Casablanca: Movies and Memory

by Marc Augé, Tom Conley (Translator)

Marc Augé was eleven or twelve years old when he first saw Casablanca . Made in 1942 but not released in France until 1947, the film had a profound effect on him. Like cinephiles everywhere, Augé was instantly drawn to Rick Blaine's mysterious past, his friendship with Sam and Captain Renault, and Ilsa's stirring, seductive beauty. The film-with its recurring scenes of waiting, menace, and flight-occupies a significant place in Augé's own memory of his uprooted childhood and the wartime exploits of his family. Marc Augé's elegant and thoughtful essay on film and the nature of both personal and collective memory contends that some of our most haunting memories are deeply embedded in the cinema. His own recollections of the hurried, often chaotic embarkations of his childhood, he writes, are become intertwined with scenes from Casablanca that have become bigger in his memory through repeated viewings in the movie houses of Paris's Latin Quarter. Seamlessly weaving together film criticism and memoir, Casablanca moves between Augé's insights into the filmgoing experience and his reflections on his own life, the collective trauma of France's wartime history, and how such events as the fall of Paris, the exodus of refugees, and the Occupation-all depicted in the film-were lived and are remembered.

Genres: Film, Media Tie In

120 pages, Paperback

First published September 24, 2007

About the author

Marc Augé is a French anthropologist. His career can be divided into three stages, reflecting shifts in both his geographical focus and theoretical development: early (African), middle (European) and late (Global). These successive stages do not involve a broadening of interest or focus as such, but rather the development of a theoretical apparatus able to meet the demands of the growing conviction that the local can no longer be understood except as a part of the complicated global whole.

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

The victim of misplaced expectations: some stretches were exceedingly beautiful and evocative and quietly profound, but it had the tendency to wander into tangents I didn't find equally resonant or even illuminating. I have a particular fondness for analysis that explicitly braids together critical and the autobiographical modes, and I think what I was wanting was a more theoretically rigorous variation on Jonathan Rosenbaum's lush, Faulkner-influenced Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. Instead, I remember finishing Augé's long essay and feeling that everything just doesn't quite hang together somehow, though I was unable to pinpoint exactly why (I do wonder if there might be some translation issues at play).

In the end, I actually found that Conway's Afterward “A Writer and His Movie” was what articulated many of the ideas that I was hoping to find in Augé's actual text:

"the recollections accumulating here and in Auge’s other essays leave the effect, much like that of a New Wave film, of enticing the viewer to follow an ever-bifurcating path through images, both past and present, and to employ those images as reminders of our own relations (and those of our kin) with events that shape history."

Still, I feel like someday I'll revisit this with readjusted expectations. I mean, how could I not, when there are passages as gorgeous as this?

“I don’t always spend my time thinking about movies and about Casablanca, but today, when I recall the various peripatetics of my existence, without really knowing why they continue to occupy my mind, I sometimes happen to associate the film with emotions, faces, and landscapes that, although they belong to fiction, survive me as memories."

[Carolina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the analysis really interesting and some of the personal anecdotes were really touching. However, he does ramble quite a lot and I don't think some of it is as thought provoking as it's intended to be.