#rolandbarthes — Public Fediverse posts

The war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
-- Roland Barthes

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #RolandBarthes #CommonSense #Intelligence

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Kayaks #Everglades #Florida

The war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
-- Roland Barthes

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #RolandBarthes #CommonSense #Intelligence

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sealions #Beach #Galapagos

Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes (EPUB)
Author: Roland Barthes
File Type: EPUB
Download at https://sci-books.com/mourning-diary-0374533113/
#Biographies, #RolandBarthes

The Eiffel Tower, and other mythologies by Roland Barthes (PDF)
Author: Roland Barthes
File Type: PDF
Download at https://sci-books.com/the-eiffel-tower-and-other-mythologies-0809041154/
#, #RolandBarthes

Jetzt hat auch #RolandBarthes ein Buch über KI veröffentlicht – frei nach dem Motto: follow the hype because it won't follow you! Ist aber gar nicht so übel, Leseempfehlung!

Seriously speaking: A Claude bases article on Knut Skjærven’s street photography

By Claude (AI) with some adjustments and updates

There are photographers, and then there are photographers who think deeply about what photography actually is.

Knut Skjærven belongs firmly in the latter camp. Norwegian by birth, Copenhagen by choice, and street photographer by passion — Skjærven is one of those rare figures who brings genuine intellectual rigour to a genre often dismissed as mere snapshot-taking.

His work sits at the intersection of philosophy, visual perception, and the raw human encounter, and to understand his photography is to understand something important about how we see.

From Bergen to the Streets of Europe

Skjærven’s path to photography was anything but direct. Born and raised in Bergen, Norway, he originally intended to become a lawyer. But, as he has described it, a moment of “existential despair” redirected him toward philosophical aesthetics — a detour that would shape everything that came after.

He went on to earn a B.A. from the University of Bergen and an M.A. in Film Science from the University of Copenhagen, building a broad academic foundation spanning philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, logic, and mass communication. After a brief stint as a university lecturer — and after what he himself described as “gatecrashing” the Danish advertising industry — he spent two decades as a manager at TDC, Denmark’s largest telecommunications company, even completing an executive course at INSEAD, the prestigious French business school.

Photography had long circled in the background. He had freelanced as a journalist and photographer for Norwegian newspapers for many years. But it wasn’t until 2010 that he committed to the craft with full seriousness. When he did, he approached it the way he approached everything else: with total immersion, theoretical rigour, and a refusal to do things halfway.

Henri Cartier-Bresson as Mentor

When Skjærven resolved to pursue photography in earnest, he needed a guiding figure. He chose Henri Cartier-Bresson — not by signing up for a masterclass, but by making the French master his self-appointed mentor across time. He read every book written by and about Cartier-Bresson. He studied his photographs frame by frame, searching for the inner logic beneath the instinctive brilliance.

The process yielded a surprising discovery. Many of Cartier-Bresson’s most iconic photographs revealed a deep structural affinity with gestalt psychology — even though Cartier-Bresson had almost certainly never consciously engaged with that theoretical tradition. His famous feel for balance, tension, and the “decisive moment” could be mapped onto principles that gestalt thinkers had formalised decades earlier. This was not a coincidence, Skjærven concluded; it was evidence that great visual perception operates according to laws that can be understood and, crucially, learned. (KS: Should be moderated).

His own equipment philosophy reflects a similar discipline. He has described his preference for gear that “slowed him down a bit” — favouring the Leica X1/X2 for its near-invisibility on the street and its silence, and choosing manual lenses precisely because the extra thought they demanded forced a more intentional relationship with what was in front of the lens. “I have deliberately tried to eliminate all sources of error by doing things the right way,” he has said. When something goes wrong, he knows where to look: at himself.

Street Photography as Philosophy

What makes Skjærven genuinely distinctive is the seriousness with which he treats photography as an intellectual discipline. He describes his work as documentary, and understands street photography not as a location but as an approach — a mode of honest, respectful, unstaged engagement with people wherever they are found.

He is careful, however, about the word “unstaged.” The moment a photographer opens their eyes, choices begin: what camera, what lens, what settings, what time of day, what background. All of these are subtle forms of staging. The difference lies in spirit and intention. For Skjærven, street photography is at its core an act of respect — for people, for moments, for the truth of what is actually in front of the lens.

