Moms, Bears, and Planes...oh my...

I found it interesting how in the beginning of Lucinda, Barthes describes his torturous shifts between genuine and pose and how lifelike we try to be we are still posing, muted and we become dead in this respect "to make oneself up was to designate oneself body as simultaneously living and dead"(31). The camera seems to always elicit ingenuity accept in the case of the surprise shot. This directly coincided with Mr. Treadwell's constant shift between persona and the genuine and in a very morbid analogy his obsession with not assuming but becoming the pose (and becoming a bear) lead to his very literal death.

Barthes states that punctum in the photograph is not coded, this seems to provide evidence of reality. Incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance. This is what I feel gave La Jete its very powerful visual performance. As a film composed of photographs it re-demonstrated to me the power of the photo, a medium I rarely have the patience for. The effort and care put into the composition and organization and pacing of the photos evoked a number of inexplicable feelings and emotions that in film i very rarely have time to process, to add. Using punctum as a measure of reality, does Jete exemplify a film which achieves authenticity?

I feel that punctum is rare in cinema but can be detected. For instance in Grizzly Man, one thing that really smacked in the face/disturbed me/sought out and destroyed me were the behavior of the foxes. This absolutely did not coincide with my understanding of nature, as the bears so predictably did, and made the movie authentic to me amongst an awkward director, cruel ironic edits used to foreshadow, and sentimental reenactments which are used to establish a history. If the fox behavior was in fact a punctum, this punctum would be exclusive to film in that a single photograph cannot properly reveal the in depth wild dog/treadwell relationship as movement and sound do.

Where I disagree with Barthes is his Winter Garden Photograph amongst digressions of his mother. This photo to him was just an image, but a just image that truthfully captured the essence of his mother, it was the photographic epitome of truth to Barthes. But in this scenario the truth is entirely specific to him and him alone, which he alludes to kind of, but I believe that it is impossible for a photograph's meaning and interpretation to be real because this truth it depends on varies to much, there is no constant.

Touching on the questions from the lecture, I believe that a raw photograph cannot lie about the objects in the frame under the laws of science. But the meaning and interpretation has no real base as soon as language, an unreal entity, is applied to it, if that makes any sense. Along the lines of the dead, death is an undeniable reality, it is a truth which is linked strongly with history, the photo seems to incorporate both of these...