Thoughts on the film by Josef von Sternberg
I wasn't as taken with Morocco (1930) as I was by the
later collaboration between actor Marlene Dietrich and
director Josef von Sternberg, the masterful Shanghai
Express (1932).
While essentially similar in their themes, tones and
intentions, Shanghai Express seemed to have a lot more going on beneath the
surface; not merely connecting its melodrama to ideas of war, displacement,
clashes of culture, and the self-reflexive relationship between the train
journey that defines the narrative and the conventions of the narrative cinema
itself, but having those elements become a part of the psychology of its
characters. The themes, the backdrop of civil war, the divided country, the clashes
between people, weren't simply plot devices, they were an external expression
or projection of the internal, elemental dramas that the characters faced.
By contrast, Morocco seems
far more straightforward. While one could argue that the titular setting, the
backdrop of the Rif War and the surrounding issues of colonialism and white/western
exploitation, fulfil a similar function as the Shanghai setting of that later
work, I felt there was a much greater disconnect here between these elements
and the more conventional melodrama that rests at the heart of the film.
Morocco [Josef von Sternberg, 1930]:
While Shanghai Express felt mysterious – its band of
characters, some sinister, others played for comic relief, keeping the
development of the plot compelling through their dialogues and interactions – Morocco
feels locked into the relationship between its three central characters; the
narrowed scope creating a more stifling and hermetic atmosphere that for me was
never entirely engaging.
Adapted from the play "Amy Jolly" by the
writer Benno Vigny, Morocco feels comparatively more theatrical than Shanghai
Express. In keeping with its origins and ambitions, the film plays with themes
of performance, voyeurism, objectification and the role of the characters as
individuals hiding behind masks, uniforms and personae, while keeping the drama
contained to specific, single locations that facilitate easy introductions,
providing a place for several characters to meet at once.
The nightclub at the start of the film is a good
example of this. As well as explicitly connecting the film and Dietrich's role
to the actor's first collaboration with von Sternberg, The Blue Angel (1930),
the initial setting becomes a self-contained world; a microcosm, much like the
fantasy Morocco that the filmmakers evoke, that becomes the center stage for
this drama to be enacted.
The Blue Angel [Josef von
Sternberg, 1930]:
Morocco [Josef von Sternberg, 1930]:
The theatricality of the film, its "staginess" or artificiality, isn't necessarily a criticism. Many
great films have drawn on theatrical limitation to powerful effect, from Peter
Brook's adaptation of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as
Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the
Marquis de Sade (1967) to films like Rope (1948) by Alfred Hitchcock, Twelve
Angry Men (1957) by Sidney Lumet and Dogville (2003) by Lars von Trier, among
others. However, Morocco is so stiffly mannered and bluntly expositional in its
emotional entanglements, that the staginess becomes a barrier to engaging with the
emotions of the film.
The effect is almost Brechtian; jarring the audience
out of the film's romantic or dramatic reverie, creating a distancing effect
that is most likely unintentional. Rather than depict a functioning human
being, the characters become embodiments of specific roles, professions, or
personifications of class. In short, they have a symbolic function, representing
ideas rather than presenting fully rounded characters. Their dialogue tells us
what these individuals are thinking at all times, announcing emotions in blunt,
declarative statements, not like human beings, but like actors in a play.
In this aspect of the film's construction I was
reminded of one of my favourite filmmakers, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Fassbinder would effectively remake von Sternberg's earlier, aforementioned The
Blue Angel, with one of his final works, Lola (1981), but it was in seeing
Morocco that I realized where much of Fassbinder's later aesthetic was born.
Finding elements of von Sternberg's work in everything
from Despair (1978) to Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and through to his final
film Querelle (1982), the influence was undoubtable.
The same complex system of blocking, the moving camera, the mirror symbolism
and its resultant themes of projection and self-reflection, are consistent
between the two filmmakers' works. Similarly, the instances of characters
confined and imprisoned by set-design, illustrating the way these same
characters have been ensnared by a world and its responsibilities, creating a
further shorthand for themes of possession, desire and objectification.
Lola [Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1981]:
Querelle [Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982]:
Fassbinder's work, particularly from the
middle-to-later period of his short career, stands as superior to a film like
Morocco, able to go deeper into the same themes of sadness, disenchantment and
the cruelties of exploitation and pity that human beings are capable of,
without being constrained by the necessary and unambiguous morality that films
of Morocco's period were expected to promote. Regardless, we should respect the
influence and the legacy that von Sternberg's work clearly had on Fassbinder's
greater films.
Despite my muted response to Morocco, at least in
comparison to other related works, there is still much to admire about the
film. Two aspects of its characterization and direction stand out as incredibly
progressive. These elements transcend the weaker aspects of the film and
elevate it as both an important and historically significant work within the context
of still topical discussions on sexuality and genderfluidity in the
contemporary cinema.
In an early introduction to Dietrich's character, the disillusioned
nightclub singer Mademoiselle Amy Jolly, the actor appears dressed in a man's
tuxedo. Challenging notions of femininity verses masculinity, Dietrich commands
the stage as she performs a musical number, directly provoking the mostly male
audience that gather in the nightclub, and in turn, gathered within the cinema.
As the sequence progresses, she even kisses another woman; a bold gesture in
the context of 1930s Hollywood cinema, and one that would have been rendered
unthinkable after the implementation of the Hays Code a few years later.
Morocco [Josef von Sternberg, 1930]:
As a sequence, it remains a key moment in the history
of film; one that might have been the focus of this entire essay had it not
been endlessly written about and discussed by writers and critics far more
insightful and significant than me.
The use of the costume and what it represents, along
with the lesbian kiss, say so much about ideas of gender, sexuality, identity
as a performative role, and the imbalance of power that exists between men and
women. In donning the clothes conventionally thought of as male, Dietrich's
character takes on traits that are now identified as being related to notions
of hyper-masculinity, or male privilege, exerting a sexual dominance and
control over another woman in an unwanted and aggressive way. At the same time,
she presents an image that is at once defiantly feminist while remaining still outside
of the conventions of gender, presenting the initial image of a woman that is both
confident and in control.
While the stylized Moroccan setting, created on a
Hollywood soundstage, is inauthentic and perhaps insensitive in its reduction
of a living culture and its people to a level of props and glamorized exotica, these
other aspects of the film still feel progressive and ahead of their time.
