Blowup

I love that Barthes references Antonioni's 1966 Blowup on page 85 when he is exploring the boundaries of photographs as a kind of proof or evidence of reality, and what the implications of those boundaries are.  He talks about a situation that arises when he receives a photograph of himself that he does not remember being taken.  "And yet, because it was a photograph I could not deny that I had been there (even if I did not know where).  This distortion between certainty and oblivion gave me a kind of vertigo, something of a "detective" anguish (the theme of Blow-Up was not far off); I went to the photographer's show as to a police investigation, to lear at last what I no longer knew about myself."  

If you haven't seen Blowup, the idea put way too simply is that a photographer thinks he has unwittingly witnessed and taken photographs of a murder in the park, but he is not sure if it really happened or not.  Because he sees a vague image of a body as he is developing his film, he becomes obsessed with determining whether it is really there and blows up the image larger and larger but it becomes decreasingly clear each time.  The film never really resolves whether the murder actually happened, but it does raise the question: is photography surreal, or more true than our own knowledge/memory?  I think that is part of what Bazin is talking about too.

To connect Blowup with Barthes more overtly, it seems that the studium of the photograph is the couple frolicking in the park (what the photographer was intentionally shooting), while the punctum is the murder.  It is a small detail captured accidentally that pricks you.  I think it is interesting too that the specific punctum itself is a violent scene in Blowup, considering that Barthes uses violent language like "prick" and "wound" to describe the concept in Camera Lucida.