"Everybody comes to Rick's" . . . but why?

In part because of this post by the esteemed Fearful Syzygy and in part because in my Humanities class we've reached the 20th century and I wanted to show a film that is both highly regarded and wildly popular, I'll be showing Casablanca in my class this afternoon. And, because we in the class keep bumping into those questions of What is Art and Who gets to decide what Art is, it seems that this film is an especially good one to think about when addressing those kinds of questions.
Below is the text of a sheet that I'll be handing out to my students today. I should tell you that I don't have answers to the questions I pose, in part because I've not (yet) seen the film enough to come to any conclusions. But I'm looking forward to watching closely today to see if anything becomes clearer.

Some Notes on Casablanca (1942; dir. Michael Curtiz; starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre)

Casablanca is #2 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American films (Citizen Kane is #1). Roger Ebert, in his commentary on this DVD, says he has literally never read a negative review of it. And yet: in one of the documentaries in the DVD, cast and crew members recall that as they made it, no one had any special sense that they were making a film that would live on in American popular culture for more than a few months or so, much less for over 60 years. In those days, major studios cranked out their films at an amazing rate (Curtiz himself directed two other films that year; for most of his career he averaged between two and three films a year). Casablanca was just another product of the old Warner Bros. back lot and studio system, one of dozens of films made in 1942. Or, to put it another way: the makers of Casablanca never had higher aspirations for it than that it would turn a profit.

So what is it about Casablanca that leads the AFI rank it as the 2nd best film of the past century? In our occasional discussions of what art is, I said that whatever else Art is, one thing it seems to me that it must have is a kind of deliberateness, or intentionality. Films exude intentionality, whether or not they are “good”: someone writes a script; people design and build sets; people play the roles in the script; someone points a camera in the direction of the actors; a director gives orders to all those people; etc., etc. None of THAT is accidental. But still: as noted above, no one on the set of Casablanca or at Warner Bros. was under any illusions that they were making “Art.” As Ronald Reagan once said of his own movies, “[The studios] didn’t want them good; they wanted them Thursday.” This is not to say that those involved in making Casablanca wanted to make a bad film; it IS fair to say, I think, that they would have been happy with “good enough,” and if “good” happened, well, cool.

Has the audience—viewers, critics, other actors and directors—decided, then, that Casablanca is Art, independent of its makers’ intentions? Certainly in part. If people didn’t like it and didn’t keep on liking it, it simply would not have survived long enough so that its characters and dialogue would become part of our national popular culture. But an audience still has to have something to respond to—and that, of course, sends us back to the film. What did an early 1940s audience see in this film? Did they respond to the plot? The characters? To both? Do we, at a 60-year remove, see the same thing(s)? Is it “just” an exceptionally fine product of its time and place, or is there something about it that causes us, as we watch it now, to think that it has something to say to us as well?

These are the same sorts of questions we can ask of any piece of art, keep in mind. The vast majority of films made are done with the purpose of getting us to pay to see them and be entertained by them—which is fine. But as with some paintings, sculptures, music and literature, some films cross a line and become perceived as something more than entertainment. What and where is that line? Who determines whether that line gets crossed? Casablanca, it seems to me, is a good test case for discussions about the nature of Art.

Technorati tags:
Film, Theories of Art