The Film Theory of Roland Barthes
There have been few milieus more conducive to the frenetic life of the mind than the one that Watts’s book considers: the French scene spanning the 1950s to the ’80s, an era rife with divisive politics and intellectual and artistic sectarianism, all swiveling around political crises (Algeria, Vietnam), and all positively electrified around the time of May ’68.
In a recent issue of Film Comment, critic Kent Jones recalled the film culture that predominated in 1970s and ’80s New York, his memories weary and tinged with rancor. More cinephobic than cinephilic, this film culture, Jones argued, had more to do with the heady pronouncements of theory than it did with any authentic engagement with, or enthusiasm for, actual films. “Certain names and phrases and references were invoked so regularly that one had the impression of Benedictine monks chanting morning prayers—‘the notion of…Barthes wrote…imaginary Signifier…Heath…mirror phase…Brechtian.’”
Roland