Deconstructing Casablanca event: The good, the bad and the continuity errors

Dwight 101 called in an impressive crowd Tuesday, Feb. 18. Students and professors braved the snow and freezing air to hear film editor Nina Kleinberg’s lecture, “Deconstructing Casablanca.” Using an elaborate, custom-made presentation, Kleinberg broke down the film from the perspective of an editor.

First she covered the script. In Casablanca’s case the script was never completed; it was an evolving collaborative effort. Although the working script for Casablanca was based on an unpublished play by the same name, the adaption process reflected the studio system in Hollywood at the time. Several staff writers and executives had their hands on the project, adding elements and re-writing characters. This collaborative approach makes it difficult to pinpoint a single “auteur,” or author, for the film, who was ultimately responsible for the vision and execution of Casablanca. Kleinberg suggested that if anyone could be called the mastermind of the movie it would be the producer, Hal B. Wallis, who was ultimately responsible for putting the script in the hands of new writers and filtering their ideas. However, the question of the ultimate film author and their intentions is important to stress, because all films are of such a collaborative nature that no single person can be credited with a whole film. Kleinberg further suggested that in the case of Casablanca, it is the unification of many writers and their ideas that has established the film’s wide appeal.

After imparting a sense of the narrative and replaying some of Casablanca’s most memorable lines (“Here’s looking at you kid,” “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she had to walk into mine,” “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” etc.), Kleinberg began to explore cinematography, or what goes into a shot and why, starting with the gender politics of lighting. Men are filmed in hard, three point lighting to make them look tough and angular while women are shot in soft three point lighting with an extra little light pointed at the eyes to make them look bright, dewy and nubile.

Kleinberg shared that this lighting scheme did not go out of style after the 1940s but is still used frequently today. She flashed a picture of Homeland stars Claire Danes and Damian Lewis shot in the same style to emphasize the continuity of the language of lighting and its orthodoxy of meanings.

The lighting of sets follows the lighting of actors. Kleinberg pointed out the hidden shadows of parrots and dancing girls that filled in blank spaces on screen.

Everything that ends up on that screen had to be shot on set. In the 1940s, without the technology of zooming or lightweight cameras, filming was limited to giant cameras strapped to dollies moving back and forth across the set. The filming of each scene was practiced over and over long before the actors arrived to recite their lines to make sure the movement of the camera was flawless; otherwise, the action could not be accurately captured on film.

With the filming process comes the film editing process. As an editor, Kleniberg’s specialty reasonably received the most attention in the presentation. She described the difficulties that editor Owen Marks and his team must have faced while assembling the famous film. Without a clear script, Marks was asked to connect the ideas of all the minds who had worked on the film and to sequence all the individual shots into a film worthy of the Warner Brother’s logo. Kleinberg detailed the implicit organizational difficulties as well as the technical difficulties (fade outs that take three seconds on our computers today took weeks in the Golden Age of Hollywood). In this way, Kleinberg testified that editors often think they are the auteurs of films because they are responsible for the ultimate interpretation of the narrative and the presentation of shots.

Next, sound editing got its time in the spotlight, as Kleinberg ran through the levels of sound and how sound affects the way action and movement are perceived. Sound, of course, was logically followed by music. Almost 90 percent of Casablana’s 102-minute run time uses music composed by Max Steiner (who also wrote the music for Gone with the Wind) playing in the background. Although the music is often overlooked in favor of dialogue, the way the score melodiously flavors the characters and their world ultimately gives shape to the emotional appeal of the film.

Kleinberg closed her presentation with a discussion of continuity errors. Even “classic” films like Casablanca include little mistakes, like male lead Humphrey Bogart reaching for a wine glass instead of a cigarette from one shot to the next, as well as larger errors like Bogart’s clothing magically changing from sopping wet to completely dry in the same scene.

If anything was missing from the presentation, it was a discussion of acting. Bogart and his costar Ingrid Bergman gave incredible, nuanced performances and it would have been interesting to discuss their intentions in greater detail. However, from start to finish, Kleinberg’s lecture was packed with useful and fun information. In Deconstructing Casablanca, she not only capably explained the processes behind filmmaking, she also breathed new life into a classic piece of film studio art.