Roland Barthes' Cinema

Roland Barthes' Cinema offers the first systematic English-language critical treatment of Barthes' writing on cinema, reassessing the relevance of his work for a new generation of readers and filmgoers. In six parts, it relates particular moments or phases in Barthes's intellectual itinerary: his early, largely ideologically driven critique of the mass media (and Hollywood cinema in particular); his innovative endeavors to construct a semiological, paralinguistic understanding of the status of the photographic or film image; his sideways shift into a renewed understanding of textual pleasures (including those of spectatorship); his attempts to elaborate a more fluid kind of theoretical understanding of textual affects and effects; and, finally, his return to the Romanticism of the fragment, of Schumann, and of what Watts describes as his "melodramatic imagination." In sum, this compact study serves as a primer to the central tenets of Barthes' thought as well as a survey of art cinema in the last half of the twentieth century.

Philip Watts was Professor of French at Columbia University until his death in 2013. His previous books include Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France and Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics.