Now, this isn’t a shot that slaps you across the face with its importance.
This noirish quality, largely thanks to expressionist-influenced director Michael Curtiz and director of photography Arthur Edeson (also the DoP for Frankenstein and The Maltese Falcon) consistently add a palpable ominousness to what could’ve been a frothy, unbelievable quip-fest. The image clearly plays with our genre-recognition abilities. The low-key lighting, the venetian blinds, and the obscured face all scream NOIR. Here, Ilsa is watching Victor as he risks his life by going out to the Free France meeting after curfew. If you were to show me this shot and say, “What’s it from?” it would take me more than a minute to realize that it’s from The Greatest Hollywood Movie of All Time (according to some people, though I don’t like those kinds of judgements). So here’s my collection of its most meaningful, mythical, and tantalizing shots. This movie invites you into it-and invites you to take souvenirs from it: favorite lines, cherished scenes, fragments of tunes and soundtrack music, and, of course, images.Ĭasablanca encourages you to turn it into your own personal collection of memories and does so more successfully than any other Hollywood film.
So many people have written mind-blowing thematic analyses of Casablanca that I decided to go another route.
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