My Mother’s Bones: The Photographic Bodies of Camera Lucida and Halving the Bones

December 1, 2021 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31, Number 3, May 2021

Chelsea Oei Kern (bio)

Abstract

This essay brings together Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Ruth Ozeki’s documentary Halving the Bones in order to situate the conceit of maternal photography within discourses of social and racial reproduction. Although Barthes’s theory of photography neglects race, it prepares the ground for a logic of maternal reproduction through photography that is not realized within Camera Lucida. Ozeki extends Barthes’s theory of photography-as-mothering to posit film as a medium that meets the needs of a contentious, mixed-race Asian body—both to escape narratives of race as enforced through the photograph, and to ensure the continued visibility of that body.

We approach the young woman from behind, creeping up on her as she sits at a desk in a cluttered room. As the camera shifts to capture her face, the narrator explains, first in Japanese and then in English, “This is Ruth. She is half” (00:01:47–50). Half American and half Japanese, that is: two parts of a whole, but somehow still only “half.” This first scene of Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury’s (hereafter Ozeki1) autobiographical film Halving the Bones (1995) opens on Ruth in her apartment, sorting through old photographs of her grandparents. The narrator is a young woman with a thick Japanese accent who later identifies herself as Matsuye, Ruth’s maternal grandmother. As Matsuye continues to speak, the camera follows Ruth’s movements around the room in a series of shaky close-ups: her hands, her face, the photographs and documents that she looks at. It is an intimate perspective, and Ruth seems entirely unaware that she is being watched. Then, just a moment before the scene ends, she looks into the camera and smiles. With this move, Ruth transforms the film from biography to autobiography. By looking at the viewer directly, Ruth prevents the film from participating in an external representation of her character and violates the conventions of fictional film.2 To Matsuye’s assertion that “This is Ruth. She is half,” Ruth replies in her upbeat American accent: “My name is Ruth, but I don’t like it” (00:04:05–10). As she takes over from and contradicts the previous narrator, she begins the process of undermining other representations of her by a medium that would view her as “half,” or as anything else that Ruth can claim she does not “like.” Seizing control of the filmic medium, she leverages it as a tool of autobiography against the ordering narratives of photography and family history.

Halving the Bones is about mothers, photography, and film—and about the power that each can exert over daughters. The film tells the story of Ruth’s journey to give her grandmother Matsuye’s cremated bones, which she has saved for several years in a small tea can, to her mother, Masako, from whom she has grown apart in recent years. The first part of the film presents Matsuye’s life in her own words, ostensibly from an autobiography that she wrote before she died, and through photographs and home movies shot by her husband in Hawaii. Ruth’s grandfather and Matsuye ran a photography business together until World War II, when her grandfather was taken to an internment camp, his photographic equipment confiscated. As this section closes, however, Ruth makes a confession: the autobiography never existed, and the movies are fabrications, with Ruth playing the part of her own grandmother in order to recreate the films that were destroyed during internment. The documentary thus takes a turn toward fiction even as it represents the true history of Ozeki-as-Ruth and her family as they negotiate being Japanese in America during and post-World War II. The construction of their race as a visual quality—communicated through photographs and other visual propaganda such as the government-issued How to Spot a Jap (1942)—shapes the narratives of their lives, and Ruth’s. At the same time, the demands of white supremacy continually attempt to erase the Japanese and mixed-race bodies of the film. From the mandate to have an English name that turns out to be unpronounceable by her Japanese relatives, to the confiscation of her grandfather’s photographic and filming equipment (and the destruction of his films) during his internment in WWII, to her white father’s hope that Ruth will be an “All-American kid,” visible Japanese-ness is continually under attack. While Ozeki develops an autobiographical response to the external construction of her body through photography, she is also invested in asserting the valued presence of a racialized body that is always contested.

At its heart, Ozeki’s film is concerned with questions about authenticity and reproduction in photographs, which she asks with an understanding that the search for the meaning of photography is a search for her mother. So, too, in Camera Lucida (1980), perhaps the most well-known inquiry into photographic meaning, Roland Barthes entwines his search for the meaning of photography with maternal longing following the death of his own mother. Barthes’s most telling reflections on photography come about because of the Winter Garden Photograph, a picture of his mother as a child in which Barthes “finds” her, but which he never produces in the text. Like Ozeki’s false home movies, Barthes’s missing maternal images are the centerpieces of his theory of photography. Both Halving the Bones and Camera Lucida thus hinge on the absences of a mother and a photographic or filmic object that are nevertheless integral to the works. The formal similarity of recantation (Barthes’s “palinode,” Ozeki’s confession) also organizes both the film and the book. The unsteadiness of this model (revising, going back, confessing) underlies the oblique autobiographies that these texts produce as they waver between self and mother. The convergence and thematic resonance of these two autobiographical texts occasion my reading of their meditations on photography, film, and mothers.

