Casablanca's Régime: The Shifting Aesthetics of Political Technologies
(1907-1943)
Jorge Otero-Pailos
©
1998
PMC 8.2
...the concept of reality is always the first victim
of war.
--Paul Virilio, paraphrasing Kipling
(War and Cinema 33)
Vacillating Realities
At the corner of the
bar a man in a white suit, probably an American business traveler, asks
for more coffee and looks intently at a young professional woman who,
seated across the room, is slowly sipping a Martini. The bartender
notices his stare and quietly smiles while drying off the sparkling
glassware. The room is dimly light by wall sconces that cast a pale glow
over posters of Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca. "As Time
Goes By" is playing almost imperceptibly in the PA system. Five clocks
on the wall mark the time in L.A., New York, Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo.
He could be anywhere in the world. The napkin under his drink has a
familiar logo that reads "Rick's Café," and through the front door he
can see the Hotel receptionist. The man finishes his coffee, walks
slowly to the front door of the Hotel, and exits. He pauses for a moment
to light a cigarette and to look around. An immense boulevard lies
before the building dividing a row of modern structures from an old
masonry city wall. "Is this really Casablanca? It looks nothing like the
movie," he murmurs. It is a typical scene inside Casablanca's Hyatt
Hotel.
 |
 |
| Figure 1: Rick's Café (postcard). |
Figure 2: Hyatt in Casablanca (photo by
author). |
Hyatt's version of
Rick's Cafe is the only place in Casablanca where one can find a
designed and direct reference in the real to the imaginary scenes of the
Film. And yet the city owes much of its international fame to the
Hollywood movie. Most people can picture Casablanca, although they might
have never been there, as a city of tight sinuous streets,
claustrophobic markets, parrot vendors, hookah pipes, picturesque
locals, and filmic foreigners. What is shocking when we set foot on the
real streets of Casablanca is that they bear no resemblance whatsoever
to the movie: they are ample boulevards lined with modern low rise
structures and harboring a bustling metropolitan life. Inside the old
Casbah walls there are no wooden trellises overhead, signs like those
outside of the "Blue Parrot Club" have been replaced by advertisements
for Levis, and the French administrative buildings--which are crucial in
the spatialization of the old city in the film into the Café-Police
Headquarters-Airport triangle--are nowhere in sight--they are, as it
turns out, outside the Casbah in the "modern" city.
Arriving in Casablanca
as a Western traveler/movie fan, one feels strangely betrayed by the
city's reality. The movie had placed an emphasis on its own adherence to
reality with the authority, and transparent objectivity, implied by the
war documentary style of its introductory scenes, where the very real
struggle of European refugees in World War II is superimposed on a map
of Northern Africa and views of the city.
 |
| Figure 3: Still from
Casablanca. | To buttress
this blurring effect, the film was released in New York on Thanksgiving
Day 1942, just eighteen days after the Allies landed in Casablanca, in
an obvious attempt to benefit from the international attention the city
was receiving. The army's use of "Rick's Place" as a pseudonym for
Casablanca throughout the war just goes to prove the film's
effectiveness at conflating the imaginary and the real. In fact, ever
since the premiere of the motion picture, the virtual and the real
cities of Casablanca have coupled in the collective imaginary of the
West. It is therefore understandable that, when confronted with a city
that looks and feels nothing like what we might have been led to expect
by the movie, we experience in Casablanca a strange perversion of the
horror vacui which, according to Umberto Eco, emerges when "the
'completely real' becomes identified with the 'completely fake,'" and
"absolute unreality is offered as real presence" (7). A similar feeling
would pervade us if, arriving in Paris, we all of a sudden realized the
Tour Eiffel did not exist, outside of post cards and films, and
that in its place was just a wonderful six-lane highway.
One could speculate
about the reasons why Director Michael Curtiz might have chosen to
construct the city out of revamped props of Warner Brothers' 1942
version of The Desert Song, and shoot in the company's
Burbank Studios rather than on location. First there was the economic
factor. Moving the crew to Casablanca was certainly more expensive than
working in California. Second, the world was at war, and after Pearl
Harbor it was clear that US interests were not safe abroad. Traveling to
Morocco could mean endangering the crew. Can the significant gap between
the filmic and real cities be the result of these unfortunate logistic
imperatives? But what about all the other "flaws" of the film; can they
be attributed to the same cause? Certainly not. Logistics had nothing to
do in the wrongful depiction of uniformed Germans in Casablanca. Studio
writers knew that the German Army did not set foot in Casablanca during
World War II, just as they knew that such things as Letters of Transit
signed by Général Charles de Gaulle did not exist, and that neither
American nor French troops entered Berlin in 1918 (Robertson 79).
Another exterior pressure was driving writers and producers to
exaggerate and distort the real, one that demanded political
effectiveness over historical accuracy: the war. And, in the name of
this effort, reality would have to be betrayed by virtuality, and turned
into ideology.
It is widely known
that Casablanca was a war film aimed at sedating the
general American opposition to US involvement in World War II. If a
number of historical flaws are consciously present, it is because they
were deemed necessary in order to
 |
Figure 4: The fighting French march
outside
of New York's Hollywood
theater, 1942 (from Miller,
Casablanca:
As Time Goes By--50th
Aniversary
Commemorative. | accomplish
this objective. By depicting fictitious Germans, Americans, Frenchmen,
and Resistance leaders in simple exchanges, and encouraging the
spectator to synecdochally associate each character and his/her actions
with his/her nation and its international policies, the film effectively
transfigured a complex international political situation into an easily
understandable set of social relationships. The successful resolution of
the movie's crisis thanks to an American expatriate's involvement in the
affairs of a number of Europeans, and his ability to retain his autonomy
and freedom in the end, were narrative mechanisms geared to convince
American audiences that it was possible for them to fight in the war and
maintain the unencumbered relation to Europe that had stood as the basis
of their identity and freedom. In re-presenting Casablanca, the film
industry rendered the all too gray world of international politics in
vivid chiaroscuro, dividing, beyond reasonable doubt, the light from the
dark, the good from the bad, radically affecting the audience's
perception of the real, and consciously attempting to sway public
opinion towards a homogeneous support of the war. It is difficult to
assess the exact extent to which Casablanca alone
influenced the American body politic in deciding to engage in the war.
