ABSTRACT
Roland Barthes has lots of company in his preference for photography. Film is time passing, photography is time frozen, broken into pieces. Mieke Bal, similarly, tells that the movement of images in Proust is 'not cinematic, but rather recalls the effect of a "contact sheet"'. Proust is the organizer of chance, a great writer of fairy tales as well as a builder of myths. Proust's narrator's objection is to what he calls 'the literature of notations', that is, a literature which registers things the way a movie would but can't say anything about what these things mean to people. Proust's narrator, like Barthes, has decided he likes photography against the cinema, and for much the same reasons. Barthes says there is nothing Proustian about a photograph, a photograph doesn't remember the past, and of course he is right.
