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Roland Barthes' Cinema
by Philip Watts
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Book Presentation:
• Offers the first systematic English-language critical treatment of Barthes' writing on cinema
• Provides detailed analysis of the various stages of Barthes's intellectual itinerary
• Examines Barthes's explicit and implicit dialogue with France's leading postwar film critic, André Bazin
• Includes nine translated texts written by Barthes about cinema, as well as an exclusive interview with renown public intellectual Jacues Raciére
The most famous name in French literary circles from the late 1950s till his death in 1981, Roland Barthes maintained a contradictory rapport with the cinema. As a cultural critic, he warned of its surreptitious ability to lead the enthralled spectator toward an acceptance of a pre-given world. As a leftist, he understood that spectacle could be turned against itself and provoke deep questioning of that pre-given world. And as an extraordinarily sensitive human being, he relished the beauty of images and the community they could bring together.
About the Author:
Philip Watts, Professor of French, Columbia University, Edited by Dudley Andrew, R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature, Yale University, Edited by Yves Citton, University of Grenoble, Edited by Vincent Debaene, Associate Professor of French, Columbia University, and Edited by Sam Di Iorio, Associate Professor of French, Hunter College / CUNY Grad Center Philip Watts was Professor of French at Columbia University and Chair of the department from 2008 to 2012. A specialist of twentieth-century French literature and film, he is the author of Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France and co-editor of Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics.
Press Reviews:
"this is a rich and nuanced intervention which changes how we see Roland Barthes and film." - Neil Badmington, Times Literary Supplement
"Philip Watts' probing of Barthes' advance-retreat relationship to the movies is wise, sensitive and stimulating-in fact, brilliant. Even rarer is the warmth, clarity and goodwill he expresses toward the often antagonistic figures who championed French theory. The addition of several previously unavailable pieces by Barthes makes this an irresistible volume." - Philip Lopate, author of To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction
"Philip Watts' ground breaking work on Roland Barthes and cinema is a gift to film studies, to literary studies, and to theory. No other critic could match Watts in combining close textual analysis with historical insight. His encounter with Barthes' resistance to cinema shows a deep and refined critical vision, leavened by wit that Barthes would have appreciated." - Alice Kaplan, author of Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis
"Watts saw another Barthes besides the semiologist, the structuralist, the demystifier and the Brechtian Barthes, a Barthes who had always been in love with the image and with a particular aesthetics of daily life...." - Jacques Rancière
"[A] thoughtful bookWatts approach uncovers unexpected riches in what have seemed to be minor moments in Barthes work. The book has chapters on film and myth, on film and perception, on Barthes and Bazin, on film and utopian politics, on film theory, on melodrama Roland Barthes Cinema also includes new translations (by Deborah Glassman) of nine of Barthes less well-known articles on film. s"
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
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