Abstract
The later books of the French anthropologist, Marc Augé, present an ethnography of everyday spaces attractive to geographers concerned with embodied experience. Casablanca, his most recent work to appear in English, beautifully straddles the representational and the non-representational, resolving often sterile conflict between polarized positions; overtly subjective, the book draws upon feelings and memories evoked by Curtiz’s iconic film. Casablanca has been so absorbed into modern western consciousness that one might imagine little more could be written about it, but Augé mobilizes the film’s myth-like ability to conjure both time and timelessness as a device to uncover social and personal memory.
Memory works sensuously to pull the past into the present; it is affective before it is emotional or historical. A vital element in the construction of persons and societies, it is rarely a simple matter of factual recall; memory wafts through, provoking sensation, a shudder, a softness, a perfume; it whispers and insinuates.
Augé is now an old man and for him the film Casablanca evokes a lifetime. It is not simply that the story, images and music pull him back to his childhood, his family, wartime and post-war France; each viewing recalls a lifetime of viewings and places of watching. Drawing upon Deleuze on film as constructive of time, montage deriving from ‘movement-image’, Augé engages with history, family, eternity, myth. Like every French family, Augé’s had painful wartime experiences that a child would not have understood directly but would have sensed through the adults around him. He refers to his mother, ‘who never wanted to be far from her husband [and] took pains to follow the tracks of the French army in its defeat’, moving with him as a small child out of Paris in anticipation of the German invasion, across the Loire. The film depicts the invasion he did not see but which affected him; it evokes his childhood but it also pulls Augé closer to understanding his parents as young people, though, when the film was released in Paris (after the war in 1947): ‘I remember that my parents had guffawed at the way the Americans thought of Paris on the eve of the entry of the Germans . . . And then I began to realise that no matter what, the hot spots, nightclubs and jazz joints were completely off my parents’ compass’ (p. 4).
The city of Casablanca is both real and imaginary:
If the stereotypical exoticism of the streets of Casablanca in the film has always left a strong impression on me, it’s because it corresponds to the images that from early childhood the name of this African city had awoken in me, along with a few others, such as Diego Suarez or Djibouti. All these names punctuated the travels that the great man of the family, my uncle, had made to distant lands during the war years. (p. 5)
But: ‘I hardly know Casablanca. I’ve been through it only on two or three occasions, and rapidly at that. Today the city of my childhood dreams exists only in the Latin Quarter, in Curtiz’s film’ (p. 8).
Augé reminiscing about his uncle is an old man momentarily stopping time, sharing a melancholy evocation of his uncle’s and his own withered youth, captured fresh in his memory as Rick and Ilsa’s love is captured in film: ‘I saw him grow old. But the image that always comes to mind when I think of him is that of this handsome thirty-five year old kid coming right out of history’ (p. 8).
Attempting to understand his childhood experience of the exodus from Paris, Augé talked to his very elderly mother because, ‘We need to “mount” or “make a montage” of our memories, these rushes of memory, in order to recompose a continuity, to turn it into a story’ (p. 17). But, ‘Our conversations were chaotic . . . one memory calling forth another and opening parentheses that we forgot to close. The story that we finally settled upon relates a series of events at once important and derisory’ (p. 24).
To make sense he employs ‘floating affect’, whereby the emotions of a film enter one’s own life:
now and then a refrain will surge forward unconsciously. It’s because we need to believe in love, in heroism and in self-denial that we instinctively adhere to the most romantic version of the story and, in the secrecy of our memory, give way to the intimate and personal montage of our film, this film whose title, Casablanca, flickers every time we pronounce it, that hereafter resonates in us as if it were a memory coming out of a distant past. (p. 30)
The bulk of this slim book deals with the contemplation of a life – the retention of remnants of all ages in old people, in places and in films. Anyone still having difficulty understanding geographies of affect may well learn more from Augé than from any geographer.