INNER CIRCLE - Film Theory Lectures I Mentioned in a Video

Nice stuff, Dan! The coolest thing about foundational texts is how later writers often end up in a kind of implied dialogue with them. My favourite book on photography is “Camera Lucida” by Roland Barthes, and I see now that he references this essay in the scene where he is trying to find the essence/being of his diseased mother in her photographs. And he keeps failing (probably because a person is always more than “the light that they reflect” at any particular moment). This is how he describes it (so beautifully): “According to these photographs, sometimes I recognized a region of her face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the movement of her arms, her hands. I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether. It was not she, and yet it was no one else. I would have recognized her among thousands of other women, yet I did not “find” her. I recognized her differentially, not essentially. Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labour: straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false. To say, confronted with a certain photograph, “That’s almost the way she was!” was more distressing than to say, confronted with another, “That’s not the way she was at all.” The almost: love’s dreadful regime, but also the dream’s disappointing status—which is why I hate dreams. For I often dream about her (I dream only about her), but it is never quite my mother: sometimes, in the dream, there is something misplaced, something excessive: for example, something playful or casual—which she never was; or again I know it is she, but I do not see her features (but do we see, in dreams, or do we know?): I dream about her, I do not dream her. And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labour: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again.” P.S. later he discovered one special photo of her, but that is another story.

Dr Q