Reading Response: Roland Barthes

The text concerning people’s feelings in the cinema really gives me some inspirations. When it talks about “cinema situation”, I can’t help thinking of my experiences in the cinema, feeling hypnotic, and now I know it relates to darkness and the relaxation it triggers.

His idea of “two bodies” also shows me a better way to watch and understand a film. For one thing, I can have a narcissistic body lost in the images of the film. But for another, in order to really understand the film, I must have a perverse body not limited by the images. It must look and think more deeply, into the texture of the film and the atmosphere of the cinema. This idea also sheds light on the features of good films, which not only attract people by their images, but also create atmospheres for people to look into and think more.

Song Yang, 3035772781

1 thought on “Reading Response: Roland Barthes

  1. Noella Kwok says:

    Great effort in using the “narcissistic body” and “perverse body” to interpret the ways of seeing in the text. You may like to delve deeper into the distances between the bodies and the image – Barthes noted that “the Real knows only distances, the Symbolic knows only masks; the image alone (the image-repertoire) is close, only the image is “true” (can produce the resonance of truth” (1986,348) and that he “complicate[s] a “relation” by a “situation” […] [he is] hypnotized by a distance; and this distance is not critical (intellectual)” (1986, 349). What is the importance of “distance” to allow one to “narcissistically identify” (1986, 348) oneself and exceed the image through the “perverse body”?

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