This essay reads Halving the Bones alongside Camera Lucida in order to explore how these two works grapple with and subvert the idea of photography as a documentary, truth-telling form that is metaphorically and even literally tied to motherhood. A photograph is procreative like a mother, Barthes suggests, because it produces bodies out of itself through the indexical relationship to the photographed subject. While Barthes’s insistence on the indexicality of the photograph has been hugely influential in subsequent photography theory, less attention has been paid to his more bizarre and personal claim that photographs not only indexical but also maternal. Highlighting photography’s mothering role inscribes photography with a familial significance that is always personal as well as theoretical. Camera Lucida and Halving the Bones share this interest in maternal photography as an intimate heuristic for thinking through visual representation of bodies. Much of the criticism on Camera Lucida has taken a psychoanalytic approach to the work, drawing on Barthes’s own engagement with Freud and the text’s focus on the mother as a structuring figure. While this scholarship also underpins some of my analysis, and while Barthes’s text is a place where psychoanalytic concepts and methods make themselves felt, I focus instead on how mothers, bodies, and their representation in photographs provide insight not into psychoanalytic relations but into the social contexts of such terms. This essay examines the connection of photographic indexicality on a social scale to the personal experience of being and creating photographic bodies as the child of a mother and a family. A mother, in my reading, is not merely the resonant childhood home of psychoanalysis but also the sociallydetermined body that produces new bodies and family histories: she is the mechanism through which racial difference propagates.3

Despite their different provenances, I bring Ozeki’s and Barthes’s works together in order to situate the conceit of maternal photography within discourses of social and racial reproduction. Fred Moten and others have shown that Barthes’s theory of photography inadequately addresses the racialized body. Here, I follow Moten’s essential observation that Barthes performs a violent “disavowal of the historical in photography” when his work leans on images of racial difference only to “justify a suppression of difference in the name of (a false) universality” (Moten 203, 205). But of course, photography, with its presumed indexicality, has played a central role in the construction of race as a visual marker, contributing to what Alessandra Raengo calls the “photochemical imagination” of racialized bodies (23). Despite Barthes’s failure in this regard, I argue that his theory of maternal photographic reproduction prepares the ground for a logic of social reproduction through photography that is not realized within Camera Lucida. I revisit Barthes’s claims in order to bring together discourses of the mother in photography with the conversation on photography as a technology of race. If the photograph is both personal and social, then it is also part of the way that individuals negotiate their own autobiographical representation through visual media.

Ozeki, extending and expanding Barthes’s theory of photography-as-mothering, posits film as a medium that meets the competing needs of a contentious, mixed-race Asian body—both to escape socially-determined narratives of race as enforced through the photograph and to ensure the continued visibility of that body in visual media, asserting its historical presence against the erasure of white supremacy. Nicholas Mirzoeff writes of the potential for photography to intervene in the visual construction of race with an attempt “to make the indexicality of race incoherent to the point of failure” such that it “might become the document of the complexity of lived, embodied experience” (125, 126). Ozeki troubles the indexicality of the photograph by filtering it through film, where indexicality falters so that individual embodied experience can come to the fore. And yet, Ozeki’s work with photography still recognizes that social context through the double function of the mother as an individual mother and as a reproducer of socially legible bodies. Barthes is often ambivalent about film. For him it is variously “in opposition” to photography, but still impossible to separate from it, “not … hav[ing] completeness,” not being “‘normal,’ like life,” or “an illusion … oneiric” (CL 3, 89, 90, 117). As Neil Badmington shows, however, film underpins many of the reflections on photography in Camera Lucida, including the central concept of the “punctum.” Ozeki’s engagement with the medium in both Halving the Bones and her fiction takes up this ambivalence to use film as an in-between space: moving and still, referential but fictive, ordered but not ordering. Ruth’s grandmother Matsuye and mother Masako emerge as the simultaneously present and absent mothers who at once create and suffer from the racialized bodies of the family as they are represented in photographs. In shuttling between photography and film throughout the work, Ozeki makes space for the inherited and personal experiences of racialized, photographed bodies. Ultimately, manipulating her representation in photography and film allows Ozeki to both claim and escape from the ordering narratives of race that her mothers and history have created for her.

Photographic Bodies

In both Halving the Bones and Camera Lucida, photography becomes linked to mothers through their shared ability to create bodies out of themselves, a connection that I take up to situate photography as a reproductive technology within the context of social and family history. For Barthes, the photograph is remarkable among other forms of art for its ability to certify the existence of its subject. Unlike painting, sculpture, or literature, Barthes argues, photographs have actual, chemical relationships to the objects they depict. This indexical relationship makes the photograph a record, rather than just a representation, of its referent. Because photographs are a way to capture the emanation of light from real objects, “the ‘photographic referent’ [is] not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph” (CL 76). What we see in a photograph must exist, Barthes says, as the photograph’s existence is contingent on the existence of the thing in the picture, which emits the rays of light that the camera’s mechanical and the darkroom’s chemical processes capture: “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here” (80). Due to its relationship to its referent, then, “the Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is'” (5).

