Cross-Cultural Seductions

The Spanish TV series with the greatest popular and critical success in the successive seasons of 2013 and 2014 have something unusual in common: both were set and shot partly in North Africa. Antena 3's historical romance El tiempo entre costuras taped early episodes in Tangiers and Tetouan, while Telecinco's crime thriller El Príncipe takes place mainly in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. In spite of their different genres and periods (romance and policier, the 1930s–1940s and the present day), both series are examples of the trend to “cinematic television” in which the use of authentic locations and expert special effects are held to be a marker of quality and legitimacy.

Yet the fraught history of Spain's relations with Morocco, both before and after independence, makes such engagement rare in popular TV fiction. Indeed, I am aware of no other Spanish series based in North Africa. In this chapter, then, I review the varied histories of Hispano-Moroccan audiovisual collaboration (studies that are necessarily limited to cinema) and explore how this filmic heritage compares to my two contemporary TV fictions. Paying attention to the latter's conditions of production and reception I further suggest that they exhibit the phenomenon of “disorientation” traced by Susan Martin-Márquez in her minute analysis of Spanish colonialist texts in and on Africa over more than a century.

In a volume which collects essays on Melilla, Ceuta, and the north of Morocco, Eloy Martín Corrales gives an account of a century of what he calls “Hispano-Moroccan relations on the screen.” Thus, even before the establishment of the Franco-Spanish Protectorate in 1912, documentaries were produced on Tetouan and Tangier (which are, incidentally, the cities in which El tiempo entre costuras was to shoot). Later the army used film for propaganda purposes to such an extent that, Martín writes, the camera took up the same position as the Spanish guns (12). In 1921, Spanish cinema proved more resourceful than the Spanish armed forces with documentaries on the military disaster of La Annual successfully shot and screened around the Peninsula (13). And in 1924 Francisco Franco himself filmed his own troops’ retreat from Chefchaouen (17).