Lit/Film Journal #10: Speculating on Casablanca
Casablanca, written by Joseph and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch, directed by Michael Curtiz, and starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, and a notable supporting cast, is a classic Hollywood film, with scenes and dialogue that everyone is familiar with. (Every opening credit of a Warner Brothers film in recent years has played a few bars of “As Time Goes By,” for example, and films from Play It Again, Sam, Woody Allen’s movie about a romantic triangle in which the ghost of Bogart advises the hero on his love life, to Airplane! have played off its familiar elements.) What is the story of Casablanca? What is the thread we are following throughout the movie and what suspense is there to the story? Where are the characters at the beginning of the story and where are they at the end of it and how did they get from one place to the other? What do you think is the significance of the ending of the film, particularly considering the time the film was made? How much do you think this sixty-year old film reflects the values of our own time?
Lit/Film Journal #11: Speculating on The Stranger
The Stranger (L’etranger in French, also translated as The Outsider) by Albert Camus is one of the great twentieth-century novels. It is set in Algiers and tells the story of Meursault, a man whose mother has recently died when the book opens and who tells his own story of getting involved with a woman named Marie, hanging out with a thuggish neighbor, and killing an Arab on a beach. Consider the tone in which Meursault tells his story, the dispassionate way he responds to his life, the description of his mental state at the killing and what we actually know about what happened, and the conduct of his trial, in which his attitude and behavior are more incriminating than his actions. In the end Meursault has to think about the significance of his own existence (this is the first great novel of existentialism) and the meaning of his likely death. Given what happens in the short novel and the way Meursault responds to what happens, what do you think about fate and justice in this book? What do you think the title of the book refers to?