Punctum Saliens: Barthes, Mourning, Film, Photography

Abstract

In the light of the publication of Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary (2009), this essay examines how the influential theory of the photographic punctum has cinematic roots which are repressed in Barthes's Camera Lucida (1980). My aim is not to repeat familiar arguments about how Barthes's ‘The Third Meaning’ (1970) anticipates the photographic punctum in a cinematic context; it is, rather, to attend specifically to Mourning Diary as a much closer, more precise precursor which has been visible only since 2009, and which casts new light upon the work of Roland Barthes.