After reading “Leaving the Movie Theater” by Roland Barthes, I was impressed by the way how Barthes described the film-watching experience in a cinema as hypnosis. I usually watch movies on my phone but whenever I want to get relief from daily life, cinema is certainly the best place for me because of the irreplaceable “darkness” in a cinema, significant aroma of pop-corn, bright light beam projected on a big screen, moving images and sound truly distract me from the reality. Fascinated by the film image and its narrative, I always stare at the screen and know nothing about my surroundings, however, Barthes imagined that he had two separate bodies, a “narcissistic” one reflects himself into the movie world while a “perverse” one is like a beholder observing the situation happened within the cinema, including himself. This gives me a new insight into the film-watching experience that watching a film is no longer a literal space for relief but is also a mirrorlike space to understand what I tend to seek from a movie. So, I believe that I will know more about myself in my next movie watching.
–LAI Man Ching, 3035825083
Barthes definitely clings to the hypnotic atmosphere of a cinema! An atmosphere that is inducing (if not supporting) inward self-enjoyment activity. He treats the movie theatre as an escape, an alternate world to what is “outside”, which provided him with “… the most venerable of powers: healing” (p.345). What some people found in libraries, Barthes found it in the cinema. In addition, I’d say that the duality of “self” (or in Barthes’ words: “bodies”) is embodied by the cinema as both an extroverted place (who welcomes the audience) and an introverted place (where we can get lost in our own world) at the same time.