Casablanca
As a film maker I completely appreciate this film in black and white and all the lighting effects in creating mood and emotions. In the scene where Rick is sitting in his bar drinking after hours, after he was surprised by seeing Ilsa that day, where the bar is dark with overcast shadows on his face (not even halo in his eyes), you can feel his despair and yearning, you can feel his desperation thinking she would come to him and you could feel his hurt and anger not only in his face but also by the mood created with the lighting and shadows. Then the door opens and Elsa floats in surrounded by light, seemingly glowing with the light, and the light picks up in the room and on Rick, like the light had been brought back into Ricks life and we as the audience see the change in Rick and feel his anticipation and hope, even though he tries to not let it show. It’s a pretty cool effect that would speak on its own, even if they didn’t say a word and we didn’t know what was going on. I don’t know a lot about “good” film as how it’s supposed to work, the technics or anything technical about it but I think when Ilsa walked in the bar, everything changed. In his book The Power of Film, Howard Suber wrote “The central characters…are not only in greatly changed circumstances by the end of the film, they are not who they were at the beginning.” This is what happens with the main character Rick, what he was in the beginning of the film is not who he was in the end. Even with
