Building Your Moroccan Film Corpus

1. Principles of Corpus Selection for a PhD

Choosing your films is one of the most decisive steps in shaping your research. A well-defined corpus provides focus and depth, while a poorly defined one can lead to a study that is sprawling and superficial. For a PhD dissertation, the goal is typically not a comprehensive survey but a deep, nuanced analysis of a small, representative set of texts. Most film studies PhDs are based on a corpus of 4-6 films.

When selecting your corpus, you should be guided by several key principles:

• Relevance: This is the paramount criterion. How does each film, and the corpus as a whole, directly enable you to answer your research question? If a film doesn't provide significant material for your inquiry, it doesn't belong, no matter how much you admire it.
• Coherence: What is the organizing logic that binds your chosen films together? This logic forms the basis of your justification. Coherence can be based on:
  • Director: e.g., the films of Ahmed El Maânouni.
  • Period: e.g., films of the "Years of Lead."
  • Genre: e.g., the Moroccan road movie or documentary.
  • Theme: e.g., films about urban migration or memory.
  • Sonic Properties: e.g., films notable for their experimental use of sound or their representation of multilingualism.
• Variety within Coherence: A good corpus is not monolithic. It should offer points of comparison and contrast. For example, if your corpus is focused on urban soundscapes, you might include one film that offers a counterpoint by depicting a rural soundscape, thereby sharpening your analysis of the urban.
• Feasibility: Are the films accessible with good quality audio and video? Is the number of films manageable for the in-depth, scene-by-scene audiovisual analysis required for a PhD project?

2. Justifying Your Corpus as a Methodological Choice

Simply listing your chosen films is not enough. You must construct a compelling argument for why this specific group of films is the ideal choice for your study. This justification is a core part of your research methodology. It demonstrates that your selection is deliberate and strategic.

To understand how to frame this justification, it's helpful to see how other scholars use film as a primary source to investigate cultural and historical questions. The following article argues for the value of cinema as a source for rewriting Moroccan histories, providing a strong model for the kind of thinking you'll need to apply.

This reading demonstrates that justifying your corpus is about showing how your chosen films are not just objects of analysis, but are, in fact, essential tools for answering your research question.

3. Strategies for Building Your Corpus

Now, let's brainstorm some potential strategies for building your own corpus, connecting back to the theoretical frameworks we discussed previously. These are starting points to stimulate your thinking.

Strategy 1: The Historical-Foundational Corpus

This approach focuses on a group of films from a key period that established many of the sonic conventions and concerns of Moroccan cinema.

• Organizing Logic: Post-independence "vernacular modernist" films (c. 1960s-1980s).
• Theoretical Alignment: This aligns perfectly with Peter Limbrick's framework of 'vernacular modernism' and allows you to trace the historical roots of contemporary sound practices.
• Rationale: This corpus would allow you to investigate how the first generation of Moroccan filmmakers used sound to forge a new cinematic language, negotiate with colonial legacies, and critique postcolonial modernity.
• Potential Films:
  • Transes (Ahmed El Maânouni, 1981): As the reading showed, its focus on Nass El Ghiwane makes it a cornerstone for studying the relationship between music, place (Casablanca's Carrières Centrales), and social protest.
  • Retour à Agadir (Mohamed Afifi, 1967): Its contrapuntal use of a jazz soundtrack against images of ruin is a prime example of sound being used for critical commentary.
  • Mémoire 14 (Ahmed Bouanani, 1971): As discussed in the previous lesson, Bouanani explicitly used the soundtrack to express what could not be shown visually.
  • El Chergui, or the Violent Silence (Moumen Smihi, 1975): Known for its complex sound design that reflects on tradition and modernity.

Strategy 2: The Contemporary Urban Soundscapes Corpus

This strategy focuses on more recent films that grapple with the sonic realities of contemporary Morocco.

• Organizing Logic: 21st-century films depicting urban and peri-urban life.
• Theoretical Alignment: This is an ideal match for Gilles Aubry's 'sonic pluralism' and postcolonial theories of the city. It allows you to analyze how filmmakers capture the 'sawt' of modern Morocco.
• Rationale: This corpus would enable an analysis of how soundscapes are used to represent contemporary issues such as neoliberal development, social inequality, youth culture, and the negotiation of local and global identities. The following reading on hip-hop videos, while not about feature films, provides a superb analytical model for this approach.

• Potential Films:
  • Casablanca Beats (Nabil Ayouch, 2021): An obvious choice, directly exploring the world of hip-hop and youth expression in a Casablanca cultural center.
  • Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets (Nabil Ayouch, 2000): A key film for its depiction of street children and the soundscape of Casablanca's margins.
  • The Unknown Saint (Alaa Eddine Aljem, 2019): A comedy whose sound design could be analyzed for its construction of a quiet, isolated rural space disrupted by modern ambitions. This could provide a valuable point of contrast.
  • Sofia (Meryem Benm'Barek-Aloïsi, 2018): Could be analyzed for its use of sound to create tension and contrast the different sonic worlds of social classes in Casablanca.

4. Writing the Justification in Your Proposal

Once you have a provisional corpus, you must articulate your justification clearly in your PhD proposal. It should be a concise, confident statement of your methodological choices.

Here is a template you can adapt:

3.2 Primary Corpus

The primary corpus for this dissertation consists of four Moroccan films released between 2000 and 2021: Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets (Ayouch, 2000), The Unknown Saint (Aljem, 2019), Sofia (Benm'Barek, 2018), and Casablanca Beats (Ayouch, 2021).

3.3 Rationale for Corpus Selection

This corpus has been selected to provide a focused yet varied examination of how soundscapes are constructed and contested in 21st-century Moroccan cinema. The organizing logic is thematic, focusing on films that engage with the social, cultural, and political tensions of contemporary Moroccan life. This selection is particularly well-suited for an analysis guided by a framework of sonic pluralism, as it allows for an investigation into how the complex 'sawt' of modern Morocco—a mix of languages, music, and environmental sounds—is mediated by filmmakers to explore themes of class, gender, and urbanization.

• Ali Zaoua and Casablanca Beats provide two longitudinal case studies from the same director, Nabil Ayouch, showing an evolution in the sonic representation of youth culture in Casablanca.
• Sofia offers a crucial perspective on domestic soundscapes and the use of sound and silence to articulate class and gender dynamics.
• The Unknown Saint serves as a vital counterpoint, its minimalist, rural soundscape highlighting by contrast the dense, layered sonic strategies employed in the urban-focused films.

Collectively, this corpus provides rich, comparable material to investigate how filmmakers use sound design to direct perception, create immersive spaces, and construct nuanced portraits of Moroccan cultural identity.

Conclusion

Today, we have laid the final cornerstone of your research design: the primary corpus. You have learned that selecting your films is a methodological act that requires a clear rationale connecting your research question, your theoretical framework, and your chosen texts.

Key Takeaways:

• A PhD corpus should be coherent, relevant, varied, and feasible.
• Your justification must argue why your selected films are the most suitable primary sources for answering your research question.
• You can organize your corpus by director, period, theme, or sonic properties.
• Drawing inspiration from existing scholarship, like the articles on using film as a historical source or analyzing hip-hop videos, provides powerful models for your own justification.

Preview of the Next Lesson

With the "why" (research question), the "how" (theoretical framework), and the "what" (film corpus) now defined, you have all the core components of your research proposal. In our next and final lesson of this module, we will assemble these pieces into a coherent whole by learning how to draft a high-level chapter structure for the proposed dissertation. This will provide the roadmap for your entire writing process.