Suturing and Other Narrative Practices in Film

Paper Summary:

This paper studies the concept of suturing which is defined in many different ways such as sewing something back together, gesture or pseudo-identification, the individual watching a film as a stand-in for the camera and more. It looks at the filmmaker Ranier Werner Fassbinder's work 'Despair' as an example of a film that attempts to undercut notions of the gazer of the film becoming sutured into the web of the film and of becoming socially subjected to the predetermined constructions of reality within the film's text. Finally, it concludes that the destabilizing of a master narrative with the particularity of autobiography is better than the complicated suturing.

From the Paper:

"On a very literal level, to suture something is to sew something back together, usually imperfectly, usually with a substance that is alien to the body that is being altered, such as the doctor's suturing thread that stitches together an open wound. On a semiotic level, according to Jacques-Alain Miller, Miller's definition of suture (in a nutshell) is that the suturing process in culture is the process through which a subject is joined into the signifying chain of culture, allowing a signifier to stand-in for the subject's absence in discourse. (Suture as a Laconian Concept) "

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