To begin with the response after reading the chapter written by Ronald Barthes, I did not think about the functions and effects that theaters brought to me before. Specifically speaking, the vibe, darkness, size of the screen, audio and visual technologies all play essential role in making people more concentrated and enjoyed on the film. According to Ronald, darkness represents a “twilight reverie” that results in cinematic trance and the loss of worldliness. When I stepped into the cinema and theaters, the darkness will attract all my attentions on the screen. Additionally, turning to the passage written by Walter Benjamin,

Continue readingReading Response: Barthes, R. and Benjamin, W.

Prior to the tutorial I found Benjamin’s reading completely tedious to read through due to its massive number of subject-specific terms and what I found to be incoherent and unfocused writing. I found that while reading through there would be certain individual paragraphs that raised interesting points the overall length and writing of the text felt redundant and failed to make or establish any significant points that stuck with me. After my first read I found his point about the increasingly two way feedback of author and audiences (due to press and internet) as well as the comparison between a

Continue readingReading Response: Walter Benjamin

I have to say that I am in love with this French man’s words. “From street to street, from poster to poster, people finally bury themselves in a dim, anonymous, indifferent cube.” Inside the cube(movie theatre), people sit in the auditorium, “by their human condensation, by their absence of worldliness, by the relaxation of postures,” with other people, experience the darkness, see the “festival of affects known as a film” projected by a beam of “visible and unperceived” light glancing off people and piercing the darkness, get into a new story showed by the image and sound inside the screen. 

Continue readingReading Response: Roland Barthes

Barthes’ expressed his irrepressible fascination with cinema in his article. To him, movie theatre serves not only an instrumental function but also a healing, erotic, relaxing “opaque cube” underlying the immersive darkness. It is the darkness that makes cinema unique from watching television at home. Indulging in this ‘twilight reverie’, the visual and audio effect of the film can be represented more vividly and lifelike, and no more distractions can severe us from the full experience of a movie. Then, we get our ‘image-repertoire’ from the movie, a unity of opposites: one totally immerses in the movie and one preserves

Continue readingReading response: Roland Barthes