Paul Bowles‘ birthday today. Paul Bowles, born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City,
December 30, 1910. He died in Tangier. Morocco, his beloved Morocco, November 18,
1999, aged 88).
Two recent movies about him recently of note:
This past month at the 22nd Marrakech International Film Festival, saw the world premiere of Five Eyes (the name comes from Paul Bowles’ 1979 Black Sparrow volume), Karim Debbagh‘s lovingly-crafted, long-in-the-making, much-anticipated, documentary.
“I was 19 years old. Paul was 82”, he recalls, “Without realizing it,I began visiting him every day till the day he left us. Before he left, I filmed him. I was the last one to film him. Then I came back looking for his friends…I kept the film hidden away for 25 years. Then I found myself making a film about Paul, Jane and their Moroccan friends.. ”
Debbagh’s “Five Eyes” is quite different to what’s gone before. It offers an intimate portrayal of Bowles through the eyes of the Moroccans who knew him best, featuring the writer Mohamed Choukri, the storyteller and painter Mohamed Mrabet, Bowles’s longtime driver Mohamed Temsamani, and Abdeslam Boulaich, who drove him during his final decade – and the fifth eye, is, most importantly, Debbagh himself.
“By weaving together never-before-seen footage and personal testimonies, Debbagh challenges Orientalist narratives and crafts a uniquely Moroccan perspective on Bowles’s enduring legacy.”
He is interviewed at length about the film here:
“The documentary is centered on Paul Bowles’s story and his encounters in Morocco. He is the main character, but his story is told through those close to him. Five Eyes explores how Moroccans who lived and worked with him perceived him. That is a first, and it is what motivated me to create a film shaped entirely through a Moroccan lens.
In Morocco, Paul Bowles’s circle was rich and varied: writers, painters, storytellers, musicians, but also ordinary people who meant a great deal to him. Many lived alongside him for years, accompanying him from his early days in Tangier to the very end.
At (first) I simply wanted to document a pivotal encounter at the beginning of my adult life because I sensed it could profoundly shape my path…Later, when I watched documentaries and films about Paul Bowles, I realized no one ever included the Moroccan perspective. These works showed only European, American, or Western narratives about the writer and composer. Moroccans were often sidelined, or entirely ignored. That struck me deeply.So I told myself that, as a Moroccan, it was my responsibility to give my fellow citizens a voice in telling his story.
His life was profoundly shaped by Morocco and by Moroccans. I wanted the film to reflect that. I also wanted Western audiences to hear what Moroccans have to say about Bowles.”
Debbagh has crafted an extraordinary film.
Lasfar‘s – Mohammed & Paul – Once Upon A Time in Tangier, the second Bowles film to appear this year, debuted a month earlier at Amsterdam’s International Documentary Film Festival
“For filmmaker Nordin Lasfar, who grew up in the Netherlands as the child of Moroccan parents, author Paul Bowles opened the door to literature and stories from the land of his forebears. In the 1960s and 70s, Tangier was a base for Western artists and writers of the Beat Generation, among them Bowles.
Mohammed Mrabet, a fisherman’s son and storyteller in the Moroccan oral tradition, became a central figure in those circles. Although illiterate, he gained wider recognition when Bowles transcribed and published his stories. In a setting where creativity and free morality went hand in hand with colonial inequality and racism, a complex relationship developed between the two.
Now in his late eighties, Mrabet, a master at interweaving fantasy and reality, looks back. Fragments of his stories, recorded on dozens of cassette tapes, are complemented by magical-realist AI images – a giant fish, a melon that houses a palace. Through archival material, interviews, and street scenes, the filmmaker goes in search of this remarkable literary bond and asks the question: who actually owns the stories..?”
Nick Cunningham reviews it here
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo offers a guarded opinion – here