In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

69 3 The Suture Scenario Audiovisuality and Post-Screen Theory A dorno’s essays on popular music, for all their habitual negativity, represent a seminal conjunction of critical theory and mass culture. Screen theory, a potent combination, like Frankfurt School critique, of Marxism and psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, first came to prominence in Great Britain in the early 1970s. The difference between the two formations is that Screen theory took its cue from Cahiers du cinéma, engaging Hollywood cinema without the contrary disposition that occasionally mars Adorno’s, if not Benjamin’s or Kracauer’s, work on mass art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Yet if Screen theory was willing to explore the performative contradictions and progressive character of the classic realist text, the journal from which the movement took its name, Screen, indicates its singular attention to the field of visuality. Moreover, perhaps its most distinctive contribution to cinema studies, the concept of suture, tended to operate at a formal level as a figure of closure in almost direct contradistinction to the textual and spectatorial indeterminacy posited at the level of theory. Given these discursive orientations, the Screen concentration on the visual field and the related, univocal conception of suture, the aim of this chapter is to reexplore suture theory in light of the audio or, more precisely, audiovisual register and in the context not so much of classical and rock music (as in the previous chapter) as of jazz and rap (i.e., Billie Holiday and gangsta rap, respectively). More specifically, this chapter is structured in the form of a diptych . In the first theoretical part, I offer a brief history of suture theory Heath. One of my working premises is that if the “time of suture seems to have irrevocably passed,” as Z  iz  ek says in The Fright of Real Tears, then rather than interpret this “disappearance as a fact,” it might be more instructive to see it as an indication of the “decline of cinema studies.”1 In the second, illustrative part, I appropriate Z  iz  ek’s proposition and positively invert it, examining audiovisuality in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) and F. Gary Gray’s Set It Off (1996), mobilizing Z  iz  ek’s rereading of the Screen account of suture (suture-as-desuturing) as a way to conceptualize a revised notion of suturing action that better speaks to what I take to be its complex, dialectical functioning. Indeed, another of the working premises of the chapter is that “queer cinema” and the “new black movie boom” of the 1990s provide a less monolithic, more performative model than Screen theory for thinking the relations between musicality and narrativity as well as between the apparatus and textual traditions within film studies itself. Theory: The Suture Scenario If it’s true, as Noël Carroll maintains in his introduction to Mystifying Movies, that contemporary film theory originated in 1966, when Christian Metz began composing the essays that would later comprise one of the founding texts of ciné-semiology, Film Language, 1966 has an additional significance in that it was also the year in which Jacques-Alain Miller’s essay on suture appeared in Cahiers pour l’analyse.2 Jean-Pierre Oudart’s “Cinema and Suture” (1969) might be said to represent the first properly film-theoretical moment of the suture scenario, but the second film-theoretical moment, marking as it does the translation of Miller’s and Oudart’s work into English as well as the appearance in 1977–78 of Heath’s “Notes on Suture” in the same issue of Screen, is, in retrospect, the critical one.3 While Daniel Dayan’s “Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema” had appeared in 1974 (and eventually became the object of William Rothman ’s 1975 critique4 ), Heath’s essay fluently recapitulated each of its predecessors and quickly became a locus classicus of contemporary film theory. A translation of sorts of Miller’s essay on suture (the latter of which was also a translation of sorts of Lacan’s 1964 seminar on the “causation of the subject”), part of the importance of Heath’s “Notes on Suture” was that it almost immediately migrated into other disciplines , producing determinate theoretical effects outside the field of film theory. Thus, when Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe introduced their neo-Gramscian notion of “hegemonic suture” in Hegemony 70 PART 2: SOUND FILM from 1966 to 1977 as well as a synoptic review of it since Stephen [3.137.164...

Share