Because of this indexical relationship, Barthes says, photographs produce bodies when they make the self, once immaterial or fluid, legible as a body. Speaking about his aversion to being photographed, Barthes writes, “I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice” (11). Photographs of people fix the body in place, and in doing so, produce it as a body, “heavy [and] motionless,” rather than the self, “which is light, divided, dispersed” (12). Portraits produce bodies out of selves by forcing the unfixed, immaterial sense of self to become an unmoving image. But this process is not limited to pictures of people. All photographs, because of their relationship to the real objects that they depict, become linked in Camera Lucida to the human body as a marker of their materiality. The abiding connection between photography and the body appears in Barthes’s intent to begin with a series of photographs that are meaningful only to him: “Nothing to do with a corpus: only some bodies” (8). From the figurative corpus, Barthes moves to an etymological pun, and in doing so claims a bodily nature for all photography.

As Elissa Marder writes, “because photography, unlike all other modes of communication, can only assert the real and necessary existence of its (prior) material referent, it resembles biological reproduction more than it does artistic representation” (“Nothing to Say” 31). This is the basis of Barthes’s intriguing claim that photography is procreative in the same way as mothers: it produces bodies out of itself. Barthes explains: “No doubt it is metaphorically that I derive my existence from the photographer … with the anguish of an uncertain filiation: an image—my image—will be generated” (CL 11). The photographer who generates the image (the body) through the medium of the photograph is an individual who passes on traits, as a mother might, to the child-image that the photograph depicts. But it is the photograph itself, not the photographer, that has the power to fix bodies in space, and thus exerts this procreative force—literally rather than metaphorically. Produced through the body of the referent, the photograph is a “a process of reproduction that, like the mother, gives birth to a series of images—through chemical means—which create, preserve, and destroy their subjects” (Cadava and Cortés-Rocca 25).

This capacity for mortification, preservation, and destruction points to the overwhelming power of photography’s maternal role in Camera Lucida. By coercively producing bodies, photography becomes an almost oppressive force that precludes individual agency to selfdetermination within the larger social structure. Through its referential insistence on the photographed body, Marder writes, the photograph “endows the modern subject with a social, codifiable, collective body” (25). This body, unlike the light and dispersed “self” that Barthes imagines for himself, is beholden to the rules of social and family life. Barthes describes how photography operates on revealing “likeness” between a photograph and its referent, but “more insidious, more penetrating than likeness: the Photograph sometimes makes appear what we never see in a real face … : a genetic feature, the fragment of oneself or of a relative which comes from some ancestor” (CL 103). In this way, the photograph “gives a little truth, on condition that it parcels out the body. But this truth is not that of the individual, who remains irreducible; it is the truth of lineage” (103). This “truth of lineage” causes some confusion: Barthes reveals that he sometimes mistakes another mother and child for himself and his own mother, or a photograph of his father for himself or his grandfather. While the individual is “irreducible” in photographs due to the undeniable presence of the referent, photography also reveals the existence of a larger structure that forms and informs each individual. That larger structure, as Barthes’s confusion indicates, can in fact cast the specific individual into doubt by blurring her into the faces of those who have come before, trapping her in the preserved body of the image. It is for this reason that photography’s genetic function is “insidious”: it reveals the usually hidden ways in which each referent—each individual—relies entirely on the reproductive power of the mother andher social and genetic roles, and therefore on the reproductive power of photography too.

“…making a family album?”

Halving the Bones also begins with photographs. While Matsuye’s voice narrates, Ruth goes through a box of photos and other items taken from her late grandmother’s apartment. In one little sleeve, labeled “Snapshot Memories,” she finds several photographs of her grandfather in Hawaii: a Japanese man standing with arms folded in a field of sugarcane, dressed in a threepiece suit. The camera is shaky, positioned partially behind Ruth’s head, and the glare on the glossy paper makes it difficult to see the photos properly. And yet, these blurry images, along with the bones themselves, are the seeds for the film’s exploration of Ruth’s maternal family. As in Camera Lucida, photography is at once a welcome vehicle for memory and a threatening presence in the family archive, one that aids in the construction of their bodies as othered Japanese bodies.

Throughout the film, a family history of photography haunts each generation like a persistent genetic trait. While both her father and mother were invested in photography, Ruth’s mother Masako notes:

Interesting, this interest in photography skipped me, but the strange thing is that my daughter [Ruth], to whom I have never introduced photography, somehow picked it up! And the camera and the movie machine that my father sent me she took an interest in them and now she’s interested in photography enough to make that her profession! So it’s very interesting it should jump a generation and develop this way.(00:29:36–30:16)

“Awakening in me the Mother”

Although the mother figure is in many ways a threatening or controlling one, both Camera Lucida and Halving the Bones revolve around the search for an absent mother. For Barthes, this is both the actual mother who has died and the “universal theory of Photography” that she implicitly represents. To explain his attraction to a landscape photograph, Barthes remarks: “Freud says of the maternal body that ‘there is no other place of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there.’ Such then would be the essence of the landscape (chosen by desire): heimlich, awakening in me the Mother” (CL 40). The mother is the original home, and Barthes finds himself attracted to these landscapes which conjure up for him the maternal sense of being-at-home.6 It is to this home, which is both literal and photographic, that he wishes to return through the writing of Camera Lucida. As Ruth notes near the beginning of Halving the Bones, her name in Japanese (留守) means “not at home,” and thus the absent mother who should provide that home forms part of her character from the very beginning (00:04:33). The film itself is a search for the composite mother figure whom Ruth hopes to understand in order to make some sense of her family’s difficult history.