His visual philosophy is equally demanding. He insists that aspiring photographers look away from social media, and instead educate their eyes in Europe’s finest galleries — studying Matisse, Rembrandt, Picasso, and Munch before ever turning to photography. “The history and learning of street photography does not start with photography,” he has written. “It ends with it.” For him, photography is art, and art demands the full breadth of a cultural education.

He is also a committed advocate of what he calls “small coin photography” — a phrase drawn directly from the philosopher Edmund Husserl, who reportedly urged his students: “Not the big bills, gentlemen, rather the small coins.” In an era of award-winning disaster imagery and high-drama photojournalism, Skjærven insists that the greater technical and artistic challenge lies in mastering the quiet, the subtle, the apparently undramatic. It takes, he has argued, considerably less talent to photograph someone falling from a building than to control all the fine-tuned elements of a less dramatic image.

The Phenomenological Toolkit: Seeing Before the Camera

To understand Skjærven’s deepest contribution to photography, one has to engage with phenomenology — the philosophical tradition he has spent years applying to the visual act of making pictures.

Phenomenology, founded by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl at the turn of the twentieth century, is the rigorous study of experience itself: not the world as it is “out there,” but the world as it appears to a conscious mind. Its core directive — zu den Sachen selbst, “to the things themselves” — demands that we set aside inherited assumptions and theories, and attend carefully to what is actually given in experience. It is, in essence, a philosophy of attentive, unbiased looking.

For Skjærven, this is not an abstract academic interest. It is a practical lens — or rather, a way of seeing that precedes the lens entirely.

Husserl’s lectures on perception, phantasy, image-consciousness, and memory, delivered at Göttingen in 1904–1905, gave Skjærven a key framework. Husserl distinguished between the physical image (the photograph as material object), the image-object (what is depicted), and the image-subject (what the depiction is of or about). For a street photographer, this tripartite distinction matters enormously: it reminds us that a photograph is not simply a record of reality, but a structured act of representation in which the photographer’s consciousness shapes every level of meaning.

There is also, for Skjærven, a deeply personal reason why phenomenology and street photography belong together. Both are committed to what Husserl called the epoché — the bracketing of assumptions, the suspension of the taken-for-granted, in order to see freshly. A great street photograph does exactly this: it catches the world at a moment when its ordinary invisibility falls away, and something essential becomes visible. The photographer’s job is to be present and open enough to notice when that moment arrives.

Gestalt Factors: The Invisible Rucksack

Alongside phenomenology, Skjærven draws heavily on gestalt psychology — the early twentieth-century tradition developed by, among others, Max Wertheimer, who, along with Edmund Husserl and Rudolf Arnheim, taught at what is now Berlin’s Humboldt University. Skjærven has spoken about visiting the Humboldt University every time he comes to Berlin, as a reminder that science and intellectual innovation have direct consequences for how we practise visual communication.

Gestalt psychology proposes that the human mind perceives wholes rather than assemblies of parts. We see a face, not a collection of features. We see a composition, not an arrangement of lines. The gestalt principles — proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, figure-ground — describe the mechanisms by which perception organises raw sensory data into coherent, meaningful experience.

Skjærven has integrated these principles so thoroughly into his photographic practice that they have become, in his words, “part of my second nature” — an “invisible rucksack” he carries on every shoot. Gestalt factors, he argues, help the photographer understand why a photograph holds together as a whole: why certain elements create tension or harmony, why the eye is drawn in particular directions, why an image feels complete or incomplete. As one participant in his Berlin workshop put it: “Gestalt factors help us to see that a whole exists independently from the component parts, thereby imbuing a photograph with an inner dynamic that works at the unconscious level.”

The crucial insight here — one that connects gestalt psychology directly to Skjærven’s phenomenological commitments — is that this is not primarily about conscious compositional calculation. It is about training perception itself, so that the eye begins to see gestalt structure automatically, in real time, in the living world. The goal is not to apply a formula; it is to develop a way of seeing that is ready when the decisive moment arrives.

Roland Barthes and the Street Photographer’s Toolbox

Phenomenology and gestalt psychology are not the only theoretical tools in Skjærven’s kit. He has also made extensive use of Roland Barthes — particularly Barthes’ analysis of photographic connotation in The Photographic Message and his later, more intimate meditation in Camera Lucida.

