Myth and the Cinematic Apparatus Deconstructed in The Phantom of Liberty (1974)

Abstract

Roland Barthes defines myth as a semiological system with “the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal.” I link his ideas to Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus theory, which argues that the mechanisms of filmmaking and exhibition forge “an ‘organic’ unity” between a film’s essentially disparate images. Finally, I examine the ways in which films can deconstruct myth by increasing in Barthes’s terms “the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign,” a goal toward which Luis Buñuel’s 1974 film The Phantom of Liberty admirably strives.