Barthes’ writing about the happenings in cinema allows me to reflect on the purpose and significance of watching movies in the cinema. Despite not being able to enjoy and experience the cinema during the pandemic, the reading serves even more important to remind us why is cinema important.
Barthes emphasized on the ‘darkness’ inside cinema which is not only visually dark but also atmospherically silent, such condition allows us to truly immerse into the movie, reducing the distant feeling due to surrounding activities, noises and distractions. Nowadays, cinemas are being considered less and less important as technology allows us to view the same content easily online at any time, in anyplace. Streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney+ provides accessibility for people to watch movies but seldom will audiences discover the huge difference in terms of the viewing experience. The space that allows us to imagine and feel are often forgotten when we watch carefully planned movies casually. As a result, fewer and fewer people truly understand and reach the depth of the movie itself.
Tang King To Anson
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I would argue that the movie theatre is not “atmospherically silent”, not even when one is watching a silent movie. In fact, Barthes dedicated a paragraph to talk about the significance of sound in film – “sound is merely a supplementary instrument of representation; it is meant to integrate itself unobtrusively into the object shown, it is in no way detached from this object;[…] blurring the scene shown by the screen yet without distorting its image (its gestalt, its meaning).” (1986, 347).
It would be great if you could elaborate a bit more on the viewing experiences at a movie theatre and on streaming platforms to support your point of their differences and potential obsolescence (?) of movie theatres. It would also be helpful if you unpack and reference the text a bit more in your response. For example, what did Barthes meant by “dark” as “the very substance of reverie (in the pre-hypnoid meaning of the term) […] also the “color” of a diffused eroticism; by its human condensation, by its absence of worldliness.” (1986, 346)? Why is leaving the movie theatre, bringing oneself out of “darkness” and “hypnosis” and back to the world, so important in the viewing experience at the movie theatre?