We do know, however, that it was the most widely acclaimed of the
enormous volume of war films produced by the major Hollywood studios
during the 1940s, and that its premiere caused a number of pro-war
demonstrations, including the 1942 parade of the Fighting French outside
of New York's Hollywood Theater.
A little known fact is
that just as war and its contingencies were at the root of the film's
production, so too was armed struggle the basis for the modern city's
construction by the French, next to the old Medina. Indeed, the
principal importance of both objects resided in their ability to serve
as political technologies which helped mobilize the population as a
single unit towards war. In the late 19th century, German and French
imperialistic interests clashed in Morocco, turning control of the
West-African country into a veritable arm-wrestle where military force,
and the ability to rapidly mobilize troops and armament, were measured
up before an imminent conflict. The monumental effort to erect the
"modern city" and to overhaul the old Casbah was carried out, not out of
a magnanimous will to "share" modernity with Morocco, but out of a
necessity to demonstrate France's military response time, strength, and
administrative expediency. But this "show" was not staged just for
foreign powers, it was (as was the movie in America) devised to quell
national anxiety and low self image before the increased strength of the
German Empire. The new city's main objective would not be to adhere to
the forms and spatial configurations of Moroccan architecture and
urbanism with archaeological precision, but to construct and project an
alternate reality where the French might find a compelling, almost
mythical, image of their own mettlesome nature, their industrious
spirit, their benevolence towards the colonized, and their republican
stability. This effort would entail a necessary manipulation of the
city's reality (which prefigures Hollywood's later distortions).
Political Technologies of Control: The Idea of War
Although the film and
the city bear no visual resemblance, this is not to say that they have
nothing in common. As we shall see, they share a number of particulars
which, understood historically, cast new light onto the performative
potential of architecture and film as social practices in contemporary
society. To begin let us return to the most obvious commonality: the
blatant interpretative liberties (not to say disregard) that both
objects exhibit towards their pre-existing context. French designers,
far from employing or referencing local typologies in their plans,
imposed a Beaux Arts spatiality to their new cities, which they then
adorned, if ever so slightly, with simulated Moroccan motifs (Koranic
script is conveniently erased in the French versions).
 |
| Figure 5: Casablanca's Palais de Justice
(Joseph Marrast, 1925), in Casablanca's Grand Place, now
Place Mohammed V (photo by author).
|
In turn, Hollywood's productions designers chose to present a wholly
fictitious city, where not a single building of the French or Moroccan
town is present.
 |
| Figure 6: Scene from Casablanca; the
film's version of Casablanca's Palais de Justice can be
seen in the background. |
It would be impossible to attribute this attitude towards design to a
designer's whim, to time constraints, or to mere logistics. Both
architecture and film are intensely decision-based artistic practices,
and solutions are contingent on approval by the designer or director,
the client or producer, the financing institutions, the prospective
user's or audience's preferences, etc., so that such basic
considerations are not likely to be the result of mere oversight or
typical contingencies. In fact, we know that French administrators
amassed large reference libraries of photographs and drawings
documenting existing Moroccan buildings and cities,1 and that Hollywood production designers used
photographs of French Casablanca as a reference in their work.2 We might contend that if the motivations for the
construction of these objects were political, decisions concerning their
final appearance were also political, and we should therefore turn, not
to architecture or film, but to the art of politics, to ask why
disavowing the real in representation might be an effective and
desirable practice. Now, if only for a moment, we make a backward leap
to the fourth century B.C. to ask this very question.
In his construction of
the Ideal Republic, Plato describes rhetoric as a fundamental technology
of politics. It was the art used by the orator in convincing an assembly
that a particular course of action was good and virtuous. Of course for
Plato, this orator, a man capable of persuasion, should also be a man
capable of discerning right from wrong and of determining what goals and
public policies might ensure or enable the individual happiness of all
citizens--i.e., a philosopher. Rhetoric's political value lay in its
ability to make the members of the assembly (a group of individuals
including those daltonic non-philosophers unable to perceive the subtle
shades of truth) see actions and situations in a particular light, to
sharpen their awareness of what was virtuous as the camera focuses our
attention with its depth of field, to penetrate reality and represent
its essence. Already in the Republic it is clear that the notion of
representation is a prerequisite for the very existence of politics.
Unfortunately,
Plato--who was as we know a fine orator--had more than a few
difficulties carrying on his self-appointed mission as politician in the
public sphere. His mentor Socrates, another able speaker, had already
met an untimely death for not holding his tongue before the state. War,
in this case the Peloponnesian War, combined with the instability of the
403 B.C. counterrevolution, had radically transformed the operations of
the Athenian State from a forum for debate to a mechanism for
homogenizing thinking and legislating ideology. The visions of death and
destruction that plagued the minds of Athens' democratic rulers turned
all considerations of good and evil on a single axis: winning the war.
The Idea of War was a specter so powerful it could fracture and
dismantle any rhetorical presentation constructed by philosophers. This
for Plato was the root of all the social evil of his time. Thinking men,
concerned with the able exegesis of the real, had been cast off from
politics by men of action in the name of the war. A new technology of
politics, the spectacle of war had befallen every transaction of state
affairs, threatening to subvert any attempt to understand the real by
simply establishing a new reality (by decree).
If the goal of
politics is to conduct the public affairs of a body of people, it is
also necessarily to exercise control over the agency of individuals in
the name of efficiency. State affairs are deemed too complex to explain
to everyone, yet they must somehow meet with the support of all affected
by them if the government is to function effectively. Therefore,
policies and directives, once resolved at the legislative level, must be
presented as the best and most desirable solutions, and communicated to
the socius in simple but persuasive terms. This aspect of politics--the
interface between government and individual--is all about
representation, about wheedling, about influencing the public's
understanding of reality. In this sense, war is a perfect political
technology: It exercises its political strength by placing an emphasis
on difference, and rallying a particular and otherwise heterogenic
socius into a cohesive unit--within which difference is not tolerated.