Both works “find” this elusive mother through visual mediums that come to stand in for the original. And yet, both also maintain a conspicuous absence of the images that would actually constitute a “certificate of presence” that Barthes claims is a necessary part of every photograph. This absence is an attempt to regain control over the image and move away from the socially-determined body that it produces. The Winter Garden Photograph is Barthes’s great “rediscovery” of his mother as a child, and he devotes the second half of Camera Lucida to exploring photography through this single image. Throughout this process, he fails to produce the actual photograph, even though the text includes many of the other photographs that Barthes discusses. “I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me,” he says (73). Unfortunately, this failure to provide the photograph to readers makes its absence suspect. Perhaps it really does only exist for him.7 Barthes stresses the truth-telling power of the photograph by contrast to writing: “It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself” (85). Language, unlike photography, is always separate from its referent, which may or may not exist somewhere else. Thus, when Barthes says, “Here again is the Winter Garden Photograph. I am alone with it, in front of it,” we cannot know for sure (90). Instead, Barthes constructs the photograph through language—what Marder calls his “photographic writing,” or E.L. McCallum terms the “verbal photograph” (Marder, “Dark Room” 251; McCallum n.p.). This strategy “cannot show anything directly; it animates a potential field of associations through which the time ‘before’ is awakened otherwise and, when read, brings the ‘déjà vu’ of a possible, impossible future to life” (Marder, “Dark Room” 251). Like a photograph, photographic writing can invoke the “prick” of time, the impossible history before the self. But unlike photography, this writing cannot “authenticate” itself—it instead activates a form of history that does not include the fixed, socialized photographic body of the subject.

Thus, instead of relocating his lost mother, Barthes’s attempts to find the mother actually reinforce her absence and subsequently take her place through the process of procreative reproduction. His procreative power over the subjects of the photograph (who do not have a “certificate of presence” exterior to this language) positions Barthes himself as a mother figure who is able to produce bodies as mothers and photographs do. The particular photograph is important, as “it is the concrete and particular photograph of Barthes’s mother as a little girl that promises mythically to resolve death by extending the fantasy of reversing not just life but also birth order and the life cycle, giving Barthes the sense of ‘engendering his mother'” (Casid 110). By producing the linguistic image of his mother as a small child, Barthes the adult takes the position of the mother figure who produces the infant. Barthes in fact characterizes the entire process that Camera Lucida describes as one of reproduction: “Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false” (CL 66). Barthes represents his search as “labor,” at once pointing to the difficulty he encountered and punning on “labor” as related to birth and motherhood.8 The process of writing Camera Lucida thus becomes his metaphorical pregnancy, the Winter Garden Photograph (and the mother therein depicted), the child. In becoming a photographer (through writing), Barthes becomes a mother—his own mother. By producing the image of his mother in the Winter Garden Photograph he produces the image of himself. The photograph becomes, in other words, a mode of autobiography, despite its alleged subject.

Furthermore, Barthes’s full control of the Winter Garden Photograph returns the photograph to the realm of aesthetics, where it can be controlled and manipulated to serve whatever purpose Barthes desires. Namely, the turn to language allows Barthes to escape photography’s power to produce and fix bodies in time and space. Previously, he relegated the photograph to a realm outside of art because “Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see” (CL 6). Photography as a medium, as a category of artistic representation, does not register for the ordinary viewer. Instead, Barthes argues, photographs simply are what they represent. Unlike the other photographs in the text, however, the Winter Garden Photograph does not have a concrete referent that hides its medium. It exists only as language. This strategy, Erin Mitchell argues, “protects the text from the uncontrollable excesses and hermeneutic possibilities of the image qua image” (326). If images, as Barthes explains extensively, always exceed their medium to point to the real, “Writing photography, then, privileges the voice and writing above the image, even as it acknowledges the frailty of words, the necessary failures of attempts to represent a human life” (Mitchell 326). In other words, by presenting the Winter Garden Photograph only through language, Barthes prevents the (potentially) real photograph from “fill[ing] the sight by force” through its almost violent insistence on the presence of its referent (Barthes, CL 91). Barthes wants to claim the photograph for art. But he cannot do so because of its abiding relationship to the body, which insists upon its singularity and resists abstraction into symbol or icon. On the other hand, language is never a guarantee of its referent. As Barthes says, “No writing can give me this certainty” (85). Rendering the Winter Garden Photograph (which, like all photographs, threatens to produce a “heavy, motionless, stubborn” body) in words rather than image frees Barthes from the tyranny of the body so that his “light, divided, dispersed” self, his “neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing” can stand in its stead (12). The missing Winter Garden Photograph and its construction through language thus allows Barthes to recover the photograph as a site of potential personal inscription.9

