Roland Barthes’s Cold-War Cinema

Roland Barthes’s essays are now part of the history of film studies, their force having pulled back with the tide of theory. Barthes’s proclaimed “resistance to cinema” (Roland Barthes, 54), however, the choice he made near of the end of his life to write about photography “in opposition to Cinema” (Camera Lucida, 3), the pleasure he felt upon leaving a movie theatre, his suspicion toward what he called cinema’s “imperialism,”1 leave the impression of a vertiginous ambivalence toward the movies at the heart of a work that not so long ago was a fundamental reference for film scholars. This suspicion toward the moving image may be attributed to Barthes’s melancholy penchant for the stillness and silence that inspired his meditative essays, or perhaps to a European literary scholar’s mistrust of an art form that he saw primarily as a commodity and a popular spectacle. Barthes’s ambivalence may also have been tactical, however. If we follow Barthes’s writing on films, from the early Mythologies to his last essay on Antonioni, we find that Barthes’s resistance to cinema may have also been an attempt to sketch out a resistance to what he saw as another sort of imperialism, that of the two rival and dominant Cold-War powers. Barthes’s essays on film may very well have been determined not just by a desire to escape what in his 1975 essay “En sortant du cinéma” he labeled the “ideological” (258), but also and more precisely by an attempt to question through writing an opposition that structured the film field after 1945, and which Barthes in his Mythologies, called “la grande contestation URSS-USA” (42). 2