There is something to confess: your speaker likes to leave a movie theater. Back out on the more or less empty, more or less brightly lit sidewalk (it is invariably at night, and during the week, that he goes), and heading uncertainly for some cafe or other, he walks in silence (he doesn’t like discussing the film he’s just seen), a little dazed, wrapped up in himself, feeling the cold—he’s sleepy, that’s what he’s thinking, his body has become something sopitive, soft, limp, and he feels a little disjointed, even (for a moral organization, relief comes only from this quarter) irresponsible. In other words, obviously, he’s coming out of hypnosis.
The contrite speaker above is Roland Barthes, taken from the opening of his 1975 essay, ‘Leaving the Movie Theater.’ Originally published in the journal Communication, for a special issue on ‘Psychoanalysis and Cinema,’ Barthes’ essay alights on a form of experience common to all trips to the cinema but rarely narrated by critics: the strange, dazed state that occurs upon emerging, in which we feel the presence of the material world more acutely and see it through more attentive eyes. But though it is a pleasurable experience, pleasurable enough to need to be confessed, it is also an ambivalent one; confusing and disorientating. How else can the street be “more or less” “empty” or “brightly lit”? These environmental absolutes are modified by the extended spell cast by the film just watched: Barthes notices more upon leaving, and notices even more that these things may not be what they appear to be. He may have left the movie theatre, but as the odd, muddled charisma of Barthes’ prose demonstrates: an element of the experience remains stuck to him. For his part, Barthes makes no effort to shake it off.
In staging the movie-going experience in reverse, and identifying the point of pleasure as the moment in which the cinema is left behind, Barthes suggests a new way of conceiving the art form. Cinema here becomes a mode of experience, coextensive with the world outside, as opposed to a particular site or set of formal constraints. In showing us the world through mechanised means, cinema can re-present the physical world back to us with renewed force. It is precisely because the cinema captures us that we can be released, more attentive and more open, back into the world. If, as the opening of the essay suggests, the cinema is a form of hypnosis then it is a temporary one, one that we eventually have to wake up from. Awaking from hypnosis requires us to come back to our senses, and, in turn, our sense of the world. In showing us the world’s immanence (as opposed to allowing us transcendence) Barthes suggests that the value of film is primarily located in the encounter between the spectator and the world outside, rather than in any specific film. His argument, though a democratic one, is also indifferent to skill, style, or intention. Perhaps this explains Barthes’ need to confess: in admitting to being vulnerable to, and finding pleasure in, cinema’s power of hypnosis he has failed in his job as a critic; failed in the act of discretion, and failed to establish the distance necessary to judge a work based on its formal construction.
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The questions that were being asked when Barthes was writing have dogged cinema since its invention, but are being asked with renewed force in our networked, digitised world: What is cinema? How can we recognise it, and how can it be put to use? Reading Barthes’ post-cinema sensing of cinema, in a post-cinema age, where notions of absorption and attention have become increasingly contested and political, throws light on some of these questions.
In our contemporary environment, highly saturated with screens, the hypnosis Barthes describes risks becoming all-pervasive. We tend to think of hypnosis as something coercive: the substitution of our will for someone else’s, but at the beginning of the essay Barthes only associates his cinema-induced stupefaction with “the most venerable of powers: healing.” Writing of himself in the third person (“your speaker”) he has lost his sense of himself to pleasurable effect. Later on, however, Barthes, now nervous about the consequences of his hypnotism, writes of the contrary, of the cinema’s seductive power, and the completeness of its conquest. “The image captivates me,’ he writes,
captures me: I am glued to the representation, and it is this glue which establishes the naturalness (the pseudo-nature) of the filmed scene (a glue prepared with all the ingredients of ‘technique’).
It is the naturalness of this image that Barthes is threatened by, finding a link between the viscosity of the image and how one can also become ‘glued to ideological discourse.’ Here the cinema’s hypnosis becomes something more coercive: losing oneself allows something else, something disagreeable, to be substituted. It is interesting to read these lines on a laptop: the technology with which we watch moving images may have advanced, and the demands on our senses may have become more acute, but the metaphors we use remain adhesive; we are ‘glued’ to our phones, and feel that we have to ‘peel’ ourselves from them. (The opening of Barthes’ essay testifies to how the process of unsticking can itself become a pleasure. Think of one of the universal rituals of childhood: coating hands in PVA glue just for the satisfaction of peeling it off.)
This distance that Barthes deems essential to avoiding complete absorption in the movies is “not critical (intellectual)” but “amorous”: an analytical, but still reverent, form of engagement—a difference that Barthes’ more figurative language makes clear. Christian Metz’s essay in the same issue of Communication describes the light from the projector as purely functional, “a beam of light,” provided to quite literally project our desires (or an image that we may accept as representing our desires) onto an undifferentiated screen. Barthes, on the other hand, in a passage I love, admires this “dancing cone,” “visible” yet “unperceived,” for delivering a different kind of illumination: “a gleaming vibration whose imperious jet brushes our skull, glancing off someone’s hair, someone’s face.” But why “visible” and “unperceived”? Here the directness of the beam—and the corresponding image of its effectiveness—is dispersed, scattered by the inconvenient, intruding heads of the very audience that it needs in order to function as an ideological tool. In Barthes’ essay, perceiving the cinema as a form of interpersonal connection becomes more than a cute abstraction: the source of cinema—its literal light source—is an intimate touch between strangers, all the more moving for gracing them undetected. That you can be both touched without noticing and moved without knowing it is both the risk and the miracle of cinema. Barthes believes in both.
