Casablanca is one of the most celebrated Hollywood films of all time, its iconic romance enshrined in collective memory across generations. Drawing from archival materials, industry trade journals, and cultural commentary, Barbara Klinger explores the history of Casablanca's circulation in the United States from the early 1940s to the present by examining its exhibition via radio, repertory houses, television, and video. By resituating the film in the dynamically changing industrial, technological, and cultural circumstances that have defined its journey over eight decades, Klinger challenges our understanding of its meaning and reputation as both a Hollywood classic and a cult film. Through this single-film survey, Immortal Films proposes a new approach to the study of film history and aesthetics and, more broadly, to cinema itself as a medium in constant interface with other media as a necessary condition of its own public existence and endurance.
Barbara Klinger is Provost Professor Emerita in the Media School at Indiana University. She is the author of Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk and Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home.
"This powerfully original work is perhaps the most complete documentation we have had to date of the persistently morphing moving-image commodity. Barbara Klinger uses the longevity and iterative nature of this beloved movie to show us how ideas about history, taste, value, gender, class, and race are unevenly shifted or reinforced. Immortal Films is essential reading for film, media, and popular culture scholars."—Charles R. Acland, author of American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder
"This book completely dislodges the synchronic approach that has long dogged studies of historical film reception, replacing it with a deft and supple account of how Casablanca was adapted, re-presented, and repackaged in various media forms."—Matthew Solomon, author of Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century
368 pp.6 x 9Illus: 27 b/w illustrations
9780520296459$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Nov 2022