Casablanca Political/Historical Contexts Flashcards
(15 cards)
What did the Southern states pass?
The Jim Crow Laws.
What did the Jim Crow Laws mandate?
Racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former confederate states of America (1870s) and were upheld in 1896 by US supreme courts ‘separate but equal’ doctrine.
What was the legal principle of ‘separate but equal’ extended to?
Public facilities, Transportation (Including coaches of interstate trains and buses.)
How were the facilities for African/Native Americans different compared to the facilities for White Americans?
Consistently inferior and underfunded, sometimes there were no facilities at all for people of colour.
What did the Jim Crow Laws insitutionalise?
Economic, Educational and Social disadvantages for African Americans and other people of colour who were living in the south.
Where did legalised racial segregation principally exist?
Southern States.
What was Casablanca motivated by?
Jack Warner (and other Jewish staff) at WB who believed that the American public should be more actively involved in the issues of Hitlers war in Europe.
What can the film be seen as?
An act of propaganda.
What did 80% of the American public believe?
That the Second World War was nothing to do with them and that the country should remain neutral.
What did Warner want to challenge?
The policy of isolationism.
How is Rick shown to be a symbol of this isolationist policy?
Playing chess alone - 2 player game.
The shallow focus distances him from the spectator.
How does Ricks motivation change as the film goes on?
Less motivated by self-interest and more by a desire to help those taking a stand against the Germans.
How is this transformation shown at the beginning of Le Marseillaise sequence?
Rick nods towards the band - he is giving approval to start playing and allowing things to happen.
How is film form used to create a binary between the Nazi’s and those standing against them?
Long shot - appears as united and more numbers against Nazi’s.
Costume - Dark, Militaristic for Germans.
How does the films resolution reinforce the film’s commitment to standing against the Nazi’s?
Rick ignores his own wants for the support of the greater good (Ilsa leaving with Laszlo)
Nazi’s unsuccessful, they instigate the violence + end up failing.
