Cinematic Cuts by Sheila Kunkle

Author:Sheila Kunkle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1.Alfred Hitchcock, quoted in François Truffaut, Hitchcock: The Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock by François Truffaut, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 73. Immediately after claiming that one must always give the audience knowledge, Hitchcock does make an exception for the twist ending. He adds, “Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story” (73).

2.The movement of desire from object to object is what makes desire so compatible with the capitalist economy. Capitalism isn’t a product of human nature, but it does have a parasitical relationship to desiring subjectivity. Without the logic of the desire structuring subjectivity, the emergence of capitalism would be unimaginable.

3.In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” Jacques Lacan straightforwardly identifies desire with metonymy when he claims, “desire is a metonymy, even if man scoffs at the idea.” Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 439. Lacan’s suggestion that one might resist this identification of desire with metonymy stems from our belief in the independence of each subsequent object of desire.

4.Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre IV: La relation d’object, 1956–1957, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 15.

5.Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 30.

6.Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 21.

7.Of course, not every fantasmatic ending is ideological. The ending of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), for instance, depicts the elimination of the threat to the romantic union between Jeffrey (Kyle McLaughlin) and Sandy (Laura Dern) occurring in an idyllic setting. But because Lynch includes a shot of a robin, the figure of fantasmatic redemption in the film, eating a bug in the midst of the romantic union, we see how disturbance persists in the middle of the reconciliation that seems to eliminate antagonism.

8.Truffaut’s first two features, The 400 Blows (1959) and Shoot the Piano Player (1960), both reflect the inventiveness of his endings. The former ends with the hero Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) running away from a boarding school and discovering finally that he has nowhere further to go when he reaches a beach, and the latter concludes with the shocking shooting death of Léna (Marie Dubois), the new love of the piano player Charlie (Charles Aznavour).

9.The weakest of Linklater’s trilogy of Jesse and Celine is the final installment, Before Midnight (2013), which details the married life of Jesse and Celine years after their reunion in Paris. Though critics celebrated the realism of the film’s depiction of married life in contrast to the fantasmatic vision of romance proffered by the first two films, Before Midnight falls into an ideological trap that the second film avoids. Though the third film shows how the obstacle to Jesse and Celine’s relationship remains, the obstacle ceases to be the source of satisfaction and becomes purely a source of dissatisfaction.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.