On suture

pp. 76-112

in: Stephen Heath, Questions of cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1981

Abstract

Use has been made in preceding pages of the idea of a suturing activity involved in the relations a film sustains and is constructed to sustain with its spectator. Suture was initially introduced as a concept within the field of psychoanalysis in an article by Jacques-Alain Miller, the subsequent editor of Lacan's seminar, and then translated into film theory by the Cahiers du cinéma critic Jean-Pierre Oudart. The currency that has now been achieved for suture as a concept in film theory, in both French and Anglo-American writing, has not gone without ambiguities and misunderstandings. The following notes try to provide a context for understanding suture, to indicate something of the terms of its original psychoanalytic elaboration and of its subsequent utilization to specify the functioning of cinematic discourse. The first section, which deals with the former, is thus a somewhat "technical" exposition of certain aspects of Lacanian theory and difficult in this; those aspects are important, however, for grasping where suture comes from into thinking about cinema and the problems it can raise.