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Gowher Ahmad Naik, LPU Unit 30: Umberto Eco's 'Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’ (Textual Analysis)

Unit 30: Umberto Eco's 'Casablanca: Cult Movies and Notes
Intertextual Collage’ (Textual Analysis)

CONTENTS
Objectives

Introduction
30.1 Intertextual Analysis
30.2 Text—Casablanca
30.3 Summary
30.4 Key-Words
30.5 Review Questions
30.6 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Discuss Eco’s Casablanca.
• Analyse Eco’s Casablanca.

Introduction

All texts, whether they are spoken or written, make their meanings against the background of
other texts and things that have been said on other occasions (Lemke 1992). Texts may more or less
implicitly or explicitly cite other texts, they may refer to other texts,or they may allude to other
past, or future, texts. We thus ‘make sense of every word, every utterance, or act against the
background of (some) other words, utterances, acts of a similar kind’ (Lemke 1995: 23). All texts
are, thus, in an intertextual relationship with other texts.
Umberto Eco (1987) provides an interesting discussion of inter-textuality in his chapter ‘Casablanca:
Cult movies and intertextual collage’. Eco points out that the film Casablanca was made on a very
small budget and in a very short time. As a result its creators were forced to improvise the plot,
mixing a little of everything they knew worked in a movie as they went. The result is what Eco
describes as an ‘intertextual collage’. For Eco, Casablanca has been so successful because it is not,
in fact, an instance of a single kind of film genre but a mixing of stereotyped situations that are
drawn from a number of different kinds of film genres. As the film proceeds, he argues, we
recognize the film genres that they recall. We also recognize the pleasures we have experienced
when we have watched these kinds of films.
The first few scenes of Casablanca, for example, recall film genres such as the adventure movie,
the patriotic movie, news reels, war propaganda movies, gangster movies, action movies, spy
movies and finally, with the appearance of Ingrid Bergman, a romance. The poster for thismovie
suggests a number of these film genres, but people who have seen the movie would most likely
describe it as a romance. As Brown (1992: 7) observes, the chemistry between its two stars Humphrey
Bogard and Ingrid Bergman ‘was so thick it would make movie history’ and defines Casablanca
movie romance for all time. It is not, however, just a romance. It is, rather, a mixing of types of
film, in which one of the major themes is the relationship between the two lead players, set in a
world of action, adventure, spies, gangsters and of course, romance.

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