Ebook: Roland Barthes' cinema

"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."--Publisher's description.;Introduction -- A degraded spectacle. The interpreter and the sensualist -- Roman hair -- A Cold War cinema -- Demystification, 1957 -- The face of Garbo -- Refresh the perception of the world. On cinemascope -- Barthes and the New Wave -- Barthes and Bazin. Lost continent -- From ontology to rhetoric and back -- Camera Lucida -- Another revolution. The fetishist -- Eisenstein, 1970 -- From leftocracy to affect and intimacy -- Leaving the movie theater. The science of filmology -- Apparatus theory -- The aestheticization of the world -- A long conversation with Christian Metz -- Leaving theory -- The melodramatic imagination. The Brontë sisters -- The New Wave's melodramatic turn -- Michel Foucault's melodramatic imagination -- Barthes and Foucault -- Barthes and Truffaut: Melodramatic photography -- Conclusion: From Barthes to Rancière? -- Interview with Jacques Rancière -- Nine texts on the cinema by Roland Barthes: The angels of sin (Les anges du péché, 1943) -- On CinemaScope -- Versailles and its accounts -- Cinema, right and left -- On left-wing criticism -- Traumatic units in cinema: research principles -- Preface to Les inconnus de la terre (Strangers of the Earth, Mario Ruspoli, 1961) -- Answer to a question about James Bond -- Sade -- Pasolini.