From Camera Lucida, Skjærven draws on Barthes’ famous distinction between the studium — the culturally coded, generally interesting dimension of a photograph — and the punctum — the detail that pierces, that wounds, that exceeds cultural coding and strikes the individual viewer with unexpected force. For Skjærven, this distinction maps onto a practical question for the street photographer: what separates a merely competent image from one that genuinely arrests attention? The punctum, he argues, is not something the photographer can manufacture deliberately; but an educated eye, trained in perception and attuned to the unexpected, is far more likely to find it.

From Barthes’ earlier work on The Photographic Message, Skjærven draws a set of what he calls “connotation procedures” — the ways in which a photograph generates meaning beyond its literal content. These include trick effects, pose, objects, photogenia, aestheticism, and syntax. Each of these, Skjærven argues, offers the street photographer a practical analytical lens: a way of understanding, after the fact, why an image works — and, with practice, a way of building that understanding into the act of looking itself.

He has documented this framework extensively in his Street Photographer’s Toolbox project — a body of writing and teaching aimed not at academic readers, but at active photographers who want practical tools for seeing better. “My ambition was never to do yet another study on perception,” he has written, “or to embark on an academic path to street photography. What interested me was to see how I could use the tools as a photographer. Pictures, not words, have the highest priority.”

Open and Closed Images: A Phenomenology of Attention

One of Skjærven’s more original visual concepts is his distinction between “open” and “closed” images — a distinction that emerges directly from phenomenological thinking about perception and attention.

At first glance, the terms seem self-explanatory: an open image suggests space, possibility, incompleteness; a closed image suggests containment and self-sufficiency. But Skjærven’s analysis reveals something counterintuitive. An image that appears visually spacious and open may, on closer inspection, be entirely self-contained — it gives you everything it has to give, and asks for nothing more. He calls this a closed image. Conversely, an image that appears visually tight or constrained may generate an almost irresistible desire to know more: what is happening beyond the frame? What came before? What comes next? This is the open image — not open in its visual space, but open in the quality of attention it demands.

This distinction speaks to something fundamental about the phenomenology of looking. A photograph does not simply present an object; it structures a relationship between the viewer’s consciousness and the world depicted. The best street photographs, on this account, are those that create an encounter — not merely a record.

The New Street Agenda: A Project in Progress

All of these theoretical threads — phenomenology, gestalt, Barthes, the open/closed distinction — converge in Skjærven’s umbrella project, New Street Agenda, which he formally named in 2014, though its roots go back to 2007.

New Street Agenda is not a static body of work but an ongoing process — a “tandem of shooting and analysing,” as Skjærven describes it. He often finds the most interesting intellectual challenges after he has taken a photograph: he returns to the literature, asks why a particular image works, and brings that understanding back to bear on the next encounter on the street. “The idea is to open a multitude of different venues and put them silently to work,” he has written. The theory becomes perception; perception becomes image.

The project includes multiple blogs and sites — Barebones Communication (2007), Berlin Black and White (2010), Phenomenology and Photography (2010), and the Street Photographer’s Toolbox — as well as Facebook communities bringing together European street photographers, workshops held in Berlin and elsewhere, and a personal coaching programme running across twelve weeks and seven modules.

Berlin has a particular significance in this geography. It was in Berlin that Husserl, Wertheimer, and Arnheim all taught. It was in Berlin that Skjærven began running street photography meets, initially — delightfully — reserved exclusively for Contax G photographers. And it was from Berlin’s streets that many of the images illustrating his theoretical work were drawn.

Recognition and Publications

Skjærven’s work has not gone unnoticed. In 2014, he was interviewed by the Financial Times for his photography — a notable recognition for someone working outside the mainstream gallery circuit. In 2015, he received perhaps his most prestigious honour: a nomination for the HCB Award by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg — an award named after the very photographer he had made his self-appointed mentor.

He has published two books — Filmvidenskap. Et fænomenologisk Essay (pdf file in Danish) and Godkendt – et værktøj til objektiv reklamevurdering (in Danish). He has been featured by Leica Camera, tested new Leica equipment for the brand, and been profiled in photography communities across Europe. (KS: This is a bit overdone).

He is a member of NFF, the Non-Fiction Writers and Translators Organisation in Norway, and is available for freelance photography and journalism assignments, as well as workshops and private coaching.

Why his approach matters?