It is a condensation of complex diplomatic relations into a simple and
understandable right and wrong: either you are in or out; it is a matter
of life or death. Plato himself, however against men of action,
recognized political virtue in war, and sought the unification of
dissenting Greek states by projecting the Idea of War against the
Persians onto the minds of his interlocutors. But he knew full well that
in order for these thoughts to develop into sinister specters they
needed to excite a dreadful imagery of death and destruction, and so
Plato advocated the practice of sending children and women as spectators
into the field of battle so that "in that way they will get a good view
of their future business" (170). In this way, when the
children-turned-adults would hear of a possible battle, they would be so
stricken by fear that they would rally together to protect themselves
against the oncoming perils.
The Idea of War, as
prospect or memory of bloodshed, can be stimulated in the socius as pure
representation, functioning as a political technology more efficiently,
permanently, and economically than war itself--armed conflict as a
political practice is, as
 |
| Figure 7: The "body of the town," anthropomorphic
city with fortress (Francesco di Giorgio Martini,
Architettura, ingegneria e arte militare. Late
fifteenth century. Turin, Codex Saluzzianus 148, fol. 3).
| we know, not infinitely sustainable.
Historically, during times of peace, the tools employed in war (walls,
fortresses, shields, armors, weapons, and banners) served as its
mnemonic symbols in public spectacles (i.e., in parades, architectural
ornaments, sculptures, paintings, etc.), keeping the threat of bloodshed
alive in the minds of spectators to buttress various forms of
government. For instance, the political power of wall circuits,
constructed around cities up until the 19th century, went well beyond
their physical resistance to projectiles. These military structures
established, in a simple spatial language, those that stood outside or
inside the body politic, and served as permanent reminders to both
inhabitants and visitors of the threat of aggression. When describing
these walls in 1452, Alberti would point out that they were founded with
"the greatest religion" to protect a city which was "continually exposed
to Dangers and Accidents; just as a ship which is tossed on the sea"
(133). The idea of the encircling wall generated theoretical discourses
and images of anthropomorphic cities that buttressed the notion of a
collective body struggling for survival, and emphasized the concept of
allegiance between citizens. Not surprisingly in these representations
the noblest part of the city was the military fortress. City walls are
thresholds to the polis, moments which, for phenomenologists such as
Christian Norberg-Shultz, represent "the 'rift' between 'otherness' and
manifest meaning, it embodies suffering and is 'turned to stone'" (133).
Indeed these objects exercise their communicative capacity by
manipulating the material reality of the world, but there is more. A
military wall will, at one level, be understood as separation
primarily because it divides us from each other, but, at another level,
the wall will always be exercising a deictic reference to war, for it is
only because of armed conflict that its existence is justifiable.
Efforts such as the
French and American versions of Casablanca were conceptually similar to
the fortress wall insofar as they were, first and foremost,
visualization technologies aimed at propagating a homogeneous, orderly,
politicized world view. The Idea of War was mobilized in both as a means
of internal control, as a kind of endogenous war where victory was
determined not by fire power but by persuasive ability, since they aimed
not at killing but at rallying supporters for a particular political
platform by affecting their perceptual fields. To answer our original
question, the extent to which the film and the modern city manipulated
perceived notions of reality was directly proportional to these
political aims. As political technologies, both objects could only be
effective if they paid careful attention to establishing a play on the
real that remained within the parameters of the dominant perceptual
modes of the times, that is, within the general field of what reality
was understood to be. We have intentionally begun by discussing a simple
vertical plane (a city wall) which performed simultaneously as a tool to
apportion space, as a military defense, and as a vehicle of propaganda,
to stress the convergence of architecture, war, and politics around a
notion of reality that was centered on territory, space, and time.
Architecture is, ontologically, a field of endeavor concerned with the
manipulation of space in time. Understandably, so long as the realm of
the real has been circumscribed by these two concepts, architecture has
stood as the prime tool to manipulate it. What concerns us in this essay
is to expose how, as industrial and technological developments of the
first half of the 20th century shifted the (conscious or subconscious)
dominant perception of reality away from time and space, architecture
became increasingly obsolete as an effective political technology, and
was displaced by tools, like film, whose nature coincided with new
notions about the makeup of man's perceptual environment.
The Urgency of Order
There are striking
similarities between the social conditions that prompted politicized
institutions to use Casablanca city and Casablanca film as
propaganda vehicles for the Idea of War. The years preceding both works
are times when internal crisis, social strife, and discord menaced the
prevailing order of things. Consider the following descriptions of
conditions in France in the 1890s and the United States in the 1930s:
Aesthetic disarray and moral decay
shared the same root, in that both seemed to reveal fundamental
weaknesses, most notably a pervasive apathy, in French society itself.
From University lecterns, church pulpits, and town council halls came
repeated calls for "rejuvenation," "moral education." New voluntary
organizations vowed to break the debilitating lethargy afflicting both
the state and the older, established social groups. (Wright 16)
Among intellectuals and in centers of political power,
the importance of cultural myths to social stability was a seriously
debated topic.... The widespread doubt about traditional American
Myths threatened to become a dangerous political weakness. In
politics, industry and the media there were men and women... who saw
the necessity, almost as a patriotic duty, to revitalize and refashion
a cultural mythology. (Sklar 195-9)
In either scenario the
prevailing sentiment was one of generalized disillusionment with the
present. The cacophony of divergent opinions resulted in the perception
that traditional values were being lost, and that a once-united socius
had fallen into disorder and degeneracy. A central, recurring theme in
both countries was an understanding that people's lack of direction, and
lax value systems were conditions that could spur uncontrollable,
debilitating mass spasms. The crowd's fragmentation was conceived as a
dangerous symptom of political feebleness before other world powers. To
avoid this, recreating the illusion of a single body politic became a
national priority. The imperative for both nations was the same: to
steer the masses, as a cohesive unit, back to the values that had
traditionally stood as symbols of national identity and pride. Just as
before World War I, France's urbanists labored earnestly to provide new
mechanisms of establishing social order, so too did Hollywood's film
industry carry out its self-appointed mission in the 40s to congeal the
American socius into a single block. Needless to say, this was a
conservative effort, a folding back onto safe ground, a regrouping of
the troops to gather new strength.
