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1981
Volume 14, Issue 2
  • ISSN: 2042-1869
  • E-ISSN: 2042-1877

Abstract

Roland Barthes defines myth as a semiological system with “the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal.” I link his ideas to Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus theory, which argues that the mechanisms of filmmaking and exhibition forge “an ‘organic’ unity” between a film’s essentially disparate images. Finally, I examine the ways in which films can deconstruct myth by increasing in Barthes’s terms “the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign,” a goal toward which Luis Buñuel’s 1974 film admirably strives.

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2023-10-25
2025-06-18
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References

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