Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Para el autor, experto del cine clásico
americano, Morocco de Josef von Sternberg
« fue el primer film sonoro que recuperó la
belleza y fluidez de las últimas obras del
cine mudo, aprovechando al mismo tiempo
todas las posibilidades ofrecidas por el cine
sonoro ». La película de von Sternberg es
esencialmente una obra romántica,
construida en torno al encuentro de dos
grandes actores (Marlene Dietrich y Gary
Cooper), resultando vano buscar en ella una
descripción fiel de la sociedad marroquí.
Aunque se pueda considerar que Morocco
recurre ampliamente a los estereotipos del
imaginario exótico y colonial, no se puede
negar que también sugiere la existencia de
otro punto de vista que el occidental y un
sistema de valores otro que el que proponen
las potencias coloniales de aquel entonces.
belief during the course of Morocco, and when we first see her, she is
a despondent “suicide passenger” on a ship bound for Mogador,
nursing psychic wounds inflicted by men over many years. On
shipboard, she meets Adolphe Menjou, a rich French painter, who
begins a bemused and infatuated courtship of her.
During the next several sequences, mostly shot in the cabaret where
Dietrich is singing, she and Cooper engage in a romantic ritual,
suffused with sublimated passion and the fear of opening old
emotional wounds. After Cooper agrees to desert and run away with
her, he changes his mind and leaves on a dangerous mission into the
desert. Menjou brings her to see him off, and Dietrich is fascinated
by a group of Moroccan women who are preparing to follow the
legionnaires into the desert. “Those women must be mad,” she tells
Menjou, but he responds that “they love their men,” implying that
love and commitment entail a selflessness that, though it may border
on madness, is the logical extension of the romantic ideal. Dietrich
starts drinking heavily, loses her job in the cabaret, and accepts
Menjou’s proposal of marriage. As they prepare for a banquet to
announce their engagement, he informs her that the legionnaires
have been in a fierce battle and that the survivors are expected to
return that evening. Dietrich assures him she no longer loves Cooper,
and he need not worry.
Dietrich finally finds Cooper, only to resume their mutually torturous
minuet. Neither is willing to commit to the other until after Dietrich
has discovered that Cooper, in the privacy of his own reverie, has
carved her name, framed by an arrow-pierced heart, into the surface
of a café table. She now accepts the fact that he loves her, and that
she must accept that love on Cooper’s terms. He has defined himself
for so long as a legionnaire that she must become part of his world, if
she wants him. Dietrich’s sublimation of her fear and pride into her
desire is one of the most supreme romantic gestures in the art of the
Twentieth Century. The next morning, she joins the Arab women and
follows Cooper and his troupe into the desert.
F. W. Murnau, the greatest of German-born directors, who died
tragically in an automobile accident at 42, had made his reputation
with such studio-bound masterpieces as The Last Laugh (shot in
Berlin) and Sunrise (shot in Hollywood). His final film, however, Tabu
(released in 1931) was shot on location in the South Sea Islands,
Tahiti and the Marquesas, which Paul Gauguin and Herman Melville
had immortalized in art and literature. Tabu is a great and beautiful
film about a love affair between two of the so-called “natives,” whose
romance must struggle against the pressures of both their own people
and those brought by the French colonials. The Canadian film critic,
Tom Waugh, suggests that only in Tabu did Murnau “seem to have
found peace and a little happiness in surroundings which abolish the
guilt-feelings inherent in European morality.” Murnau was
homosexual, and Waugh believes that he attained a degree of
spiritual liberation by observing the guiltless behavior of the “natives”
52 Journal of Film Preservation / 63 / 2001