France's low self
esteem was exacerbated when its efforts to gain control over Morocco
were stemmed by German initiatives. Hostilities were ushered in when, in
an overt attempt to undermine France's prospective territorial score,
German Emperor William II exacted his theatrical proclamation of
Moroccan independence and integrity from his yacht on March 3rd 1905
while visiting Tangier. Two marked international crises ensued, one in
1905-06 and one in 1911, which almost resulted in an early start to
World War I. In 1907, as a result of the first face-off, Colonel Hubert
Lyautey was instructed to take an army unit from Western Algeria into
Morocco and establish a "definitive French presence" in Morocco.
 |
| Figure 8: Général Lyautey and Général D'Amade
inspect the "Général Drude" command post in Casablanca, 1908 (from
Marcelin Flandrin, Casablanca Rétro)
|
To carry out his
orders, the French official would need a vehicle not only capable of
carrying the message, but in itself the verifiable proof of the message.
Concerned with making visible the new territoriality, he fashioned the
request for presence on a millenary tradition of staking out the ground:
architecture. He resolved to erect French buildings on Moroccan soil and
to make Casablanca his first test case. With Casablanca, the French
responded to Germany's aggression by superseding it theatrically and
thus dwarfing Emperor William II's gesture. From the outset, the city
was understood as a weapon deployed in the theater of inter-national and
intra-national warfare. It was a counterattack to Germany that
simultaneously marshaled the Idea of War before the French socius,
binding it together in the common cause of national defense. Lyautey
understood that exercising political and military power was not "a
matter of destroying [people], but transforming them" (qtd. in Wright
16). Lyautey's self-declared infatuation with urbanity was rooted in a
conviction that cities, in their ability to partition the space of
social exchanges, constituted a "pacifist arsenal" capable of
segregating, harmonizing, and reconstructing social structures and ways
of life. The Colonel was not alone in his thinking. In fact, in the late
19th and early 20th centuries, the work of French scholars, like the
vastly influential 1894 book by Jean Izoulet, La cité moderne et
la métaphisique de la sociologie, had focused on achieving social
order through careful urban design and strict social policies. "Issues
as varied as the low national birthrate, poor industrial productivity,
class antagonisms, inadequate housing stock, and a perceived decline in
national prestige since the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian war, all
these had urbanistic implications" (Wright 17). Whereas the tenuous
political strength of regional administrators in France prevented these
theories from being implemented on French soil, the pressing need to
control Morocco made the Western Mahgreb a fertile culture for
experimentation. Constantly referring to his initiatives as progressive
and contrasting them with the intransigence and torpidity of legislature
in the métropole, Lyautey sought to demonstrate how French
inventiveness and power, if nourished by a strong political system,
could continue to stand at the forefront of the world. The French needed
only to secure their traditional values through new, clearly planned
cities, a spirited and forceful government (like his own), and a
consolidated socius, in order to become, once more, a great nation and
empire.
The colonization of
Morocco, decided in the privacy of a government office, could only
perform as an image of French strength and stability if it was cast in
the realm of the visible and offered up for the world's consumption.
Lyautey knew his primary task was to produce evidence of his
administration's ability to maintain a "definitive presence" in
Morocco--in other words, of his capacity to control space in time. Many
options were initially shuffled, from tourism to magazines, but none
could be mobilized without having an object to "show." At a fundamental
and symbolic level, even before considerations of urbanity as a tool to
mold social patterns, architecture was a perfect vehicle to carry out
Lyautey's orders, insofar as its relationship to the ground responded to
the 19th century's technology of war--one that emphasized victory as the
permanent acquisition of territorial gains. Architecture offered Lyautey
a means to guarantee the extended temporal presence of France in North
Western Africa.3
By grounding French
structures in Casablanca, Lyautey was very consciously making visible
the new status of the Moroccan geography. The first military barracks,
erected around the old medina, were quickly followed by a full blown
national Architecture and Urbanism program that legislated the growth
and aesthetic character of all major Moroccan towns. French architects
like Henry Prost, Joseph Marrast, Adrien Laforgue, and Albert Laprade
were handpicked, summoned to serve as functionaries of the state, and
charged with all the public commissions. In their hands lay the
responsibility of transforming the physical milieu to convey the new
political order. The approach seemed to yield positive results. On
November 4, 1911, after much haggling with Germany and Spain, France was
"given" rights to a protectorship over Morocoo in exchange for ceding
parts of French Congo to Germany and revising Franco-Spanish borders in
the Mahgreb. Nonetheless, international tensions continued, and, in
1912, Poincaré had promoted Lyautey to Résident-Général of Morocco and
head of the Army, so long as he could channel and mold social and
economic desires and consolidate the success of the French occupation.
To control
architectural production, Lyautey immediately set up two government
offices that would wield uncontested command over Moroccan cities'
patterns of growth, infrastructure, and aesthetic character. In 1912 he
founded the Bureau of Fine Arts, appointed Tranchant de Lunel as
director, and "granted him unprecedented powers, greater than anywhere
else in the French-speaking world, to regulate new construction and
restore existing buildings in the Moroccan medinas and mellas
(Wright 130). In addition, in 1913, Lyautey established the Architecture
and Urbanism Department under the direction of Henry Prost, to devise
master plans for the new towns, draft zoning ordinances, and design all
public structures, and canonize styles. The effect was the production of
perfectly controlled urban environments. Casablanca sprang up as a
veritable phantasmagoria, in perfect communion with the aims of the
state.
