Quote of the day: Umberto Eco on cult movies

[gwalla]

"What are the requirements for transforming a book or movie into a cult object? The work must be loved, obviously, but this is not enough. It must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world, a world about which one can make up quizzes and play trivia games so that the adepts of the sect recognize through each other a shared expertise.... [A cult movie must be] ramshackle, rickety, unhinged in itself.... Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness."

—Umberto Eco, "'Casablanca': Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage" (1984)