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Unit 31: Umberto Eco’s ‘Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’ (Deconstructing and Disciplinarising Hollywood)

of texts (1981) (1979), and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984). His first full-length study Notes
of literary meaning was Opera Aperta (‘Open Works’ -1962) where he found the most rewarding
works to involve fields of meaning rather than strings of mere lexical items, that is where the
reader is actively co-opted to explore her/his own expectations and the responses when or if they
are defeated. This perspective has developed to consider how we might limit interpretation, or , at
least, establish where inconsistencies might life; see his The limits of Interpretation (1990 [1990]) and
his contributions to interpretation and overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (1992). pp.23-88. This has
also branched out into the study of how we might identify the best translations: Experiences in
Translation (2000) and Mouse or Rat?: translation as negotiation (2003).
Semiotics is the general science of signs, of which linguistics, according to Saussure is a subdivision.
One consequence of this way of looking at language has been to encourage comparative study of
literary and visual media, especially in the area of narrative. Another has been to break down the
traditional prejudice of the custodians of ‘high culture’ against the products of popular of mass
culture. These tendencies are exhibited very clearly in Eco’s work, which is notable for its broad
range of illustration and electric methodology. He is as interested in the semiotics of blue jeans or
the Superman story as in the dense polysemy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and this, combined with
a lively, witty style, makes him one of the most accessible of critics in the structuralist tradition.
In ‘Casablanca: cult movies and intertextual collage’, he turns his attention on one of the popular
classics of Hollywood cinema, reading off its multiple meaning in a manner reminiscent of Roland
Barthes (see above, pp. 311-36). In the famous Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman movie. Eco
Suggests, filmic archetypes (or cliches, as a more elitist critic might call them) are multiplies to the
point where they begin to ‘talk among themselves’ and generate an intoxicating excess of
signification. This process, by which kitsch, in its reception by a finely attuned audience, can
allegedly achieve something approximating the sublimity of classic art, is a recurrent theme and
subject of controversy in discussions of postmodernism.
‘Casablanca’, first published in this form in 1984, in reprinted here form a collection of Eco’s
occasional and journalistic essays. Faith in Fakes (1986) (published in the United States and (as a
paperback) in Britain under the title, Travels in Hyperreality)
Peter Bondanella, ‘Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: from Structuralism to Semiotics’,in
Umberto Eco’s Alternative: the politics of culture and ambiguities of interpretation, ed. Norma
Bouchard and Veronica Pravadelli (1998), pp. 211.24 Peter Pericles Trifonas, Umberto Eco and
Football (2001) Gary P. Radford, On Eco (2003)

31.2 Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage

Cult

2
1
‘Was that artillery fire, or is it my heart pounding?’ Whenever Casablanca is shown, at this point
the audience reacts with an enthusiasm usually reserved for football. Sometimes a single word is
enough: fans cry every time Bogey says ‘kid’. Frequently the spectators quote the best lines before
the actors say them.
According to traditional standards in aesthetics, Casablanca is not a work of art, if such an expression
still has a meaning. In any case, if the films of Dreyer, Eisenstein, or Antonioni are works of art,
Casablanca represents a very modest aesthetic achievement. It is a hodgepodge of sensational
scenes strung together implausibly, its characters are psychologically incredible, its actors act in a
mannered way. Nevertheless, it is a great example of cinematic discourse, a palimpsest for future
students of twentieth-century religiosity, a paramount laboratory for semiotic research into textual
strategies. Moreover, it has become a cult movie.

1 Like the more famous line, ‘Play it again, Sam’ (actually ‘Play it. Sam’) this quotation is not quite accurate.
Ingrid Bergman’s words in the film are: ‘Was that cannon fire, or is it my hear pounding?
2. The action of Casablanca (made in 1942, directed by Michael Curtiz) takes place early in the Second World
War, when Morocoo was controlled by the Vichy French Government. The American Rick (Humphrey
Bogart) runs a cafe-night club in Casblanca which is a place of passage for refuges trying to get exit visas to

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