In a world flooded with street photography — much of it technically accomplished but intellectually thin — Knut Skjærven represents something genuinely valuable: the photographer as thinker.

His work makes a serious claim: that great photography is not primarily a matter of luck, reflexes, or equipment, but of trained perception — a way of seeing that has been cultivated through broad cultural education, philosophical self-awareness, and sustained, disciplined practice. The goal is not to arrive on the street armed with formulas, but to have internalised a way of looking so thoroughly that it operates below the level of conscious thought, ready to recognise the moment when the world briefly makes itself visible.

This is, at heart, a phenomenological claim. And it is one of the most rigorous and hopeful ideas in contemporary photography: that seeing is a skill, that it can be learned, and that the discipline required is inseparable from a genuine engagement with the full tradition of art, philosophy, and human culture.

Skjærven describes himself, always, as “the first student” — endlessly curious, never finished. That humility, combined with the depth and seriousness of his intellectual commitments, makes him one of the more compelling and underappreciated voices in European photography today.

If you haven’t come across his work yet, the blogs are well worth an extended afternoon. Bring a notepad — and perhaps a copy of Husserl.

Knut Skjærven can be reached at [email protected]. His work and writing can be found at across his network of photography and theory blogs.

The blogs: Barebones Communication (2007); Berlin Black and White (2010); Phenomenology and Photography (2010); Street Photographers Toolbox (2012); New Contax G Pages (2025).

Nowadays most of his posts goes into (this blog) On Street Photography and other Life-Changing Events (2014).

You may want to see some of his recent projects: Enigma (2024); Decisive Moments (2025); Undoing Sharpness 2025 in progress; His Masters Choice 2026 in progress; New Contax G Pages (2025);

He also runs a personal blog Ad Notam: Uoppfordrete skriveøvelser om mere til … (2014) written in Norwegian, English and Danish.

Tags: street photography, Knut Skjærven, phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, gestalt psychology, Roland Barthes, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Copenhagen, Norwegian photographers, visual communication, European photography, philosophy of photography, New Street Agenda

"Roland Barthes in his classic study of photography, Camera Lucida, uses two terms, punctum and studium, to descrube our reactions to photographs.

"The studium can be translated as what the photo represents in aesthetic and intellectual terms, wholly disconnected from our emotional response.

"The punctum can be translated as the wound of the photograph. It's both emotional and individual. The punctum for you might be different from my sense of the punctum in a photograph.

"It's a small detail that wounds us, a bou's crooked teeth in a photograph of smiling boys, a man shading his eyes from the sun in another."

--Robin Hemley, essay Lines that Create Motion, The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre

Camera Lucida : Reflections on Photography used book by Roland Barthes: 9780374532338

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/camera-lucida-reflections-on-photography-9780374532338

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-far-edges-of-the-fourth-genre-an-anthology-of-explorations-in-creative-nonfiction-9781611861211

#robinhemley, #rolandbarthes, #creativenonfiction #savednotes

"Language, according to Beneviste, is the only #semioticsystem capable of interpreting another #semiotic #system ... How, then does #language when it has to interpret #music? Alas, it seems, very badly.' #RolandBarthes, "The Grain of the Voice," Image Music Text

What passes for “common sense” often defines which forms of intelligence are allowed to speak.

When we stop trying to force coherence through control, a different wisdom becomes audible — carried through exhaustion, relational signals, and shared attention. Listening reconnects us with what we already know, but have learned to ignore.

Full reflection for this week here:
https://emotus.substack.com/p/the-wisdom-that-is-already-there

#TheWisdomThatIsAlreadyThere #RelationalInfrastructure #PracticedAttention #RolandBarthes

The war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
-- Roland Barthes

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #RolandBarthes #CommonSense #Intelligence

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #PitcherPlants #Flowers #Florida

Writing Degree 32.

#AltUnitsOfMeasurements
#HashTagGames
#RolandBarthes

"Separate the art from the artist"? That's hard while the artist still earns a royalty and spends it on harassing critics in court or promoting intolerance.

"The Death of the Author"? The author's heirs aren't dead and can keep a biography from being published. Copyright encourages intentionalism.

