Content area
Full Text
The multi-faceted and beautiful new book Quelques événements sans signification à reconstituer (Some Meaningless Events to Reconstitute), despite its ironic, almost-eponymous title - a working title for the film whose history it recounts - attempts to do justice to the restoration and reconstitution of the Moroccan film De Quelques événements sans signification / About Some Meaningless Events (1974). Directed by Mostafa Derkaoui, who engaged a network of artists, filmmakers, cinephiles, and political activists to help him, the film had a precarious existence at the time of its completion: effectively banned during the repressive political climate of its moment, it circulated clandestinely on VHS but never in theatres. Thanks to research by the book's editor Léa Morin, a France-based researcher and curator of Moroccan cinema, the negatives for the film were located at the Filmoteca de Catalunya where it was also restored. It now, finally, has wider exhibition some fifty years after it was made.
Morin has assembled a group of insightful critics, curators, and filmmakers for this volume. She herself offers a long essay that takes us through Derkaoui's biography, including his time (with his brother, cinematographer Abdelkrim) at the Łódź school of cinema from 1966, and reveals the film's long struggle with censorship and the difficulties it provoked for critics because of its form and mode of production. Her beautifully researched essay complements the illuminating conversation with the preservation team from the Filmoteca de Catalunya which restored the film. These two chapters establish for the reader the details and importance of the film and its rediscovery, such that other essays can further establish its historical context and significance.
Mostafa Derkaoui himself writes one of the book's two epistolary chapters: his prologue, addressed to Morin, marvels at the opportunity to return to the...