Roland Barthes and the Moving Image

Abstract

From Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives (1966) to S/Z (1970), Roland Barthes's work on narrative constitutes an essential source of ideas about the nature of narrative in film. With S/Z, for example, film scholars have found a way to understand texts as an interplay, an interweaving, of voices rather than as the unmediated expression of themes. The notion of codes in S/Z moves beyond Christian Metz's less analytic discussion in Language and Cinema of the imbrication of specific and nonspecific codes and provides a method to approach the complexity of film as textuality. Yet, significantly, it is precisely as method, and not as a philosophy, that Barthes's work has been useful to narratologists. Even though S/Z alternates its semic rewriting of Sarrasine with longer meta-theoretical digressions which derive from a specific poststructuralist ideology, it is the detailed analysis which scholars have picked up from S/Z, while the ideological underpinning is left behind. It is not surprising that S/Z and Mythologies tend to be the books from Barthes's career to which scholars most often refer; these two texts are Barthes's most seemingly practical, providing a way to think about the structurings of masscultural practices in their intricacy and detail. Barthes's work becomes no more than the source of a technique which can be applied to no matter what end. While I agree with the estimation of usefulness for Barthes's work, I am interested here in discussing the link, or lack thereof, between this specific application of Barthes and the less analytic, less methodological aspect of his work which achieves its fullest representation in The Pleasure of the Text, The Empire of Signs, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, and Barthes's final book, Camera Lucida. But for a few comments on the need to develop an aesthetics of textual excess,' scholars concerned to develop analytic methods have found little of interest in Barthes's later work. Indeed, from