But what does Barthes mean by a “neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing?” How could such a thing ever come about, and who can have one? For Barthes, Leslie Hill argues, the body is outside of all possible theorizing or ideology; it is exhausted in “the arabesques of its own singularity … like a handful of dust … like some indeterminate remainder” (125). The body is utterly singular, slippery. Such a reading of bodily presence is, I would suggest, only possible for a white body. And yet, as Jonathan Beller also points out, Camera Lucida is full of Black bodies: the Richard Avedon photograph of William Casby, Born a Slave, and the James Van Der Zee portrait of the Black family, among others both pictured and not pictured (107). But the fact of race is for Barthes never the point (the prick). Instead, the disappearance or irrelevance of the context of race is what allows for the development of the punctum that truly touches him. The “discursive disappearance of slavery establishes the facts of photography” for Barthes, Beller writes (109). Margaret Olin points out the strange elisions and mistakes that Barthes commits when discussing the Van Der Zee portrait: transforming a pearl necklace into a gold one, for example, which allows Barthes to identify the Black woman in the photograph with his own aunt (105). This is a process in which Barthes “colors himself and his Aunt Alice under the darkness of the woman,” Carol Mavor writes. “Nourished by the blackness” of the photograph, Barthes seeks his own singular ties to it (48). The bodies here—Barthes’s and the Black subjects of these photographs—become the occasion for Barthes’s aspirational self-reflection. The ease with which Barthes “colors himself,” however, is a kind of racial slippage available only to those for whom race is an affectation—a costume—rather than a binding social reality.10 His neutral body can go wherever it pleases, light and dispersed, as he “pass[es] off the position of the objectified onto others” (Smith 103). For this reason, Barthes’s maternal theory of photography falters where it could be the most provocative. Can we instead imagine photography as a way to acknowledge, dwell within, and resist the coercive narratives of social and genetic lineage?

Home/Mother Movies

To move forward on the promise of personal inscription while attending to the lived experience of racial difference, I turn to Halving the Bones, where Ozeki balances autobiography with history. It is through the mother that Ruth inherits her socially legible, racialized, visibly Japanese body, produced in the confluence between photography and reproduction. Understanding this complicated family history is the rationale for Halving the Bones, which organizes photographs and films into a documentary. However, like Barthes, Ozeki engages in a key deception about these materials: Matsuye’s alleged autobiography and home movies turn out to be fictions. Ruth’s belated confession reveals them both to be fabrications:

Up until now I haven’t been 100% accurate. There are a couple of things that I made up. Like my grandmother’s autobiography for example. She never really wrote one, so I made it up from the real family stories I’d heard from her and also from my other relatives. I did sort of the same thing with these home movies. I’d seen a photo of my grandfather holding a movie camera, so I know he really did make movies, but his cameras and films were all confiscated after Pearl Harbor. I made up these things because I never really knew my grandparents, and now they’re dead and I didn’t really have much to go on. I thought I would understand them better if I just pretended to be them. Anyway, I just wanted to set the record straight, even though I made up the way I represented them, the facts of their lives are all true, and I did have my grandmother’s bones in my closet for the last five years, and now they’re in the car and I’m going home to deliver them to mom.(00:21:58–22:55)

In light of Ruth’s recantation, the presence of the movies and Matsuye’s voiceover merely points to the now more conspicuous absences of the actual mother figure whom they are meant to represent. These absences complicate the narrative of “found” mothers that structures the resolution of the film. Instead, Halving the Bones offers up film as a fitting replacement for the absent mothers of Ruth’s family. Whereas Barthes retreats from the photograph as image, taking control through language to avoid being made into a body, Ruth turns to film as her alternative to photography, extrapolating from the photographs she has in order to fabricate the absent autobiography and home movies.

What is at stake in this turn to film? In Ozeki’s 1998 novel My Year of Meats, the protagonist, a mixed-race Japanese American woman named Jane, works as a documentary filmmaker for a television program called My American Wife! At the outset, her goal is to “make programs with documentary integrity, [portraying] a truth that exist[s]—singular, empirical, absolute,” and she sets about her work with a sense of righteous purpose (176). Soon, however, she and her crew encounter the paradoxical reality of documentation: “It’s a lie” (29). In one early show, a single rump roast is basted over, and over, and over again, the happy housewife in question has recently been left by her husband, and the reunion kiss at the end was shot before their marital disaster struck. Even the recipe, the centerpiece of the program, is a sham: instead of Coca-Cola, “It’s Pepsi … Not the real thing at all” (30). Though the people, objects, and actions that they film are real enough, something shifts between the initial filming and the finished product. Editing intervenes in the middle, where individual frames and scenes are pieced together into a narrative whole. Jane’s editing process weaves together real moments into something unreal as she finds herself “taking out the stutters and catches from the women’s voices, creating a seamless flow in a reality that was no longer theirs and not quite so real anymore” (179). As opposed to photography, then, My Year of Meats suggests that film slips loose from its chemical, referential origin in photography and gains the capacity for narrative.11

