, but the film's portrayal of destruction also gestures toward the technoscientific remaking of Agadir as a test case for seismic failure. The technoscientific practices—used to established that (a) "the earthquake lasted twelve seconds," (b) 70 percent of the city's buildings collapsed, and (c) the magnitude was 5.7—played a decisive role...