Review: Patrick ffrench, ‘Roland Barthes and Film’

BooksReviews

11 Oct

Review of Patrick ffrench’s *Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics* (Bloomsbury, 2020, hardback; 2021, paperback), 311 pages.

Reviewed by Neil Badmington

On 23 April 1944, Roland Barthes began a letter to his friend Georges Canetti from the sanatorium at Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet, where he was undergoing treatment for tuberculosis: ‘I am writing to you from the terrace where I have a very beautiful view; the weather is splendid and I’ve never seen anything more calming than this Sunday afternoon. Nearly everyone is at the cinema; they don’t know what they’re missing’ (2018: 30). Barthes was twenty-eight years old and had published little at the time, but the mood of many of his later writings on film tints the scene that he sets for Canetti: the cinema is elsewhere, at a muted distance; film obscures something; Barthes prefers to look at a different scene while others contemplate the moving image, which nonetheless flickers its way into the telling of his gaze.

Philip Watts’s Roland Barthes’ Cinema (2016) was the first book-length examination in English of Barthes’s texts on film. Its starting point was Barthes’s declaration of his own ‘resistance to cinema’ (Barthes, 1995: 54). ‘Resistance’, Watts noted, ‘is a sort of compromise between fascination and repulsion, or rather the alternation of critique and fascination, of turning away from while turning toward the sensual delectation of the image’, and Barthes ‘wrote about movies his whole life, as a kind of working-through of this resistance’ (1). Watts’s book was unfinished at the time of his death in 2013 and was brought to publication by several of his friends who observed in their introduction that they ‘had to come to terms with the fact that this collectively edited text would never match the book Phil Watts would have published’ (xi). The rescued chapters that make up Roland Barthes’ Cinema are brilliant, insightful, and suggestive, but there were, the editors noted, planned pathways that Watts simply did not have time to explore.

At more than twice the length of Watts’s book, Patrick ffrench’s Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics is a more sustained study. Like Watts, ffrench begins with Barthes’s ‘resistance to cinema’ – a theme that has become, he observes, ‘a critical commonplace in writing on Barthes and film’ (3). He explains that he takes resistance as his point of departure because he wishes ‘to use this motif as the signal of a sustained ambivalence toward cinema in Barthes’ work, but also to recognize in it not a failure or an impoverishment but a powerful contribution to film theory and film philosophy’ (4). Barthes’s approach, he adds, is ‘ex-centric’ and ‘de-centering’, and it ‘speaks to cinema as if from a “voice-off”’ (4). One of the principal aims of the book, the concise introduction states, is ‘to enter into the internal logic of this theory and to bring it to light’ (4) by offering a ‘broadly chronological’ (14) overview of Barthes’s scattered writings on film.

Chapter 1, ‘Film as Myth and Form’, examines how Barthes’s early writings on the moving image revolve around an interest in the face and in space. Always attuned to context and dialogue, ffrench draws out neatly both ‘a parallel and a divergence’ (26) between how Barthes discusses cinematic physiognomy and how Bataille and others approached the human figure in Documents in the 1920s and 1930s. While Bataille ‘established Hollywood as a site of sumptuous expenditure’ linked to waste and destruction, Barthes found a way to be ‘more attentive to the shifting fortunes of the face within the history of film’ (26). With that attention comes a tension: from the outset in Barthes’s work there is, ffrench proposes, the possibility of ‘an “other” look, a counter-image, another film, which subtly allows the glimpse of another order outside ideology’ (36); at the same time, however, there is a tendency to ‘immobilize the moving image, to reduce it, almost, to its other: photography’ (55).

This ‘photogrammatization’ (55) of film, ffrench stresses, is central to Barthes’s engagement with the cinematic in his semiological writings of the late 1950s and 1960s, and Chapter 2 pursues this point while examining the way in which the essays by Barthes that appeared in the Revue internationale de filmologie, for all their ‘non-cinephilic’ qualities, ‘form an important joint between filmology and film theory’, particularly the work of Christian Metz, Thierry Kuntzel, Gilbert Cohen-Séat, and Etienne Souriau (65).

Much of Chapter 3 is devoted to ‘The Third Meaning’, which was published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1970. Drawing out some fascinating connections between this essay and S/Z, which appeared in the same year, ffrench proposes that, just as Barthes rewrites Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ by casting meaning adrift in analysis, he rewrites Eisenstein in ‘The Third Meaning’, where ‘it is this operation of setting adrift, in a sense, which Barthes brings into play with the third meaning, introducing it through the motif of his incapacity to detach himself from the image, being still “held” by it’ (109). The chapter concludes with a close examination of ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, which develops the propositions of ‘The Third Meaning’ and raises, by singling out a scene in Dreyer’s Vampyr, the possibility of a fleeting ‘transgression of the representational order’ (129). Here, ffrench notes, when we see what a dead man ‘sees’, we confront the ‘theoretical example of a subject position impossible to occupy’ and a ‘breach in the sovereignty of the subject anchored by the system of representation’ (131).

