Section IX Chapter 5 197- 218 Summary and Analysis

The first essay of this section is titled "Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage". Eco opens this essay talking about the movie Casablanca. He suggests that the movie is not a great artistic achievement; however, it does inspire a great deal of conversation and has managed to achieve cult status.

Eco suggests that in order to achieve this cult status a movie "must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters as if they were aspects of the fan's private sectarian world...". Eco also asserts that to achieve this status the movie must be breakable into sections, that it must have many main themes instead of one, and finally that it must have certain "textual elements".

Eco discusses some semiotic elements including form and motif. Motif is described as "the simplest...