Jorge Otero-Pailos

School of Architecture
Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico
jotero@mit.mit.edu

 

…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the old Casbah walls there are no wooden trellises overhead, signs like those outside of the “Blue Parrot Club” have been replaced by advertisements for Levis, and the French administrative buildings–which are crucial in the spatialization of the old city in the film into the Café-Police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 Eiffeldid 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 Casablancaalone 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 separationprimarily 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 Marocwere 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 Casablancawas 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.

 

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.