Below are some dot points of some messages Week 8’s readings were discussing:
Eco, Umberto. (1985). “Casablanca”: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage. SubStance, 14(2), pp. 3-12.
- In order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to unhinge it, to break it up or take it apart so that one then may remember only parts of it, regardless of their original relationship to the whole. With a look, one can unhinge it manually, so to speak, dismembering it into a series of excerpts. A movie, on the contrary, must be already wobbly and disjointed on itsef.
- Casablanca is a cult movie precisely because all the archetypes are there, because each actor repeats a part played in other occasions, and because the characters live not the ‘real’ life of human beings, but a life as stereotypically portrayed by previous films
- Casablanca has succeeded in becoming a cult movie because it is not one movie. It is “the movies.”
McKee, Robert. (1997). ‘The substance of story.’ In Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York, USA: HarperCollins, pp. 135-154.
- The protagonist in particular is a wilful being. The exact quantity of this willpower, however, may not be measurable. A fine story is not necessarily the struggle of a gigantic will versus absolute forces of inevitability
- The audience’s emotional involvement is held by the glue of empathy. If the writer fails to fuse a bond between filmgoer and protagonist, we sit outside feeling nothing. Involvement has nothing to do with evoking altruism or compassion.
- The measure of the value of a character’s desire is in direct proportion to the risk he’s willing to take to achieve it; the greater the value, the greater the risk