#intentionalism #copyright #FairUse #DeathOfTheAuthor #RolandBarthes #LiteraryCriticism

The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980 (English and French Edition) by Roland Barthes (PDF)
Author: Roland Barthes
File Type: PDF
Download at https://sci-books.com/the-grain-of-the-voice-interviews-1962-1980-english-and-french-edition-0809050889/
#Philosophy, #RolandBarthes

Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) by Roland Barthes (EPUB)
Author: Roland Barthes
File Type: EPUB
Download at https://sci-books.com/album-unpublished-correspondence-and-texts-european-perspectives-a-series-in-social-thought-and-cultural-criticism-0231179863/
#Philosophers, #RolandBarthes

J'avais filmé cette vidéo il y a un petit moment, je profite du nettoyage d'automne de mes blogs pour vous la remettre.

https://swamp.fr/lempire-des-signes-par-roland-barthes/

#Japon #RolandBarthes #Sémiologie

"... the exuberant dance of language, delighting in the textures of words themselves...

Reading is less like a laboratory than a boudoir."

#RolandBarthes #Reading

appearance perception

If (post-)modern mainstream fashion [is to be] 'readerly', then […] postmodernist style [appears] as analogous to Barthes' 'writerly' text (Barthes, 1975), where 'signifiers, it seems, hold a certain privilege over what is signified'.

Muggleton, D. (1998) 'The Post-subculturalist', in Redhead, S. (ed) The Clubcultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 167–185.

#Sociology #CulturalStudies #theory #postmodernism #RolandBarthes

Septième Fonction du Langage, spoiler sans contexte : nos héros viennent d'arriver à Bologne. Vont-ils rencontrer il professore Eco?

Suspense, suspense. Mais bon, c'est pas très malin d'y aller pendant les vacances d'été, déjà, la fac est fermée.

Je ne me suis pas autant régalé en lisant un roman depuis des années...
Je vous le conseille chaudement, mais bon faut quand même connaître un poil la faune intello parisienne rive gauche de la grande époque (années 70) pour pleinement apprécier.

#littérature #roman #RolandBarthes

Wie wirken alltägliche Phänomene und Medienbotschaften als Mythen?

🎧 In der 50. Folge des #tldrPodcast spricht Alex Demirović mit Eva Geulen über das Buch «Mythen des Alltags» von #RolandBarthes 👇
https://www.rosalux.de/mediathek/media/element/2701

“If one looks at the normal practice of #music #criticism (or, which is often the same thing, of conversations ‘on’ music), it can ready be seen that a work (or its performance) is only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective.” - #RolandBarthes, Image Music Text

https://www.liminalweb.site/lempire-des-signes-par-roland-barthes/

#Japon #RolandBarthes #Sémiologie

Je m'en vais vous cultiver un peu moi, vous allez voir... (en espérant ne pas avoir dit trop de bêtises dans la vidéo, vous voudriez quand même pas que je prépare mes textes, si ?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36K9AeQoJY

#France #Japon #RolandBarthes #Sociologie #Sémiologie

Dites, quelqu'un aurait lu "La Septième Fonction du Langage" ? C'est bien ? Oui ? Non ?

#livres #littérature #RolandBarthes

“Megalopolis”, un peplum per l’era digitale

Una volta, partecipando ad una trasmissione televisiva su Ovidio, Alessandro Barbero disse che il mondo frequentato dal poeta augusteo doveva essere assai simile a quello della upper class di New York o di Washington fatto di feste, festini e intrighi a base di sesso, alcool e droga, di party a cui partecipano i rampolli di alti esponenti della politica e dell’economia. Barbero istituisce quindi un azzeccatissimo parallelismo fra le più alte classi sociali della Roma augustea e le frange più ricche della contemporanea società americana. Frequentando quel mondo e scrivendo di amori licenziosi, è assai probabile che Ovidio abbia fatto un passo falso tanto da incorrere nell’ira di Augusto, ed essere quindi condannato alla relegazione nell’oscura Tomi, sul Mar Nero, l’odierna Costanza (che il poeta dipinge fredda e tempestosa come il Polo Nord, ma che oggi, almeno fino a prima dello scoppio della guerra in Ucraina, era il luogo di vacanza privilegiato dai ricchi magnati russi).