Perception is Reality
Prost and Lyautey were
convinced that their city would soon become the New York of Africa,
through a convenient marriage of architectonic aesthetizations of
politics and iron-fisted socio-economic policies. Unfortunately, the
main objective of their collaboration--to make an international
presentation of the solidity of the French Empire to the world in the
face of imminent war--was dramatically behind schedule. By 1917, when
Prost's team finished drafting the master plan for Casablanca's
monumental central square (the Grand Place) World War I was
well underway, placing enormous economic burdens on France and its
colonies. Architecture, as an effective visualization technology of
politics, had been rendered outmoded by the speed of war: There were
simply no funds to build Casablanca. However, instead of postponing
construction until the finances were made available, colonial
administrators opted for increasing the speed of construction at all
costs. Lyautey, under the battle cry "every quarry spares me a
battalion" (Marrast 54), ordered the acceleration of building projects
on course, and the immediate initiation of new works. The result was
Prost's "architecture en surface" where only the facades of
buildings were constructed to create the "appearance" of a coherent
city. The rest would be "filled in" when funds were made available. The
intention was clear, and it was quite obviously Haussmanian: the surface
of architecture would be spread over the city like a varnish to cover
its discontinuities. A surface rendition of unity, a new reality,
spreading over the dismembering city. The foremost task of architects
was shifting from their traditional role as organizers and distributers
of programmatic activities in space, to a new and awkward responsibility
to produce the stage sets of a photographically ordered, almost
two-dimensional, city.
Such was the rush to
get from design to finished city, that in documents such as Prost's
Grand Place plan, certain key structures, like the edifice
facing the Hotel de Ville, were simply blocked out, but contained no
indication of what program they were to house.
 |
| Figure 9: Master plan for the Grand
Place Casablanca, Henry Prost and Jean Marrast, 1914-1917
(from Wright, The Politics of Design)
|
Designing on the run, architects valued aesthetic clarity over
content. What initially seemed a strategic refusal to accept reality was
actually a deliberate effort to construct an alternate reality, which
was deemed essential for the survival of the empire. Architecture was
marshaled to represent France's ability to endure war with spirited
confidence and full command. Lyautey could not turn back. Forced to keep
up with the pace of war and to design at an accelerated rate, architects
had to draw from conventions and ready-made solutions, to install
meaning rather than to excavate it, to produce the real. When Lyautey
was called back to France in 1925, he left behind a Casablanca that had
nearly tripled its population, and that boasted a new "ville
moderne," and a scenographically remodeled Casbah.
 |
 |
| Figures 10 and 11: Aerial views of
Casablanca taken in 1907 from a reconnaissance balloon by
Lieutenant Bienvenue, and in 1928 from an airplane by Marcelin
Flandrin (from: Flandrin, Casablanca Rétro).
|
Notwithstanding the
strategically choreographic maneuverings carried out in Morocco to
demonstrate military superiority without physical confrontation, World
War I broke out in 1914. It took the death of millions of men, three
years of trench warfare, and the near exhaustion of the industrial
production machine (the Allied effort almost came to a halt a year into
the conflict due to scarcity in munitions), to make commanders realize
that the technological advances of weaponry had transformed the logics
of battle beyond their comprehension. Soldiers who had initially been
sent into battle in bright uniforms (offsprings of the 17th and 18th
century when smoke in the field made it difficult to discern your
friends from your foes), were rapidly clothed in earthly tones to blur
their contours against the desolate topography of no-man's-land. To look
beyond to the other trench meant being seen, and whatever was visible
was the potential target of artillery and snipers. These limitations on
the utility of human vision and hand-to-hand combat prompted the
production of technologically mediated images of the battlefield,
inducing a transformation of the dominant field of perception and
space/time conceptualizations.4 The increased replacement of the battlefield's
topography with reproductions, the necessary reliance on imaging devices
given the inability to depend on the soldier's direct vision in
conflicts where targets were literally out of sight, had a noted effect
crucial to our understanding of Casablanca: The diminished relevance of
the territory (of space in time), and the increased importance of speed
(which collapses space and time into motion, as does cinema) as a
primary register of reality.
Already during World
War I, photographic technology had proved quite attuned to the new
perceptual exigencies of the war machine (there were regular air
reconnaissance operations carried out, especially by the US
expeditionary corps, to document troop movements). A veritable coupling
of the art of war and the art of chronophotography was being achieved
that rapidly turned film into a weapon. According to Paul Virilio, the
possibility of this amalgam was rooted in the similitude of space-time
distortions produced by technological advances in modern war and in
cinema:
[T]he military voyeur is handicapped by
the slowness with which he scans a field of action overstretched by
the dynamic revolution of weaponry and mass transport.... For the
disappearance of the proximity effect in the prosthesis of accelerated
travel made it necessary to create a wholly simulated appearance that
would restore three-dimensionality to the message in full.... [T]his
miniaturization of chronological meaning was the direct result of a
military technology in which events always unfold in theoretical time.
As in cinema, what happens is governed not by a single space-time
principle but by its relative and contingent distortion, the capacity
of repressive response depending upon the power of anticipation.
(59-60)
As the cataclysmic
events of the Great War unfolded, the trust placed on the ability of
spatial technologies to control the crowd was put into crisis: The
inertia of physical barriers could not match the explosive power of new
projectiles. However, French officials insisted on the relevance of
urbanity. But, because of the exigencies of the war, they were forced to
rely on the image of urbanity over its real presence, to convey the idea
 |
| Figure 12: Poster for the 1917 exhibit of
Morroccan art organized by Lyautey's administration in Casablanca.
The profits went to benefit wartime construction.
| of France's long term presence in
Morocco. Prompted by the critical importance of convincing the world
that French Casablanca was a reality, even if it was not a
finished product, the colonial government deployed an aggressive
publicity campaign, hiring travel writers, photographers, poster
artists, and filmmakers. As early as 1908, journalists, like Reginald
Rankin of the London Times, were regularly sent to the city to report on
current events. The Franco-Moroccan Exposition (1915) held in Casablanca
with the intention to "demonstrate France's determination to maintain
the white city" (Cohen and Eleb 19) triggered the first comprehensive
photographic documentation of Moroccan buildings and cities--other
similar exhibits would follow regularly. Official journals like La
Renaissance du Maroc were founded with the objective of
disseminating the image of French Morocco, and of lauding the work of
French professionals (architects were deliberately compared to
renaissance masters, salvaging and re-interpreting the Islamic past). In
this and other similar periodicals, French-built cities were
continuously described as generating the kind of civic morality needed
in France at the time.
