Cinematic Cuts: Theorizing Film Endings (SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature)

Explores the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings. Editing has been called the language of cinema, and thus a film’s ending can be considered the final punctuation mark of this language, framing everything that came before and offering the key to both our interpretation and our enjoyment of a film. In Cinematic Cuts, scholars explore the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings, analyzing how film endings engage our fantasies of cheating death, finding true love, or determining the meaning of life. They examine how endings offer various forms of enjoyment for the spectator, from the momentary fulfillment of desire in the happy ending to the pleasurable torment of an indeterminate ending. The contributors also consider how film endings open onto larger questions relating to endings in our time. They suggest how a film ending’s hidden counternarrative can be read as a political act, how our interpretation of a film ending parallels the end of a psychoanalytical session, how film endings reveal our anxieties and fears, and how cinema itself might end with the increasing intervention of digital technologies that reorient the spectator’s sense of temporality and closure. Films by Akira Kurosawa, Lars von Trier, Joon-Hwan Jang, Claire Denis, Christopher Nolan, Jane Campion, John Huston, and Spike Jonze, among others, are discussed. Sheila Kunkle is Associate Professor of Individualized Studies at Metropolitan State University and the coeditor (with Todd McGowan) of Lacan and Contemporary Film. Introduction: on the subject of endings / Sheila Kunkle Resolution, truncation, glitch / Hugh S. Manon The banality of trauma: Claire Denis's Bastards and the anti-ending / Hilary Neroni The greatest trick the devil ever played: desire, drive, and the twist ending / Ryan Engley Retroactive rupture: the place of the subject in Jane Campion's In the cut / Fabio Vighi Love, loss, endings, and beginnings: a psychoanalysis of Rust and bone / Juan Pablo Lucchelli Cinematic ends: the ties that unbind in Claire Denis's White material / Jennifer Friedlander When one becomes two: the ending of Catfish / Rex Butler The satisfaction of an ending / Todd McGowan The too realistic cut: gaze as overconformity in Blue velvet / Henry Krips The end of fantasy as we know it: Her and the vanishing mediator of the voice in film / Sheila Kunkle Melancholia, an alternative to the end of the world: a reading of Lars Von Trier's film / David Denny Cut or time, and American cinema of thought-affect: cuts of failure in John Huston's Fat city / A. Kiarina Kordela The end of (self) analysis: the end of Kurosawa's High and low / Brian Wall The final failure in The dark knight rises / Slavoj Žižek The ["end"] / Jan Agodzinski.