Un parallelismo fra la Roma antica e la contemporanea società americana viene realizzato anche da Francis Ford Coppola nel suo recente e ambizioso film Megalopolis (2024) che mostra un vero e proprio calderone di epoche e figure storiche. I nomi dei personaggi rievocano il truce periodo della guerra civile della Roma repubblicana: Crasso, Catilina, Cicerone, Clodio. Una fonte di ispirazione, secondo quanto affermato dallo stesso regista, è infatti La congiura di Catilina di Sallustio. Nel film, New York diventa New Rome e Cicerone è il corrotto procuratore distrettuale Francis Cicero mentre Catilina è il ricco architetto Cesar Catilina, nipote del banchiere Hamilton Crasso III e nipote di Crasso è anche il depravato Clodio. Quest’ultimo, ponendosi populisticamente alla guida delle classi più povere, vuole contrastare i progetti di ricostruzione della città (che sta per essere devastata dalla caduta di un satellite sovietico) di Catilina.

Il ricorso al mondo classico operato da Coppola possiede diverse sfaccettature. Una più estetica e incline al kitsch, con la valenza metaforica generale di corruzione e degradazione. Ad esempio, in Italia, alla fine degli anni Sessanta, richiami al mondo antico con questa valenza metaforica erano stati attuati da Alberto Arbasino e da Federico Fellini con due loro opere del 1969: rispettivamente il romanzo Super-Eliogabalo e il film Fellini Satyricon. Un’altra sfaccettatura si lega più da vicino all’immaginario fantascientifico e distopico, per cui la romanità presente nel film assume una significativa rilevanza estetica nei suoi aspetti più catastrofici, secondo quanto ha osservato Susan Sontag relativamente all’immagine del disastro nella fantascienza americana degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta. Infine, la Roma antica presente nel film appare come il frutto di una “omogeneizzazione” del passato e della storia nel senso espresso da Furio Jesi nel suo saggio Cultura di destra. Il linguaggio delle “idee senza parole” (1979): una omogeneizzazione della Roma antica attuata dallo stesso Mussolini e dal fascismo, una rilettura del passato alla luce del lusso spirituale e materiale realizzata generalmente anche dalla cultura di destra successiva. D’altra parte, una mescolanza incongrua di questo tipo veniva perseguita anche dal filone peplum hollywoodiano, vale a dire tutta la miriade di film ambientati nell’antica Roma, soprattutto negli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta. Esiste però anche un genere peplum precedente, squisitamente fascista come, ad esempio, Scipione l’Africano (1936) di Carmine Gallone, intriso di retorica del regime.

Coppola, strizzando genialmente l’occhio al peplum, crea una “omogeneizzazione” della Roma antica fra elementi incongrui e appartenenti a epoche diverse, infarcita di citazioni shakespeariane (Cicerone, Catilina, Clodio e Crasso che leggono Marco Aurelio come un grande del passato ma che in realtà è vissuto molto dopo, la presenza del Colosseo come stereotipo della romanità, che in realtà venne costruito dai Flavi molti anni dopo il periodo delle guerre civili ecc.) unendola a elementi della contemporaneità come la tecnologia digitale o le automobili. Questa grande omogeneizzazione, anzi mega-omogeneizzazione in puro stile peplum digitale 4.0, serve a creare un’altra potente immagine metaforica, quella del capitale nelle sue più violente e incomprensibili (almeno da parte della ‘gente comune’) declinazioni: il potere economico e finanziario. Dietro lo strapotere e la ricchezza dei personaggi, guarda caso, ci sono le banche: il corrotto e depravato Clodio mira infatti ad impossessarsi della banca dello zio Hamilton. E lo strapotere finanziario può anche ergersi a guida populista (come fa Crasso nel film), manovrando la popolazione meno abbiente come tanti ignari burattini. Il travestimento estetico, kitsch, iperreale e postmoderno della Roma antica di Coppola cela un cuore fatto di violente e tribali guerre finanziarie ed economiche, le stesse che si consumano a Wall Street. Il cuore pulsante di questa società non è troppo diverso da quello che ci mostra un film che viene sempre propinato al pubblico televisivo la sera del giorno di Natale, e lo è stato immancabilmente anche pochi giorni fa, Una poltrona per due (Trading Places, 1983) di John Landis: i ricchissimi fratelli Duke, esponenti dell’alta finanza, decidono, per una scommessa, di far precipitare in miseria il loro dipendente Winthorpe. Quello che viene spacciato per un film di Natale sui buoni sentimenti, oltre ad esaltare il rampantismo primi anni Ottanta, mostra in realtà una violentissima guerra tribale, quella che si consuma ogni giorno nei palazzi dell’alta finanza e, ormai, neppure più nei palazzi, ma nell’universo digitale.