Just as the city wall
had at once been a physical instrument of military deterrence that
literally contained the socius, Casablanca had been constructed as a
spectacular deterrence mechanism that would unite France under a single
effort. But it was becoming increasingly evident that the political task
of the city was being carried out in other fields of endeavor. The gap
in temporality between the political commission and the architectural
delivery was being filled in, almost imperceptibly, by photographs and
written accounts that were twice-removed from the real. But in these
photographs, the memory of the Idea of War was alive, much more alive
than in the actual cities. In fact, photography could already be
classified as a military weapon. Photography, as a medium, was not only
the primary source of military surveillance, but also the new synthetic
battlefield. Children would no longer have to be sent to view the
spectacle of war. It could be delivered to them with the same intensity
as it was experienced by military commanders behind the lines: in
pictures (and, not much later, in moving pictures). Under the camera's
eye, architecture fused into the new simulated territories, no longer as
a material substance, but as an ethereal phenomenon symbolically
designating ownership, and certifying the verity of the new
representations. Conspicuously, writers such as Pierre Mac Orlan would
describe Casablanca not as a physical presence, but as an essence, a
symbol of French prowess: "Endowed with all that modern industry can
provide, this spontaneous phenomenon of French energy [is Casablanca]"
(qtd. in Cohen and Eleb 19). But the spectacular construction was not as
spontaneous as the French writer would have liked: its production
required such a slow gestation that the city's "presencing" in the real
would only come after the Great War it was meant to deter, as a kind of
flashback of it. Mac Orlan's prose, published in 1934, veiled the fact
that the city's construction had been 27 years in the making, and that
many official buildings were still unfinished.
 |
 |
| Figures 13 and 14: View of the corner
of Bouskoura and Galiéi Streets towards the Grand Place
in 1926 and 1928 respectively. The Hotel des Postes can
be seen terminating the axis, but most structures remain
unfinished (from: Flandrin, Casablanca Rétro).
|
Lyautey had originally
thought of the flourishing tourist industry as a means to exhibit his
urbanistic prowess and to boost the economy. His contention was that
"since the recent, intense development of large-scale tourism, the
presentation of a country's beauty has taken on an economic importance
of the first order. To attract a large tourist population is to gain
everything for both the public and the private budgets" (qtd. in Wright
134). Tourism had the added advantage that it effectively held the
tourist's sight captive, from official monument, to canonized local
quarters, to scenographic French boulevards and plazas. To create a
desire for the French public to visit Morocco, Lyautey sent his
architects to Paris to reconstruct fragments of the Empire. In 1925,
Tranchant de Lunel would design the Moroccan section of the North
African Pavilion for the Arts Déco exhibition, and in 1931 a
large architectural display was erected at the 1931 Colonial Exhibit.
But tourism was still too selective and expensive, entailing long trips
from Marseilles to Oran and then to Casablanca. However, the touristic
gaze could be molded, controlled, and allowed to perceive the colonies,
without actual travel, through representation. The added advantage was
that the surface rendition of unity ushered in by Prost's
architecture en surface could be made to appear whole and
complete. With the disappearance of the "proximity effect," there was a
window of opportunity to move from the prolonged constructive
temporality of Architecture, to wholly simulated, instant environments
that could fill in the discontinuities of the real city. It was becoming
increasingly evident that architecture could no longer serve either as a
primary means of military deterrence nor as a sufficiently expedient
political technology. As "Countries, including Britain, would down their
traditional means of defense and concentrated on research into
perception" (Virilio 50), Lyautey would invest in alternative means to
propagate the idea of order embodied in his Casablanca. He invited Jean
and Jérôme Tharaud, acclaimed travel writers of the 20s and 30s, to
Morocco, so that they might, through their work, foment the touristic
visions of Morocco. The Tharauds willingly came under the mandates of
the colonial administration--probably thinking they were helping bring
morale back to the disconcerted French socius--and produced a wealth of
popular accounts on Moroccan cities. The two brothers traveled much of
the Mahgreb (and the globe for that matter) in military planes, peering
down at the work of the empire from the sky, as their compatriot fighter
pilots had targeted objectives with their guns and cameras during World
War I. What is interesting in the work of the Tharauds is that, as Emily
Apter has pointed out, they repeatedly described their aeronautic eye as
a cinematograph panning across the landscape, evidencing the fact that
filmic vision had already become the predominant perceptual mode of
their era.
