In his final, grief-stricken work Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes finds himself “torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical,” particularly when confronted with an image that causes pain, the punctum. 1 In the book, Barthes concentrates on a “Winter Garden Photograph” of his mother that he cannot bear to share in the book itself since it would then become an “ordinary” object, subject to study: “it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most, it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound.”2 Barthes’s photograph calls attention to the feeling of an image, which, as he points out, seems to exist beyond the objectivity of the critic. Academic writing in the humanities tends to distance itself from the emotions produced in the critic themselves: we have been taught to veer away from the use of the first-person, not just in writing but in the analysis itself. There is a “critical” language and an “expressive” language, and Barthes highlights that to exist as a critic often means to split this dichotomy.
But those of us who study film not-so-secretly love it: cinephilia is real, and provokes genuine emotions. We don’t talk about this in our writing, even the videographic one. Vulnerability is something we can hide in the darkness of the movie theater or in front of the privacy of our home screens.
This project began with a challenge put forth to confront the irrational fear of the critic getting caught up in the movie they watch—or, rather, my fear of being seen, being emotional. Confronted with an exercise at the “Embodying the Video Essay” workshop at Bowdoin College in 2023 (now available as part of the Ways of Doing experimental space) to “visually insert yourself [into a film] as part of its reality,” I rejected the invitation and used images from another film to stand in for myself. The very next exercise, however, asked us to consider how the media object itself might be embodied—which prompted me to return to my own fears and concerns as I was editing other material and reacting to it emotionally, viscerally, vulnerably. What would happen if I went away from the image and explored my position within the cinematic apparatus, something which we rarely consider as a subject in and of itself? In essence, what would happen when the subject becomes the object?
Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) provided a rich opportunity for examination. For one, it’s a film that I have wrestled with both in a previous video essay and in a larger project I am presently writing. The film functions as a reflection on the director’s own past by centering the nanny, an indigenous young woman named Cleo, and her perspective on this otherly world. The film is an extremely personal auteurist work—and yet, distributed as it was through Netflix, it also required international translations beyond the cinematic. By this, I mean the film was subtitled (and dubbed) in multiple languages, influencing our own reactions and emotions all over the world as spectators.
The scene that inspires this video essay is the climactic moment of the film, highlighted in the poster art and Netflix iconography, a moment when Cleo saves the children from drowning in unexpectedly rough surf—but in this moment of near-loss, she also confronts the actual loss of her own stillborn child from earlier in the film. “I didn’t want her,” she says—but at this moment, I am quite literally “torn between two languages”: my own Latinidad means that I can see the English subtitle “want” and hear that the verb she uses is querer, which simultaneously means “love.” To love and to want in the same moment, torn this time in the same language. For me, this moment is heartbreaking: Cleo confesses a painful yearning and comes to terms with a memory, surrounded (visually) by a family that she loves and cares for—but the family matriarch, shrouded in her own privilege/whiteness/positionality, misinterprets Cleo, weakly responding, “We love you so much.” And here, as the tears flow down my own face, I confront my own subjectivity: my personal history as a white Peruvian-American male aligns me with the family, but the power of emotions in this cinematic moment allows me not just to see the image, but also to feel “the wound.”
And this time, the camera turns around, the spectator has been disarmed: what is usually exposed for analysis (the cinematic image; the story of this young indigenous woman) is present aurally but removed visually—and instead, I give you my own eyes, watching in the dark, reacting instead. When my cinematographer, Tristan Au, and I discussed filming my watching the entirety of Roma, we had an idea of what would happen, but we didn’t know exactly what would occur. My own idea was to keep a single camera on my face, immobile, containing everything as spectator—but with a second camera in play, I let go of my own agency, in full control of what the image will be. And so the second camera captured that spectatorial gaze, caught up in emotion and love, the expressive and the critical together as a new text.
Queriendo sin querer: loving, maybe without wanting to. This conflation is what we do as film spectators, even (and perhaps especially) those of us who function as critics. Coming to terms with that uneasiness of subjectivity is our challenge.
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Endnotes
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Notes on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 8.
- Ibid., 73.
Jeffrey Romero Middents