Film Quarterly (1975) - Against "The System of the Suture"

Details

• article: Against "The System of the Suture"
• author(s): William Rothman
• journal: Film Quarterly (01/Oct/1975)
• issue: volume 29, issue 1, pages 45-50
• DOI: 10.1525/fq.1975.29.1.04a00100
• journal ISSN: 0015-1386
• publisher: University of California Press
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Bodega Bay, California, Cahiers du Cinéma, History, Ingrid Bergman, Motion pictures, Notorious (1946), Raymond Bellour, The Birds (1963), William Rothman

ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info%3Aofi%2Fenc%3AUTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/summon.serialssolutions.com&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Against+%22The+System+of+the+Suture%22&rft.jtitle=Film+Quarterly&rft.au=Rothman%2C+William&rft.date=1975-10-01&rft.pub=University+of+California+Press&rft.issn=0015-1386&rft.volume=29&rft.issue=1&rft.spage=45&rft.epage=50&rft.externalDocID=10.2307%2F1211840

Links

• Google Scholar
• jstor.org
• DOI.org

Abstract

Such a criticism might well systemically investigate his use of terms such as "ideology," "system," "codes," "classical cinema," "fiction," "enunciation," "de-construction" and so on-each of which is used in a way loaded with theoretical implications which could be challenged. Dayan argues that this sequence of "experiences" (the viewer's discomforting discovery of the frame; his uncertainty as to why the frame is what it is; his realization that he is only authorized to see what is contained in the glance of an "absentone" who rules over that frame; his acceptance of the figure shown in the subsequent reverse shot as that sovereign "absent-one") is not contingent: it is the effect of a system. Throughout Dayan's article, there is an unacknowledged tension between the Marxist trappings he adopts and the fundamentally anti-Marxist idea that point-of-view sequences and hence "classical" films are by their very nature (regardless of history) reflections of a timeless bourgeois ideology.