Vision and Difference: Genealogies of Feminism Fall 2023

The gap between seeing and understanding: Studium and Punctum in Film Narrative

person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to "spectacle" and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, radiation.

Punctum: wound, a mark left by a pointed instrument’ and which ‘breaks the studium’. These ‘stings’, ‘specks’ or random details in a photograph cut through the homogeneity of the studium and ‘prick’ the spectator, This punctum is the additional details, the intensity of time, and the madness affection of pity. It could be a flaw on your dress, a wrinkle on your face, or the death that wounds you when you look at your mother’s image. What matters is that it needs to be subjective, against the objective cultural illusion. 

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