Roland Barthes' Cinema offers the first systematic English-language critical treatment of Barthes' writing on cinema, reassessing the relevance of his work for a new generation of readers and filmgoers. In six parts, it relates particular moments or phases in Barthes's intellectual itinerary: his early, largely ideologically driven critique of the mass media (and Hollywood cinema in particular); his innovative endeavors to construct a semiological, paralinguistic understanding of the status of the photographic or film image; his sideways shift into a renewed understanding of textual pleasures (including those of spectatorship); his attempts to elaborate a more fluid kind of theoretical understanding of textual affects and effects; and, finally, his return to the Romanticism of the fragment, of Schumann, and of what Watts describes as his "melodramatic imagination." In sum, this compact study serves as a primer to the central tenets of Barthes' thought as well as a survey of art cinema in the last half of the twentieth century.