Leaving the Movie Theater
Abstract
Roland Barthes’ essay, originally published in the journal Communications (1975, no. 23), describes the “cinema situation” as “pre-hypnotic”. The author analyses the conditions specific to the movie theater, as well as the psychological state of the viewer before going to the cinema and after leaving it. According to Barthes, the darkness of the movie theater combined with the communal and, at the same time, individual experience, constitutes the specificity of the cinema. The author articulates the difference between the cinema and the television, which is associated with family life and does not evoke the same fascination as the cinema. In line with the psychoanalytic approach, Barthes encourages readers to lose themselves in the cinematic experience, but the distance between the audience and the screen is also important to him. The author points out the ideological dimension of watching a film in a movie theater, and consequently he invites his readers to “fall in love with the distance”.
Due to copyright restrictions the article is available in the print version only. (Non-reviewed material).
Keywords:
movie theater, spectator, dreaming, the Real, the Imaginary, the SymbolicReferences
Nie dotyczy / Not applicable
Google Scholar
Authors
Roland Bartheskwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
France
Born 1915, died 1980; an influential French literary and cultural critic, theorist, and a leading representative of semiotics; author of several important articles in the field of film studies. He was associated first of all with École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Collège de France. Among his most famous works are: Mythologies (1957), S/Z (1970), The Pleasure of the Text (1973), A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980). As a cinema theorist, he published: “The Problem of Signification in Cinema” (1960), “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills” (1970), “Leaving the Movie Theater” (1975). In his texts, he blurred the distinction between the scientific and the poetic style.
Statistics
Abstract views: 683PDF downloads: 471
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Roland Barthes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author grants the publisher a royalty-free non-exclusive licence (CC BY 4.0) to use the article in Kwartalnik Filmowy, retains full copyright, and agrees to identify the work as first having been published in Kwartalnik Filmowy should it be published or used again (download licence agreement). The journal is published under the CC BY 4.0 licence. By submitting an article, the author agrees to make it available under this licence.
In issues from 105-106 (2019) to 119 (2022) all articles were published under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. During this period the authors granted a royalty-free non-exclusive licence (CC BY-ND 4.0) to use their article in „Kwartalnik Filmowy”, retained full copyright, and agreed to identify the work as first having been published in our journal should it be published or used again.