In 1930 Josef Von
Sternberg released his film Morocco, and in his footsteps,
a multitude of filmmakers were enticed to use Lyautey's theatrical
cities as backdrops to their scenes. During the 30s, "the film crew had
become such a commonplace appearance in the Moroccan landscape that
Wyndham Lewis dedicated an entire section of his jaundiced Moroccan
Travelogue Journey into Barbery to a pastiche of what he
called 'film-filibusters,' industry magnates who 'send their troupes
(not troops) merely to afford their sham-sheiks a Hispano-Mauresque
photographic setting'" (Apter 22). The residual components of an
unfinished Casablanca were being reconstituted according to a new
cinematic logic which defied single space-time relationships, and which
was increasingly independent of the ground, of space, and of
architecture. In his 1921 essay entitled "Grossissement," Jean Epstein
theorized this displacement from space to cinema as rooted in the
cinematograph's ability to subject time to technical manipulation--a
quality paralleled by spatial technologies. Giovanni Pastrone, the
Italian Futurist filmmaker, contemporary of Epstein, saw the camera not
as an instrument to produce realistic portraits but as an instrument to
falsify dimensions. With film cameras the spectator's viewpoint could be
mobile, in communion with the speed of moving objects. Epstein dreamt of
being inside his characters, of moving with them and seeing what they
saw. For Virilio, what Epstein and Pastrone saw as manipulation was in
effect the production of a new kind of understanding of reality, one
that would no longer be based on space/time conceptualizations, but on
speed:
[W]hat was "false" in cinema was no
longer the effect of accelerated perspective but the very depth
itself, the temporal distance of the projected space. Many years
later, the electronic light of laser holography and integrated-circuit
computer graphics would confirm this relativity in which speed appears
as the primal magnitude of the image and thus as the source of its
depth. (Virilio 16)
With World War II this
new conception of reality became predominant, as the globe's geography
became increasingly commensurate with cinematic samplings, and millions
of attentive viewers lived the terror of battlefields, once scattered
across the globe, now perceived simultaneously, collapsed onto the
silver screen via news reels and war propaganda. By the time the next
world war was brooding, it was clear that speed of communication (the
kind of speed that Architecture could not deliver) was a determinant
factor in victory. In speed lay the new possibility of military
superiority. Up until the nineteenth century, permanent military
fortifications had produced the effect of surprise with the help of
booby traps, ditches, and moving gates or walls. Where the enemy was
once startled by spectacular architectures, now he would be paralyzed by
the sudden appearance of images and signs on monitor screens that
simulated the field of battle. As the world's reality was supplanted by
surrogate military technologies, cinema came under the category of
weapons, not because of its ability to depict battles, but because of
its capacity to create surprise.5 In Lyautey's mobilization of Casablanca as a
vehicle of the Idea of War, where architecture was inevitably superseded
by cinema, we find a rare film-city, a strange hybrid prefiguring the
transformation in political technologies from architecture to film, from
physical space to filmic time/space simultaneity, and finally to speed.
Here we find evidence of how architecture, serving outdated political
technologies of territorial conquest, proved inefficient and was
supplanted by more effective mechanisms of propaganda: war films.
Ordering the New Reality
In the late 1930s and
early 40s, when the US felt the danger of war approaching, and fears of
unpredictable mass actions causing social breakdown began to resurface,
spatial technologies could no longer be considered as viable solutions
to curb internal political weaknesses. With the pressing need to wake
its population to the new reality of industrialized production and
destruction, the political machine turned not to architects but to movie
producers. Whereas French architects and urbanists had sought to present
a new world order to their compatriots by attempting to actually change
the world, the American moviemakers focused on altering people's
perception of reality in order to achieve similar goals. The Hollywood
studios, understanding that their own distribution networks and economic
survival were at stake, answered the call to arms with a rich assortment
of war movies that focused on bringing the aspirations and desires of
the population closer to the political goals of the state. The
particular attraction of film was that it comfortably slid under the
skin (or should we say pupils) of a socius increasingly accustomed to
equating reality with their cinematic perceptions of the world. Film, as
a technology of politics, was unburdened by the immobility and
territorial constraints of architecture. It was almost instantaneous,
affecting the entire population simultaneously, and offering as
commodities pure emotions and ideas.
With lines as
unburdened by sophistication as Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet)'s "My dear
Rick, when will you realize that in this world, today, isolationism is
no longer a practical policy," Casablanca informed American
audiences about the new contingencies of international affairs. The
message reached the entire population almost instantly. Between 1930 and
1945 Hollywood's film industry dominated the American socius' field of
perception with its visual entertainment products. Eighty million
citizens, more than half of the US population at the time, crowded movie
houses every week, drawing 83 percent of the total spent on recreation
by Americans. Television, still in its infancy, remained a luxury for
the majority--only 8,000 US homes had TV sets in 1946 (Ray 25-26, 132).
Hollywood held distribution networks that spanned the world, making the
profits reaped internationally by Casablanca upon release
roughly equal US takings--the production, which had cost little over a
million dollars, made almost six million dollars at the box office.
Casablanca's emphasis was, again, not
on depicting the spaces of the original (the French city), but on
creating a new city that could generate simple emotions in the
spectator thanks to elementary scale contrasts (small, tortuous city
streets to
 |
| Figure 15: Warner Bros. 1942 poster
| express confinement, against a vast airport,
which, occupying a space comparable to the entire city, stood as the
allegory of freedom). The world was at war, and Casablanca
was fired at the population to reinforce the idea of a collective
project, and of particular values and codes that stood in contrast to
those of other nations. The film was aimed at uniting the nation,
rallying it against the forces that endangered traditional societal
bonds. It was clear to producers that the film's potential strength
would not come from its photo-realistic depictions of the city, but from
its ability to surprise the general public. When, on November 8, 1942,
the allies landed in Casablanca, final touches on the film were dropped
to speed up release and divert the public's attention away from the real
events and into the movie houses. Eighteen days after the incident,
American movie houses were playing the film, and newspapers were filled
with advertisements reading "Warner's Split-Second Timing! 'Casablanca':
The Army's got Casablanca--and so have Warner Bros!" Inside the dark
theaters, the camera's lens became America's prosthetic eye, and where
there once was an incomprehensible and chaotic world, now a clear image
of right and wrong came sharply into focus.
The stamina
exemplified in the building of Lyautey's city and Curtiz's film drew its
lifeblood from an understanding that war "consists not so much in
scoring territorial, economic or other material victories as in
appropriating the 'immateriality' of perceptual fields" (Virilio 7).
This is an archetypal military concept, yet, in Casablanca, its logic
appears to us in relation to the delirium of industrialized production,
and acquires new meaning and relevance. What is fascinating, and at the
same time terrifying, about the American and French mobilizations of
Casablanca is that they used aesthetics that were fundamentally
militaristic as a means to solve socio-political problems. Both summoned
the Idea of War as a reductivist filter of state affairs, where clear
distinctions between what is correct and good, and what is deviant and
bad were established and propagated, by responding to political demands
with the theatrics of warfare. The surprise that befell on French
colonial administrators when they realized their city was not ready in
time to prevent war, was matched by the impotence and frustration of
French generals, when, unable to break the enemy's trench lines, they
failed to understand that the strategies of 19th century offensives had
become obsolete with the advent of long-range automatic weapons.
Industrial production had delaminated the human senses, and projected
them beyond time and space, subverting the old ways of experiencing the
world. If reality is perception, the impulses sent by the new
photographic eyes of the armies to the minds of their fellow men were
visions of a whole new universe. Architecture, as a structure that, in a
strange double motion, casts the condition of the ground in the visible
by standing over it and veiling it, could not stand on top of this new,
infinitely expanding dominion. Cinema, however, by technologically
collapsing time/space relationships in terms of speed, was capable of
delimiting and describing this new topography, and rendering it in the
visible. As in architecture, the ability of cinema to perform its
exegesis of the new ground could only be carried out by covering it, by
concealing the original. Theoreticians like Virilio have read this
phenomenon as causing the "disappearance" or the "disintegration" of
"things and places," but we must differ. Just as the ground remains
under buildings allowing them to stand, territories and space remain
under the surface of film as its supporting scaffolding. In Casablanca
one can perceive the sequence unfolding, from ground to architecture to
film, as a function of war. Each vehicle of representation, forged in
accordance to the conditions of reality, was superseded when the general
perception of that reality changed. The thread that guides us through
this protean sequence is politics, for the changing perceptions of
reality ushered in with each evolution of communication technologies
threatened chaos and instigated the need to establish order. The
political deployment of the Idea of War in architectural or filmic
vehicles, as a means to structure disorder, marks the extension of
perceptual realities that characterize our contemporary condition.
Casablanca, as rendered in stone or film, does not exemplify the ending
and the beginning of mutually exclusive realities, but the buttressing
simultaneity of perceptions that constitute our understanding of the
world today, from the immediacy of the spaces we live in, to the
poliverses of overlapping global territories we inhabit.
School of Architecture
Polytechnic University of
Puerto Rico
mailto:jotero@mit.edu
Copyright ©
1998 Jorge Otero-Pailos NOTE: Readers may
use portions of this work in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of
U.S. copyright law. In addition, subscribers and members of subscribed
institutions may use the entire work for any internal noncommercial
purpose but, other than one copy sent by email, print, or fax to one
person at another location for that individual's personal use,
distribution of this article outside of a subscribed institution without
express written permission
from either the author or the Johns Hopkins University
Press is expressly forbidden.
Notes
1. The Rabat headquarters of the Bureau of Fine Arts,
for example, boasted a collection of 25,000 photographs of various
Moroccan buildings. See: Gwendolyn Wright., The Politics of
Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1991) 133.
2. Some of the original photographic and textual
references, provided by the Warner Bros. Research Department, and used
as background for the film's writers, designers, and director, are
presented in Frank Miller, Casablanca: As Time Goes By--50th
Anniversary Commemorative (Atlanta: Turner Publishing; [Kansas
City, Mo.: Distributed by Andrews and McMeel], 1992) 45.
3. The dependency of a building to its site is perhaps
better understood in philosophical terms. Philosophy is the
construction of propositions characterized by their ability to stand
up. However, the exercise of that capacity is dependent on the
ground's condition, on the structure's supporting presence. In any
case, "standing up through construction makes visible the condition of
the ground" (Wigley 8). In The Architecture of
Deconstruction, Mark Wigley references Heidegger's propensity
to address philosophy as a kind of architecture, and metaphysics as an
"edifice" with firm "foundations," laid on stable "ground" that must
first be prepared to receive the structure. "Heidegger argues that
philosophy's original but increasingly forgotten object, 'being'
[Sein], is also a kind of construction, a 'presencing' [Answesenheit]
through 'standing.' Each of philosophy's successive terms for 'ground'
[Grund] designates 'Being,' understood as 'presence.' Metaphysics is
the identification of the ground as 'supporting presence' for whatever
stands like an edifice" (Wigley 8). Wigley's analysis draws our
attention to relationship between architecture and its ground in an
oblique fashion: by demonstrating how philosophy, in order to perceive
itself as a construction concerned with the exegesis of the structure
of Being, must first perceive itself metaphorically as an architecture
that renders the status of its ground perceivable, we come to
understand that architecture is, in part, a technology to visualize
the state of the ground.
4. See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The
Logistics of Perception (London and New York: Verso, 1989).
Also see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space,
1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983).
5. See Virilio 7-9, 72.
Works Cited
Alberti, Leon Battista. The Ten Books of Architecture.
Trans. Giacomo Leoni. London: Edward Owen, 1755; New York: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1986.
Apter, Emily. "The Landscape of Photogeny: Morocco in Black and
White." Architecture New York 16 (November 1996).
Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Perf. Ingrid Bergman,
Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, and
Claude Rains. Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., 1942.
Cohen, Jean-Louis, and Monique Eleb. "The Whiteness of the Surf:
Casablanca." Architecture New York 16 (November 1996).
Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality: Essays. San
Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986.
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space,
1880-1918. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.
Marrast, Jean. "Maroc." L'oeuvre de Henri Prost: Architecture
et Urbanisme. Ed. Académie d'Architecture. Paris: Imprimerie du
Compagnonnage, 1960.
Miller, Frank. Casablanca: As Time Goes By--50th Anniversary
Commemorative. Atlanta: Turner Publishing (Kansas City, Mo.:
Distributed by Andrews and McMeel), 1992.
Norberg-Shultz, Christian. Genius loci: Towards a
Phenomenology of Place. New York: Rizzoli International
Publications, Inc., 1986.
Plato. Republic. Trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford.
New York and London: Oxford UP, 1967.
Ray, Robert B. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema,
1930-1980. Princeton N.J.: Princeton UP, 1985.
Robertson, James C. The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael
Curtiz. London: Routledge, 1993.
Sklar, Robert. Movie Made America: A Social history of
American Movies. New York: Random House, 1975.
Wigley, Mark. The Architecture of Deconstruction.
Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1993.
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of
Perception. London and New York: Verso, 1989.
Gwendolyn Wright. The Politics of Design in French Colonial
Urbanism. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1991.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v008/8.2otero-pailos.html
Talk Back
< BACK |
|
