Today’s Popular Cinema seminar was all about using our text for this week – the classic and much-referenced Casablanca – to look at traditional Hollywood storytelling and style. The point that was most interesting for me was the question is Hollywood style invisible?

It was a point suggested in our first reading by David Bordwell called Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures. Bordwell calls his first section ‘The Straight Corridor’, because he contends that the Hollywood narrative relies on clarity; it centres around “psychologically defined individuals with clear-cut goals” and storylines that follow a structure of what we called in the the seminar “linear causality”. It sounds like a pretty simple concept  – that a story  progresses by one event causing another – but there are definitely filmmakers who subvert this, so it’s important to remember that this method of storytelling is familiar only because it’s favoured by Hollywood.

It’s perhaps because we’re so familiar with this “linear causality”, and protagonists who are “psychologically defined”, that Bordwell suggests that to some extent, the ‘Hollywood style’ is invisible. He argues that linear causality and defined protagonists encourage “a rational and logical interpretation of plot”, meaning that Hollywood’s style is solely about the most effective transmission of information and therefore is not really noticed by the viewer. This, of course, is only one interpretation of classical narration – and one that Bordwell doesn’t completely agree with himself – but it’s an interesting way of thinking about Hollywood style.

We continued this discussion of Hollywood narration into the seminar, using Casablanca as a template. In our second reading, Umberto Eco contends that Casablanca is a cult film precisely because “it is not one movie. It is ‘the movies.'” He suggests that it fits into popular culture because it references multiple narration and character cliches that transcend one particular story or genre and are recognisable and memorable. He says, “Casablanca brings with it the scent of deja vu to such an extent that the spectator is ready to see in it also what happened after it.”

Put in simple terms, we’re talking here about the film’s quotability. Even for those of us who hadn’t seen the film before, it was hugely recognisable due to the iconic images and quotes that have entered – and will forever remain in – the popular culture canon. Thus, as Eco’s ‘movie of all movies’, Casablanca was the perfect exemplar of Bordwell’s narration theories and we spent the seminar discussing it.