Five Eyes (documentary) ★★

For more than half of his long life, writer and composer Paul Bowles lived in Morocco. His five decades in Tangier left a mutual impression, both on him and the city with which he became permanently associated. Yes, his persona, work, and biography are consistently viewed through an academic, Western-centric lens. Through this lens, Moroccan persons are regularly reduced to exoticized extras. Therefore, Karim Debbagh‘s talking-heads documentary on the New York-born artist is groundbreaking, first and foremost, as it looks at Bowles’ life from a Moroccan and mostly working-class perspective. Giving new life to footage he shot 25 years ago, the Moroccan director, who knew Bowles himself, returns to Tangier to unearth the traces of the famous US writer.

To do so, he meets the people who engaged with Bowles, some of them on a daily basis. Among them are the writer Mohamed Choukri, artist and painter Mohamed Mrabet, who was also affiliated with William Burroughs, Temsamani, who was Bowles’ driver for 30 years, and ultimately Boulaich, another chauffeur who drove Bowles during his final decade in the 90s. Their stories are a motley mix of wistful memories, humorous anecdotes, contemplations, and gossip, cast in a soft light of nostalgia for what appears to be the good old days. Paradoxically, the most interesting aspect of this rediscovery and reclamation of a person and their influence on a place and an era is not Bowles himself but the social and political climate in Tangier at the time. 

With the colonialist cliches removed, Tangier’s kinetic art scene becomes a central character, even though Debbagh can’t resist the temptation to give his own youthful past persona a lead role. The titular fifth eye is the handheld camera which he used as a young man to film in Bowles’ Tangier abode. He was only 19 and had never left Morocco, while Bowles was 63 years his senior and looked back on a life of travels and adventures with the beat community. Debbagh’s admiration for the writer who allowed him freely to film in his home and record conversations is still palpable after all these years, though one wonders why the 82-year-old artist took an interest in him. 

After his death, Debbagh remained deeply connected to his heritage. This ideal image of the writer and composer hovers over each of the conversations, which share a curious consensus on their subject. There is hardly any critique of Bowles, who seems to have been immune to the colonialism which the documentary’s perspective uproots, as well as the omnipresent classism and intellectualism. The same goes for the myth of decadence and sexual freedom that drove many US Americans to Tangier. While the notion that the city, and by implication Moroccan society as a whole, was more free back then, what exactly this freedom meant is never explained. An air of sublime friendship, mentorship, and gratitude diffuses any psychological complexity. 

Instead of deconstructing the idealized trope of the Western expat artist in exotic surroundings, Five Eyes just gazes at it from a different angle. Though the grainy 16 mm footage itself is worth sitting through the 71-minute run time, it also becomes a convenient excuse for overlooking questions of neo-colonialism, social status, intellectual hierarchies, and artistic appropriation.