Roland Barthes and Film

Myth, Eroticism and Poetics

Patrick ffrench

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350120525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

Suspicious of what he called the spectator's "sticky" adherence to the screen, Roland Barthes had a cautious attitude towards cinema. Falling into a hypnotic trance, the philosopher warned, an audience can become susceptible to ideology and "myth". In this book, Patrick Ffrench explains that although Barthes was wary of film, he engaged deeply with it. Barthes' thought was, Ffrench argues, punctuated by the experience of watching films – and likewise his philosophy of photography, culture, semiotics, ethics and theatricality have been immensely important in film theory. Focusing particularly on the essays 'The Third Meaning' and 'On Leaving the Cinema' and the acclaimed book Camera Lucida, Ffrench examines Barthes' writing and traces a persistent interest in films and directors, from Fellini and Antonioni, to Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers and Hitchcock. Ffrench explains that although Barthes found pleasure in "leaving the cinema" – disconnecting from its dangerous allure by a literal exit or by forcefully breaking the trance – he found value in returning to the screen anew. Barthes delved beneath the pull of progressing narrative and the moving image by becoming attentive to space and material aesthetics. This book presents an invaluable reassessment of one of the most original and subtle thinkers of the twentieth-century: a figure indebted to the movies.

Chapter 1

FILM AS MYTH AND FORM

Roland Barthes’ early work, by which I mean that of the 1950s and before, evolves against the background of what Kristin Ross has described, via Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord, as the “colonization of everyday life,” the rapid evolution of consumer culture in post-war France accompanied by the equally intensive evolution of the “society of the spectacle.”¹ I use this last expression in a conscious acknowledgment of the diagnosis by Debord of the malaise of advanced capitalist society, in which “everything that was directly lived” is now irredeemably mediated via the spectacle, through a “representation.”² Irrespective of whatever arguments one might have with Debord over the historical accuracy of his claim, it is undoubtedly the case that the 1950s and 1960s in France saw a burgeoning of cultures of the image, with the cinema prominent among them, and a more extensive use of the image for diverse forms of marketing and ideological ratification. If Debord’s own critical engagement with his epoch, parallel to his theoretical and written work, will be through incendiary “destructions” of cinema such as the films Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade) and La Société du spectacle,³ Barthes’ “way of being present to the struggles of his time” will take the path of a concerted critical impatience with the spectacular as such, the cinema included.⁴ This critique is also accompanied and doubled, however, as always in Barthes’ work, by the evocation of either a utopian alternative or a measure of phenomenological and writerly delight on his own part; cinema is the site of a subtle ambivalence in which a critical language vies with an expressive language. Writing or rewriting the image becomes a mode of resistance to its degradation in an increasingly alienated and alienating culture.⁵

As the survey at the end of this book indicates, Barthes’ references to and writing on the cinema in the 1950s and early 1960s are more frequent and varied than in later periods. This may be a symptom of the more journalistic status of Barthes’ writing prior to his first real institutional engagement at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in 1955; the more substantial theoretical propositions about film come later. One might thus be tempted to consider Barthes’ responses to films in this period as contingent, episodic, or inconsistent. There are nevertheless two salient topics in which a consistent ethos begins to develop; these are the issue of physiognomy—the face—and the issue of space, where theatre and cinema overlap in Barthes’ sustained advocacy of an inclusive and egalitarian mode of spectatorship. In both instances the productive ambivalence at the heart of Barthes’ writing is very much in play. As Noa Steimatsky has observed, the face, and the face in film in particular, is a fascinating object for Barthes, one that provokes a demystificatory analysis and an “ekphrastic” re-mythification, a poetic re-writing.⁶ There is also in Barthes’ writing on the physical space of the cinema and that of the theatre a divergence between the aggressive critique of ideology, on the one hand, and the utopian imagining of a popular collective, on the other.⁷ I will attend, in this chapter, to each of these topics in turn, before turning to two supplementary strands—Barthes’ hesitant engagement with the “cinema of the real,” and, in a more technical mode, with the issue of the photogram, where Barthes’ oblique approach to the cinema is given a first elaboration.

