Roland Barthes Rustle of Language is a brief yet embellished short essay on the cinema movie viewing experience. Throughout the paper Barthes strongly emphasises the importance of the cinema as an active element in the movie-viewing experience. Barthes argues the cinema is not merely the physical structure in which an audience views a movie, but rather, through its physical characteristics (the englobing darkness, the “amorous” distance between the audience and the screen and the pluralist nature of being in an audience) it’s able contribute to “hypnotising” the spectator, making it view the movie in a semi-concious trance-like state, which in it of itself mutates the experience of watching a movie. The cinema, to Barthes, changes the way audiences experiences and appreciates movies.
This raises implications on how movies as an art form should be viewed. Should a director have a say in the physical space in which movies are to be viewed? Also it creates a debate on whether art should perhaps only be experienced the way it was meant to (in a cinema) concealing it to a determined space accessible to fewer people, as opposed to not doing so for the sake of a broader accessibility (ej viewing movies on a TV).
Lorenzo Pacchiarotti
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I appreciate your reflection on theater and film-watching, especially the darkness and film-watching distance that vividly demonstrate the hypnosis brought by theater. I would suggest you dig your reflection deeper based on the title “Leaving the Movie Theater”, especially the term “leave.” Also, I am wondering how and why you situate yourselves and dispose the situation of “two bodies” during watching films in the theater. Keeping rational, fully falling into the cinematic ideological world or other ways? Moreover, the 2 questions you put forward are very thought-provoking, I would like to hear more about your reflection on these.