Seminar: Casablanca

Event Date
Monday, July 8th
Body

Nathan Roberts, PhD Candidate at Harvard University, examines the life and legacy of Casablanca, perhaps the most famous film ever made.

Casablanca has succeeded in becoming a cult movie because it is not one movie. It is ‘the movies.’” As Umberto Eco suggests in this line, Casablanca looms large because it is not just one movie, released in a specific time (just after the Allied forces entered Africa, liberating Casablanca) and place (Hollywood, by the progressive Warner Brothers studio, running on all cylinders). It stands as an emblem of how movies can move us. We will therefore begin in context, examining how Casablanca moved skeptical viewers to support a world war they had avoided for years. And we will end by addressing a broad and pressing question: why does this tight–budget, committee–written, slapdash film move viewers to this very day, as time goes by?

About the Speaker

Nathan Roberts is a PhD Candidate in the Film and Visual Studies Program at Harvard University. His writing has been featured on TIME.com and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he is the author of the 2016 memoir Surface Tensions: Searching for Sacred Connection in a Media–Saturated World. In 2018, Nathan programmed the Harvard Film Archive series "Caught in the Net: The Early Internet In the Paranoid Imagination," in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. He has taught Casablanca multiple times through Harvard College and Harvard Extension School, and he is currently writing his dissertation on a theory of relational media.

About Coolidge Education Seminars

Want to learn more about some of your favorite classic films? Before select Big Screen Classics events register for the Coolidge Education seminar, which includes a 30 minute lecture before the film from an expert and a reserved seat at the screening of the film.

Seminar registration includes