[Reading Response] Roland Barthes: Leaving the Movie Theater

The writer talks about the importance of the place where you watch the moving images in this article. In one of the sections, he suggests that cinema provides an unfamiliar, dark, and anonymous place for the audience to focus only on the movie. Although I have the same idea as him, things are different. In my experiences of watching a movie in the theatre, people always forgot to switch their phones into silent mode, talked loudly, kicked my chair, etc. The bad feeling was the only thing I could get after watching the movie. Besides these annoying behaviours, there was an argument on the internet, which discussed whether the audience should give applause when watching the movie in the theatre, while the movie “Spider-Man: No Way Home” was available in the cinemas. On the positive side, people think showing feelings is reasonable when the movie is well filmed. On the opposite side, people have a similar idea with the author that cinema should be a place for people to merge into hypnosis. These arguments pointed out a limitation of the idea in the article that people cannot leave reality when they must be aware of disturbing others and try not to express their actual feelings to the movie. In another way, it also explains why some of the annoying behaviours would happen since they had already been hypnotized by the movie and forgot their actions might affect other audiences.  

Wong Siu Wing 3036184204

1 thought on “[Reading Response] Roland Barthes: Leaving the Movie Theater

  1. oscar says:

    I appreciate you expressing your own opinion, which discusses how immersion-breaking the cinema theatre experience can be when people don’t comply. Also, noteworthy that you used real-life online discourse to further discuss this issue. Do you feel that the audience, when “hypnotized,” are more or less likely to act the same?

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.