Casablanca: Movies and Memory

Description

Marc Auge 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, Auge 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 Auge's own memory of his uprooted childhood and the wartime exploits of his family. Marc Auge'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.

Marc Auge, an anthropologist trained in French universities, has studied and written copiously on North African cultures. He teaches leading seminars at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and is author of many books, including La traversee du Luxembourg, Domaines et chateaux, Non-lieux: Introduction a l'anthropologie de la surmodernite, Un ethnologue dans le metro, and Les formes de l'oubli. The English translations In the Metro and Oblivion have been published by the University of Minnesota Press.