Though a film’s “raw material is photographic” (Barthes, CL 89) and thus participates in the same reproductive mechanisms as photography, Christian Metz points out that film involves the added dimension of progressing through time with the illusion of continuity, “so that the unfolding as such tends to become more important than the link of each image with its referent” (Metz 82). Because film develops over time, it moves beyond the original moment that captures a body in image: it is “protensive,” as Barthes says, always moving forward (CL 90). As a film progresses, Metz argues, the photographic guarantee of the real in each frame paradoxically functions in service to the unreal narrative of the whole, just as on a broader level Jane’s editing in My Year of Meats weaves together the real shots of Pepsi and a housewife into a narrative about the familial bliss of Coca-Cola-basted rump roast. Through the addition of time and movement, a film straddles the boundary between the concrete referentiality of photography and the mechanisms of painting, language, and other representational art, which portray but do not reproduce the objects they depict. In this sense, film undoes the embalming work of photography, which produces static bodies that have been arrested in time. Instead, film proceeds “in a stream of temporality where nothing can be kept, nothing stopped” (Metz 83). Both Metz and Barthes argue that whereas photographs resist interpretation through their continual insistence on the preserved body of the referent, film includes these bodies in every frame but also moves past and through them in each moment. Therefore, film is able to transform Jane’s housewives’ “stutters” into “a seamless flow” that is “not quite so real” (Ozeki MYM 179). For this reason, both Metz and Barthes note that film participates in the “destruction” or “domestication” of photography’s reproductive excess (Metz 85; Barthes CL 117).12

Choosing film as her medium for narrating a history of photography, Ozeki both insists on the body’s presence and transforms that presence into something productive rather than stultifying. The materials that Ruth provides as parts of her grandmother’s autobiography and home movies become suspect, as noted above, once Ruth makes her recantation. The home movies, which mostly show “Matsuye” walking in a forest behind a screen of vegetation, are easy to take at face value upon first viewing. They are grainy and discolored, and demonstrate the interest in both botany and his wife that Ruth’s grandfather supposedly had. Matsuye herself is frustratingly elusive in the clips. We never see her face, and for good reason, since Ruth soon reveals that it is not Matsuye on the screen but herself attempting to recreate the lost films. As Barthes says, “it is always something that is represented” in a photograph (and by extension, in film, as Metz has noted), because a photograph “can lie as to the meaning of the thing, being by nature tendentious, never as to its existence” (CL 28, 87). Although Matsuye is not in fact featured in the films, there is someone in these clips: Ruth. Through this substitution, Ruth takes her grandmother’s place as the referent of the movies and thus becomes the grandmother that she has lost. In “pretending to be” her grandparents (Matsuye through impersonation, and her grandfather through shooting the movies in the first place) Ruth, like Barthes, takes over the role of mother figure in a literary and photographic sense. Her deception restores the loss of her grandfather’s work in film, but with the added benefit of self-representation—self-mothering.

Similarly, the bones of Halving the Bones, which would seem to assert the true referent of the grandmother through her bodily remains, in fact become an assertion of Ruth’s presence rather than Matsuye’s. The bones are the original catalyst for Ruth’s family inquiries, and, as the only physical remains of her grandmother, serve as the most convincing evidence that Matsuye Yokoyama did and to some extent still does exist in the world. Like Barthes’s photographic referent, the bones are physical objects that assert their presence through the filmic medium, proof that “‘That has been'” (Barthes CL 77). The title of the documentary is a pun on “having” the bones: because Ruth has the bones, her grandmother remains present and alive despite her absence. Until the final few scenes of the film, the bones remain hidden within their tea cannister, allegedly present, but as yet unproven, like Barthes’s Winter Garden Photograph. The moment of revelation, when Ruth gives the bones to her mother, is doubly significant as a moment of poignant family emotion and photographic proof (00:53:55–55:36). When Masako opens the can and sees the bones for the first time, her surprise, delight, and discomfort are all apparent. “My mother’s bones,” she says again and again, “Isn’t it pretty?” Masako’s first look is our first look as well, in a close-up where the bones and the reflective interior of the can fill the entire screen. The bones become real and present, as undeniable as the photographic referent. But Ruth does not let this moment last for long before she reminds us that “The bones I have are hers [Matsuye’s], but they’re not the same as the ones she had here [in the home movies]” because bones change and grow along with a person as they age, not to mention that by the time Ruth can carry them around in a can, Matsuye’s bones have been through fire and more (00:14:00–04). The bones are not the same because Matsuye is no longer a young woman—but they are also not the same because Matsuye never was “here.” The movies to which Ruth refers are of course the fabricated ones that feature Ruth herself as her own grandmother. Through this deception, the bones instead come to stand again for Matsuye’s absence rather than her presence, and allow Ruth to take Matsuye’s place as the original young woman.

