Ciné-Forum: Two “Marseillaise” Scenes: From <i>Casablanca</i> to <i>West Beirut</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Resume: La scene emouvante de la « » executee avec tant de brio dans Casablanca est generalement interpretee comme celebration de la resistance et de la liberie. Mais si on envisage cette scene du point de vue des maroccains qui s'opposaient a I'occupation coloniale de leur pays, cette glorification francaise de la « » devient un affront a la liberie. Dans cette perspective, une autre scene de la Marseillaise scene in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (USA, 1943) has moved successive generations of moviegoers to tears since 1943. Even Murray Burnett, the man who first conceived of the scene, wept as he scripted the duel of national songs: cried when I wrote it. I literally cried when I wrote it. Tears, actual tears. I was writing and I cried. It was that powerful to me. And it was that powerful in the film.1 following resume may help to refresh the reader's memory as to exactly what happens in this scene, set in Rick's cafe: Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) are upstairs in Rick's office, with Laszlo offering to buy the letters of transit Ugarte (Peter Lorre) had stolen from a courier. Rick refuses, and in reply to Laszlo's question as to why, Rick tells him to ask his wife. They then hear German officers singing Die Wacht am Rhein in the main room below. Rick and Laszlo go out on the balcony and look down at Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) and his fellow officers singing loudly at the piano. Captain Renault (Claude Rains) watches from the bar, his eyebrow raised, turning to see what Rick and Laszlo will do. Laszlo, listening tight-lipped, walks decisively down the steps and approaches the band, telling them: the 'Marseillaise'! Play it! band members look down, then up toward Rick who nods to them. band then begins to play the Marseillaise, and for a while, both the German and French songs can be heard, as a kind of auditory duel. But following Victor Laszlo's lead, virtually all the cafe patrons stand up from their seats to join in the singing of the Marseillaise, including many men in French uniforms, as well as the guitar-playing Spanish chanteuse (Corinna Mura); even Yvonne (Madeleine LeBeau), recently dropped by Rick and who had arrived that evening on the arm of a German officer, now sings the French national anthem with tears running down her cheeks. Major Strasser and his compatriots have long since given up their singing. Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) quietly observes this symbolic triumph over oppression, with love and admiration in her eyes for the husband who had taken charge of the situation and known exactly what to do. When the last verse of the Marseillaise has been sung, people shout la France! Vive la Dmocratic! and Victor is cheered and toasted by the French officers standing nearby, after which Major Strasser angrily suggests to Captain Renault that Rick's cafe be closed immediately. In earlier studies, I tried to show how this scene helped to shape the attitudes of U.S. audiences toward the Free (or Fighting) French,2 and to look closely at the role of Bogart's nod in the scene.3 In the present study, it is in relation to French colonialism that I want to focus on this scene and on the film more generally. And I would like to suggest that Ziad Doueiri's Marseillaise scene in West Beirut (France/Norway/Lebanon/Belgium, 1998) might be considered a reply to its counterpart in Casablanca. CASABLANCA AND COLONIALISM In describing her own experience of the Marseillaise scene in Casablanca, Judith Mahoney Pasternak wrote, The 'Marseillaise' comes to its stirring conclusion, and with tears in their eyes the patriots in the bar cry out, 'Vive la France!' Watching, tears in my own eyes, I always murmur along, 'Vive la France.' It took 40 years for me to notice that they're shouting 'Vive la France! …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".