The Face as Object

The first editions of Barthes’ seminal work Mythologies in 1957 came with a promotional wrap-around which featured a series of five photographic images relating to some of the phenomena discussed in the book, including the new Citroën, a wrestling match, science fiction, a photograph of the face of Greta Garbo from Mamoulian’s 1933 film Queen Christina, and an image from the Folies-Bergère.⁸ Alongside the images was a quotation from Brecht which appeared to instruct the readers of Barthes’ book to uncover the “abuse” within the “rule,” or to recognize the ideological manipulation in what appears to go without saying, as Barthes would put it in the work’s preface.⁹ The images on the wrap-around were thus implicitly proposed as emblematic of the stereotypes of everyday life which Barthes would critically dismantle in the essays. Yet there is a curious ambivalence in the relation between text and image here; in the essay on wrestling, and on “The Face of Garbo,” Barthes also seems to wish to maintain and to sustain something of the mythic force of the phenomenon—the collective and popular spectacle of the wrestling match, with all its artifice, and the “transcendent” mask-like photogenia of Garbo.¹⁰ The image of the Folies-Bergère, moreover, relates to a “mythology” which did not appear in the 1957 edition of the book; here too, while acknowledging the slick artificiality of the spectacle of les girls, Barthes intimates something else—a fascination with the face as mask and a paradoxical resistance to the progressive cultural erosion of the time, a resistance to the spectacular within the spectacle itself.¹¹ The close-up, sideways-on photo of Garbo also stands apart from the other images in drawing attention to physiognomy, to the face as such, and to a face from the cinema; while some of the essays in the work, notably “The Romans in Films” and “The Iconography of the Abbé Pierre,” are also concerned with cinematographic physiognomy, particularly in relation to the “abusive” deployment of certain hairstyles, “The Face of Garbo” closes in on the face and in doing so says something about Barthes’ underlying fascination with it, and his desire to redeem it from the generalized dumbing-down he detects across much of the phenomena at stake, on the one hand, and from the critical violence of his own analytic consciousness, on the other. In a substantial chapter of her paradigmatic work The Face on Film, Steimatsky has proposed that “The Face of Garbo” be read as one element of a cluster of essays on the face, most of which stand outside Mythologies and thus belong to a different orientation in Barthes’ work of the time, aimed at a “heroic recovery of the human figure,” in which it is as if Barthes’ gaze “would reconstitute the density of its object by ekphrastic and phenomenological elaboration.”¹² This cluster of “poeticizing” or “re-mythologizing” writings would include, as well as “The Face of Garbo,” first published in 1955, a series of essays from 1953: the essay on the Folies-Bergère, “The World as Object” (a focus on classical Dutch painting), and a substantial essay on the face in cinema, “Visages et figures.”¹³ I would add to this series, by way of a connection to another predominant concern in Barthes’ early writing on cinema, with theatricality, the essay “Une tragédienne sans public,” from 1954, on the great tragic actress Maria Casarès, in which Barthes elaborates on an exhaustive use of the face, in contrast to the superficial sheen of glossy images.

“What is striking,” writes Steimatsky, “is that [Barthes] comes to consider the cinema as a privileged anthropological register for the transmutation of the face in late modernity.” Barthes’ opening argument in “Visages et figures” is that a “sociology of the human face” has only been made possible with the advent of cinema.¹⁴ Ordinarily, he proposes, the image of the face escapes us; the face is continually mobile, and it returns the look, it becomes a subject, preventing the immobilization of the face as an image. The cinema offers a reified and permanent image of the face, paralleled by the faces of the girls at the Folies-Bergère, which have become masks through their very spectacularization. Paradoxically, then, in “Visages et figures” the moving image offers the spectacle of the face as a fixed image, a form Barthes identifies through the hyphenated expression “the face-object” (visage-objet).¹⁵ Steimatsky argues convincingly that Barthes’ predilection for the face as mask in these early essays and in “Visages et figures” in particular is a first expression of “an aesthetic preference for the hieratic, silent, still or stilled image, and the critical potential of suspending cinematic flow by distancing and by the operations of memory and affect.”¹⁶ In the face, and a forteriori in the close-up, in other words, the moving image tends toward the freeze-frame or the photogram, in other words toward photography, and this announces a consistent critical desire that runs across all of Barthes’ writing on the cinema—not a resistance to cinema as such, but a resistance to its unremitting movement and a concomitant desire to still the film.

In “We Had Faces Then,” the chapter which precedes her focus on Barthes, Steimatsky explores the theme of photogénie via discussions of early film theory of writers such as Bela Balázs and Jean Epstein. In a footnote she suggestively posits an affinity between this facial photogenia and Barthes’ later theorization of the photographic punctum (see Chapter 6), thus drawing cinema and photography closer together, despite Barthes’ attempt to define the latter in contradistinction to the former. In a similar vein, in a discussion of the shifts in modes of spectatorship occasioned by the advent of the digital image Laura Mulvey returns, in her book Death 24 x a Second, to the concerns of her landmark article of 1975 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” with words that resonate powerfully with Barthes’ attention to the face:

The cinema of 24 frames a second produced a voyeuristic look at the eroticized image of woman as a defence against a double vulnerability. Male vulnerability to a castrating gaze could be deflected onto a female body that was stylized to the point of artificiality, like the beautiful automaton representing castration in the process of its repression.¹⁷

While I think there are other motives behind Barthes’ attention to the face of Garbo, for example, and while the figure of the “beautiful automaton” will resurface later in Barthes’ œuvre, one element of Mulvey’s argument here is that the cinematic face is already in itself a mode of the stilling of the film. Barthes’ argument in “Visages et figures” operates along similar lines, although it shifts the terms of the proposition to suggest that the face in cinema offers the possibility of a look which is not permitted in the ordinary movement of perception. The filmic face emerges as an object, a face-object, in ways which are disallowed in living encounters.

This account of the way we encounter the face in the cinema and Barthes’ reading of the changing morphology of cinema’s faces is implicitly drawn from an account of the encounter with the other with existential, Sartrean echoes. In both “Visages et figures” and the essay on the Folies-Bergère, Barthes defines the specificity of...