By doing so, Ruth successfully evades photography’s control over her body, the control that traps her within a racial and familial narrative set into motion far before her birth. And yet, film’s vexed relationship with bodily presence allows her, unlike Barthes, to insist on the relevance of that social body while retaining influence over its deployment in her own life. Barthes prefers the retreat into language as a way to remain bodiless—”light, divided, dispersed; like a bottle-imp,” or at least with a “neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing” (CL 12). But for Ruth, a neutral, anatomic body is neither possible nor desirable: her experience of racial difference, her desire to be a daughter to her Japanese family and to explore her “halfness,” demands a body. Film allows her to exploit its ambivalent relationship with bodies to insist on the importance of the racialized body in Ruth’s experience, while also freeing her from its grip over her reproduction in images.

In a last act of filial piety, Ruth reinforces her own role as a mother—her own mother. Near the end, Ozeki’s film imagines a future in which Ruth takes over for her mother(s) when it presents footage of Ruth throwing what we must assume are both Matsuye’s bones and Masako’s ashes into the Hawaiian surf. The scene is overlaid with Masako’s narration, recorded during the earlier interview in which Ruth presents her with the bones. “What do you want to do with them?” Ruth asks, and Masako hesitates before answering:

I would like to keep them. I would like to keep these bones with me until I die. And I hope that I can somehow get myself cremated. And then the bones—well, it might be different in America, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s all ashes. Have my ashes put into a container like this. And then, I would like you to go back to Hawaii sometime, and throw both of them into the ocean. (1:00:51–02:24)

As Masako speaks these words, Ruth walks through a field of grass and to the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. The narration ends as she tosses handfuls of something into the ocean. The implication is that Masako has died, and Ruth is carrying out her wishes for her ashes and the bones. But the credits reveal that Masako was still alive and well as of the film’s release. This scene stages a desire, not necessarily for the death of the mother but for the moment when the daughter will be able to become fully independent through the mother’s absence.

In the next moment, Matsuye’s voice returns to describe Ruth: “My only grandchild came to visit me at the nursing home today. She is a very big girl, and seems to take after her father. She does not visit me often, which is perhaps due to the name she has been called … She takes after her mother and me in this way” (1:02:46–03:23). Matsuye’s words reinforce the separation of the mothers and daughters (“she does not visit me often”), but in the same moment the viewer’s knowledge of Ruth’s earlier deception turns the moment into one of reconciliation, self-determination, and autobiography. As we will soon learn in the credits, Matsuye’s voice is Ruth herself, speaking with a false accent. In this moment then, just after Ruth has staged the scattering of her mothers’ ashes, she makes her mothers speak her. That is, Ruth’s character—her traits and her name—comes out of Matsuye’s mouth, which is also Ruth’s own mouth. The replacement of the mother figure allows Ruth this moment of autobiography, when, as Barthes does in Camera Lucida, she is able to temper the photograph’s excess to take control of the representation of her own body.

In the last scene of Halving the Bones, another “home movie” shows Ruth’s father rolling a baseball to a toddler Ruth, who picks it up and then clumsily kicks it back. The girl is not Ruth and the man is not her father, as the credits will reveal, but nevertheless the scene seems to provide some kind of closure to the tension set up in the beginning: “This is Ruth. She is half.” Yes, Ruth is half, and here is the other half. Ruth’s father becomes important as a resolution within the maternal lineage structured around loss and absence. And yet, Mr. Lounsbury, too, is absent, even more so than Matsuye (who at least has her photographs) and Masako (whom we meet face-to-face). Once again, film is given an aura of authenticity due to its placement in this autobiographical narrative but presents a false face. “He wanted me to be an All-American kid,” Ruth intones before the frame freezes on the little girl, turning her into an impromptu photograph (1:06:51–52). Here we encounter another structuring family desire, one that imposes photography upon the girl’s moving form in order to capture her in this moment along with America’s favorite pastime. But the preceding hour of footage, which spells out exactly how complicated Ruth’s All-American identity has become, frustrates this desire. Compounded with the actors standing in for the supposed referents, the conflict between Ruth’s All-American and Japanese identities makes it clear that Ruth is in full filmic revolt against her photographic family. But this last image of the girl sits uneasily between photography and film, highlighting again the complex relation between them.13 Who is really depicted here, and why? What does this body, which exists, tell us about the narrative of All-American Ruth, who does not? In its wavering between these two mediums, Halving the Bones, like Camera Lucida, interrogates the truth-telling properties of both photography and film. Each of them, with their demonstrated ambivalence towards reality and fiction both, allows for this kind of blurring to take place. The unstable images and the bodies that they display are malleable, open for the kind of impersonation—the kind of mothering—that Ozeki and Barthes perform. In Ozeki’s not-home movies, in Barthes’s falsely ekphrastic language, the absent mother can be found, and spoken through as an affirmation of the self. As Ruth’s turn to the camera in the very first scene signals, these explorations of photography and film are autobiographical projects, ones that inhabit the past’s bodies in order to claim them.