Because ‘The Third Meaning’ is, as ffrench puts it, ‘probably the most commented and contentious of any of Barthes’ writings on film’ (139), Chapter 4 builds upon its predecessor by examining ‘a series of punctual engagements with writers, theorists, and filmmakers for whom Barthes’ “The Third Meaning” is especially significant and whose work has either extended or directly questioned the arguments proposed in that essay’ (139). Figures discussed here include Sylvie Pierre, Georges Didi-Huberman, Gilles Deleuze, and Raymonde Carasco.

Chapter 5 delicately illuminates the neglected relationship between Barthes’s ‘Leaving the Cinema’ and two of his closely contemporaneous books that are not about film in any immediate way: The Pleasure of the Text and A Lover’s Discourse. Referring to the latter, ffrench concludes that there is a ‘lexical overlap between the account of the subject’s capture by the image of the loved object and the spectator’s capture by the image on the screen [that] suggests a powerful parallel between the two processes’ (198). What ffrench’s analysis allows us to see at this point is something that has not been visible sharply enough in earlier accounts: Barthes sees cinematically even when he is not looking at the screen.

The penultimate chapter of the book pursues ‘the issue of the separation of photography from film which Barthes identifies as problematic’ (213) at the very beginning of Camera Lucida. Following a brilliant analysis of Barthes’s invocation of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, ffrench asks ‘if it is precisely in the (re-) attribution of photographic qualities to the moving image that a more positive engagement with cinema is engaged in Barthes’ work. Barthes would thus think the cinema photographically, and re-think it on the basis of the qualities he finds in the photograph, those which he proposes to be transgressive or pathological’ (240). The familiar ‘resistance to cinema’ is anything but simple.

The director of Blow-Up figures at greater length in the concluding chapter, which attends in detail to one of the final pieces that Barthes wrote before his death: ‘Dear Antonioni’. This brief tribute, ffrench notes, ‘is one of the few texts Barthes devoted to a single director’, and, although it has a ‘liminal position in Barthes’ oeuvre’, it nonetheless reveals that Antonioni’s films were ‘both punctually significant and broadly influential for Barthes in his thinking about film’ (247). Antonioni’s sensibilities, ffrench concludes, ‘are very much in tune with Barthes’ own, suggesting a mirroring effect whereby what Barthes finds to love in Antonioni is what he seeks to affirm in his own work’ (247).

For many years it was possible to view Barthes’s contribution to the analysis of film as relatively minor and to be held back – distracted, stupefied, hypnotized – by his self-proclaimed ‘resistance to cinema’, his claim that he went to the movies only ‘as a response to idleness, leisure, free time’ (1986: 345), and his declaration that, when it came to images, he preferred photography (1984: 3). In recent years, however, a ‘renaissance of Roland Barthes’, to borrow the title of a conference held in New York in 2013, has invited us to revise our understanding of the critic’s work. ffrench’s book is a major contribution to that renaissance, that ongoing rereading and revaluation. Philip Watts rightly noted that Barthes’s ‘engagement with film has often been overlooked by readers’ (2016: 9) and that his ‘writings on film are hardly systematic’ (3), but ffrench provides a systematic and corrective overview of those dispersed, occasional texts and their critical significance. The value of this book lies in its thorough, contextualized illumination of the ‘critical theory of the moving image’ that runs erratically through Barthes’s vast body of work. Roland Barthes and Film shows why the conjunction in its title is not the mark of a forced union or a slight strangeness, and Patrick ffrench is a fine usher through Barthes’s ‘filmic sensitivity and sensibility’ (273), his cinematic imaginings, their twists and turns, their projections and jump cuts.

References

Barthes R (2018) Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts. Ed. Marty E and Coste C. Trans. Gladding J. New York: Columbia University Press.

Barthes R (1995) Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Trans. Howard R. London: Papermac.

Barthes R (1986) The Rustle of Language. Trans. Howard R. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Barthes R (1984) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Howard R. London: Flamingo.

Watts P (2016) Roland Barthes’ Cinema. Ed. Dudley A et al. New York: Oxford University Press.

Neil Badmington is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, UK. His books include The Afterlives of Roland Barthes (2016) and Perpetual Movement: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (2021). He is the founding editor of the journal Barthes Studies and is currently writing a creative-critical book titled Guided by Barthes.
Email: Badmington@Cardiff.ac.uk