It is therefore in the presence of distracting strangers, in the intrusion of the extra-cinematic world upon the supposedly hermetic experience of the film, that Barthes finds what may be a solution to complete entrancement: the desiring body of the spectator, what he calls “the perverse body.” Roaming across the cinema hall, Barthes’ gaze oscillates between the image on screen that threatens to seduce him, and the seductive aspects of the surrounding cinema space; most notably the bodies that occupy it. Entering the cinema, Barthes describes himself as:
ready to fetishize not the image but precisely what exceeds it: the texture of the sound, the hall, the darkness, the obscure mass of the other bodies, the rays of light, entering the theater, leaving the hall.
The distraction provided by the erotic components of the cinema, the “absence of worldliness,” “the relaxation of postures”, and “the inoccupation of bodies”, weakens Barthes’ adherence to the image, allowing him to enjoy both the feelings conjured by the film itself as well as the bodies surrounding it. Instead of condemning the lure of the cinema outright, Barthes attempts to describe a desiring, positive-feedback, mode of spectatorship, in which the fascination for the image is extended to all the elements of the cinematic experience. Lured in multiple directions, Barthes can enjoy the cinema without being uncritically absorbed by it.
How can we apply this in a post-cinematic context? It is a given that we lose some of these more immersive aspects of the cinema through home or mobile viewing: the darkness, the size of the image, and the hermetic space. But what do we lose when some of cinema’s essential rituals—feeling the seductive pull of the invisible cone of light, or exiting the building—is substituted for simply putting a film down, or turning it off? If, for Barthes, the political work of cinema takes place in the body’s post-film encounter with the world outside or mid-film awareness of others, is there a way we can reproduce this on our sofas, or at our desks, or on our phones?
Reading ‘Leaving the Movie Theater,’ one would initially think not. The fourth paragraph of the essay makes clear Barthes’ disdain for television, a derision that stems not from the potential distractions afforded by the attendant chintz, but from the fact that the domestic enclave does not distract us enough. In the living room “space is familiar, articulated (by furniture, known objects), tamed.” The prosaic living space speaks to us in terms that are recognisable and mundane, and so we do not hear it, perceiving too effortlessly the sound from the box in front of us. The brightness of the room—its imperfect darkness—frustrates him, not because it competes with the image on screen, but because it inhibits the kind of erotic experience that the anonymity of the cinema allows. Barthes revels in hyperbole: television has “doomed us to the Family,” by which he means the prescribed, the expected, and the safe—a place of “no fascination.” Here there is a bind: How can we become enlivened by a place we already know intimately, without losing cinema or ourselves to the complacent comfort of domesticity?
Here it might be worth risking a rather heterodox statement. Perhaps the more Barthesian domestic viewing experience might be full of the kind of distractions that, on our sofas, make us miss the hermetic space of the cinema: checking one’s phone, a comment from a companion, getting up to have a drink, or perhaps a piss. Each of these interruptions—whilst they may interfere with the continuity of the film experience—brings us back to the “situation” of cinema (always different but retaining these fundamentals): of a body, full of urges and needs, responding to a moving image, and the flickering awareness of these two facts. Though (and here you may speak for yourselves) the twin desires to check notifications or empty our bladder do not have the same erotic charge as Barthes’ cruising eye, they nonetheless testify to the fact of the “body’s freedom,” that he deems an essential component of the cinematic experience: its drive for satisfaction, against or in concert with the film placed before it. It is our desires, suspended in us through their displacement onto the screen, that give cinema the power of hypnosis and can therefore make it dangerous. To feel one’s body shift or incline, even towards the most fundamental or mundane of actions, is both to feel the engine of cinema within ourselves and to feel it separate from the thing that risks our complacency.
What this leaves us with does seem rather unsatisfactory: I’ll admit that acknowledging your bodily functions whilst watching a film is likely to be no one’s idea of radicalism. But if it sounds too much like mindfulness this might be because we now live in a media environment that in many ways feels both compulsive and intrusive: screened media is everywhere, and we can’t stop ourselves from watching it. Barthes ends ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’ by suggesting that what he wants from cinema–and what he hopes his embodied, erotic form of spectatorship achieves–is what he calls ‘a possible bliss of discretion.’ Discretion is the cautious side of choice: having the freedom not to act, as well as the freedom to act. Barthes may describe himself as being ‘glued’ to the screen, but it is nonetheless a state of capture that he actively seeks out and that he consents to enter. He describes his walk to the cinema (the ‘cinema situation’) as ‘pre-hypnotic’: ‘a response to idleness, leisure, free time.’ The loss of cinema as a physical space and the translation of so much of our lives onto digital platforms–not to mention the scripting of one’s exposure to the world through algorithms–means that discretion feels increasingly impossible. The look that desires and the body that feels are both reminders that absorption is optional, not inevitable: we may, in fact, realise what we want is outside a screen altogether.
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