Chelsea Oei Kern is an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow with the Community of Literary Presses & Magazines, where she leads projects related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2021. Her research focuses on contemporary literature and its relation to digital technologies.

Footnotes

1. Halving the Bones was written, directed, and produced by Ozeki, who released it under the name Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury. Ozeki has since become well-known for her novels as Ruth L. Ozeki. I will refer to her as Ozeki for this reason. Though the distinction between Ozeki and the autobiographical character of Ruth whom she plays in Halving the Bones is often slippery, I use Ozeki to refer to the filmmaker and Ruth to refer to the character represented in the film.

2. Her direct smile departs from Roland Barthes’s assertion in Camera Lucida (1980) that “the Photograph has this power … Of looking me straight in the face” but “in film, no one ever looks at me: it is forbidden—by the Fiction” (111).

3. See, for example, the work of Elissa Marder on both mothers and photography in Barthes in “Dark Room Readings: Scenes of Maternal Photography” and “Nothing to Say: Fragments on the Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

4. For more on these four photographers, see Robinson in Elusive Truths. Lange’s uncensored photographs were published in Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment in 2006. Adams’ work was published as Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans in 1944 (following a gallery show of the same name). An overview of Toyo Miyatake’s work appears in Toyo Miyatake Behind the Camera, 1923-1979 (1984).

5. Barthes frames his perceptions of his father through his mother, one step removed: “The father, dead very early (in the war), was lodged in no memorial or sacrificial discourse. By maternal intermediary his memory—never an oppressive one—merely touched the surface of childhood with an almost silent bounty” (RB 14). In Camera Lucida, the father is a figure of metaphorical connections, rather than the bodily connections that characterize the link to the mother. Photography is haunted by the ghost of painting, Barthes says, and “it has made painting, through its copies and contestations, into the absolutely, paternal Reference, as if it were born from the Canvas … At this point in my investigation, nothing eidetically distinguishes a photograph, however realistic, from a painting” (Barthes, CL 30–31, emphasis added). Painting is paternal to photography in the sense that it is visually related: photographs and paintings can look alike, nearly identical. The link, however, turns out to be false: “it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater,” which shares with photography the connection to reanimated bodies (31). Compared to the maternal connection, paternal relationship is merely a distraction, a false connection that does not have the weight of the maternal body.

6. Marder notes that this landscape is one of several photographs in Camera Lucida that Barthes describes in detail but does not include in the text. “Instead of writing about the image, he writes on it, inscribing it with diverse kinds of written texts, thereby transcribing the visual components of the image into a new composite form of writing (“Dark Room” 234–235). As I explore below, this method of writing is crucial to Barthes’s negotiation of the maternal, fixing capabilities of the photograph.

7. Barthes’s Mourning Diary, written in the two years following his mother’s death and published in 2009, reveals that Barthes did encounter a photograph that matches this description prior to beginning work on CL (Mourning Diary 143). However, Badmington points out that in CL Barthes reports the date of this discovery as occurring in November, shortly after his mother’s death, whereas his diary entry puts it more than six months later, on June 11, 1978. This move, according to Badmington, adds “further weight to the claim that the book on photography can be read, at least in part, as a work of fiction. In simple terms, the decision could be seen as an aesthetic one” (309). The “real” Winter Garden Photograph then does not affect our reading of CL‘s absent version of the same.

8. “La photographie m’obligeait ainsi à un travail douloureux; tendu vers l’essence de son identité, je me débattais au milieu d’images partiellement vraies, et donc totalement fausses” (Barthes, La chambrè claire 103). The French “travail” imparts the same double meaning as the English “labor.”

9. For more on autobiography in Camera Lucida, see Dyer xii, Olin 104, and Tsakiridou 284.

10. As Mavor writes, it is easy to read Barthes’s description of the Van Der Zee photograph as a narrative of “patronizing racism” that casts the family portrait as a “naïve” grasp at “the White Man’s attributes” (Mavor 29; Barthes CL 43). Barthes’s relation to race is “Neither racist nor not racist” (Mavor 44), except, of course, in the sense that as a white man writing about Black people his every word is inflected with his relation to race. Mavor also points out that Barthes’s other sensitive and incisive critiques of Western imperialism and racism demonstrate his ability to engage with race with nuance. The point here is not to condemn but to note that if photography is an art form / an artistic medium that produces bodies, it of course must reckon with what a body is: who is allowed to own them, look at them, hide them, keep them?

11. My Year of Meats also deals extensively with the politics of women’s reproduction as/versus production in film. For more, see Shameem Black, Leigh Johnson, and Cheryl Fish.

12. Film has its own kind of excess. As Dana Polan writes, “The inexorable flow of images through the projector creates a force that, for Barthes, is beyond analysis, beyond any possible demythologizing or demystifying stance” (42). As opposed to the overwhelming real, Barthes identifies the overwhelming experience of encountering film, which buries the referential qualities that could form the basis of analysis.

13. Louise Hornby writes of the freeze frame that in these moments “film imitates photographic stillness, but as a way to reassure us of its difference and distance” (45).

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