La corruzione, i festini lussuosi, la depravazione, il sesso, la dimensione spettacolare volgare e ostentata, in Megalopolis, non sono altro che l’esoscheletro del cuore economico e finanziario del capitalismo maturo che ci circonda. Non è la romanità che è sopravvissuta fino ai giorni nostri, come nella trilogia ucronica di Sophie MacDougall Romanitas, ma è un universo ‘omogeneizzante’ che racchiude una cultura votata all’altare di un capitalismo che di romano ha assai poco. Certo, anche Petronio nel Satyricon (I sec. d.C.) intendeva affrescare la corruzione e la volgarità dell’età neroniana, un universo fatto di sesso, cibo e denaro, secondo la definizione di Gian Biagio Conte. Ma la rilettura del regista americano inserisce le figure antiche in un universo preciso: un mondo di lusso estremo che, dietro le apparenze, cade a pezzi in una tribale e violenta guerra fra bande. E poi, non dimentichiamo nemmeno che la Roma delle guerre civili era davvero una società attraversata da feroci regolamenti di conti fra bande rivali, come anche lo sarà la società medievale e rinascimentale.

Non è un caso che l’auto privata di Catilina, sulla quale si muove attraverso la città accompagnato dal suo autista, spesso inquadrata in immagini compiaciute ed estetizzanti, sia una vettura simbolo dell’alta borghesia francese ed europea degli anni Sessanta e Settanta, cioè la Citroën DS, un’automobile che è stata, secondo Roland Barthes, un vero e proprio mito del lusso, dello spettacolo e del consumo: mezzo di trasporto, nonché sfoggio di ricchezza, dell’alta borghesia parigina e addirittura auto presidenziale negli anni Sessanta si è poi trasformata, ormai invecchiata, a partire dalla fine degli anni Settanta, in mito della controcultura giovanile ed è divenuta l’ideale mezzo di trasporto per nomadici vagabondaggi. Un vero “mito d’oggi”, secondo l’efficace espressione barthesiana, soggetto a metamorfosi ma, nemmeno ai giorni nostri, del tutto tramontato. L’auto di Catilina si spinge fino ai più poveri quartieri di New York, simili a quelli in cui si ritrova il povero Winthorpe caduto in miseria, laddove una colossale statua della dea Giustizia non riesce più a tenere in mano la sua bilancia, perché pende troppo da una parte. Quei bassifondi sono e saranno abitati sempre dalle vittime del capitale, sia nella New Rome, sia in Megalopolis, la nuova città ‘riqualificata’ che Catilina intende costruire (una versione fantascientifica delle smart cities?). Con Megalopolis tutti staranno bene, saranno felici e contenti come in una fiaba (e all’universo della fiaba rimanda lo stesso film): sarà veramente così, come si auspica durante la festa di Capodanno di questo parallelo e distopico 2024? Sarà vera utopia oppure una nuova, cupa e devastante distopia che non fa altro che incalzarci e rincorrerci, anche nella realtà, giorno dopo giorno?

gvs

#AlessandroBarbero #banche #capitalismo #capitalismoDigitale #cinema #FrancisFordCoppola #FurioJesi #Megalopolis #RolandBarthes #RomaAntica

20 books that have had an impact on who you are. One book a day for 20 days. No explanations, no reviews, just book covers. #20books #20Books20Days #books #rolandbarthes #discourse #gay #love #tao #zen #lgbtq #bookstodon 16/20

New post on my blog 🔥 📸 Join me in exploring Roland Barthes' thoughts in "Camera Lucida"! Let's delve into how this book can shift the way we see photography. 🌟

#Photography #RolandBarthes #CameraLucida #ArtTheory #art
#VisualArts #CulturalStudies #PhotoCritique #ArtistsOnMastodon #fotografie #photo #blog #photosaturday
🔗 https://gosia.lol/2024/04/20/exploring-the-depths-of-photography-a-look-at-roland-barthes-camera-lucida/

"There are two musics (at least so I have always thought): the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two musics are two totally different arts, each with its own history, its own sociology, its own aesthetics, its own erotic"

Roland Barthes, Musica Practica

#RolandBarthes #music #quote