two sutures

1. Suture (n - gerund): binding. | (vt): bind together two or more separated parts of a whole, as in, skin with stitches, or film by splicing. [what do i win? did this definition have to include the uses and effects? see below. Also, I refuse to cite this definition, because I made it up.]

2. Suture in It's A Wonderful Life

What I like about the notion of suture is that it works, like the structural-semiotic view of cinema, at both the functional/technical level and at the level of narrative content. For example, in It's A Wonderful Life, the early biographical overview of George Bailey takes place through a series of voiced-over scenes, each comprised of myriad shots within the scene, including reverse-shot sequences. Taken together, these scenes lead up to the "day" of Christmas Eve.

The instances of suture in this first part (roughly 1/3) of the film range from the suturing of sound and image (read: voice and music to image) - an important point touched upon by Jason in his post, and especially problematic because they do not take place in a linear, chronologically derivative way. Rather, both are presented simultaneously, as in the initial scene of the prayers for George, followed by the heavenly host conversing, where each voice corresponds to a galaxy, and the entrance of Clarence's voice is prefigured by a star sliding across the screen. These are the most obvious uses of sound-suture, but recognizing them as such allows one to point out the more subtle uses, such as the voice of the character speaking off-screen, or the entrance of various musical themes to foreshadow or accentuate events onscreen.

This is perhaps a radically different view of the effects of sound in cinema than the argument that music is there first and foremost to cover up the sound of the projector, thereby maintaining the audience's illusion that what images they see are not mediated by a machine, and are therefore more true to reality. On the contrary, the use of music in Wonderful Life is sutured in precisely to accentuate the illusory experience of the movie, since it is usually heard without a represented source on-screen, and yet fits the "mood" of whatever scene in which it appears, or even changes that mood.

So there is the use and effect of suture to bring disparate sound and image together into a (normatively) coherent whole. There is also the suture between shots of the film, working towards figuring an invisible other, l'absent (Oudard), with whom the viewing subject is perhaps meant to identify about as strongly as they do with the camera's point of view. Since Jason and Katie have treated the theoretical implications of shot-to-shot suture quite closely, I thought it might be useful to let this issue remain with those who have, as the art historians say, a "good eye", and to move on to the issue of narrative suture.

How does suture structure narrative? This articulation of the notion of suture requires a sort of jump, a meta-conception of what suture is and what it does. First, we must have taken for granted, at a certain level, the uses and effects of structural suture from shot to shot. In other words, we must be able to take as the unit of analysis a scene rather than a shot. If we think of the scene as the basic unit of the cinematic narrative, then the process of narrative suture becomes clear.

Who, or what, figures as l'absent in a given scene? It would be naive to suggest that there exists a relation of scene/reverse-scene in most conventional (read: classical Hollywood) narratives (read: that's a big fat assumption of a claim which I'm sure has tons of exceptions). Instead of a pairing of scenes that are edited to seem in dialogue with one another, the logical structure of a narrative is set up to flow linearly, with one scene leading to another. Even in Wonderful Life, or in Memento, for that matter, the scenes which redouble upon previously-enacted scenes are inconceivable without the previous enactment. There is therefore an absence of l'absent in the relation between sutured-together narrative scenes (cf. Lacan*)

Rather, what the viewing subject is exposed to is the continuous accumulation of absences, as each scene is left behind in memory, utterly supplanted by the new one. This is explicitly manifested in Wonderful Life by the continual replacement, during the biographical scenes, of young Georges with older and older Georges. What keeps this progression from denigrating into nonsensical replacements is the repeated insistence (by the voice-over from the character of Joseph, usually) that this is in fact the character of George Bailey. Then, following that insistence, we find the other characters addressing him by name, and the continuities (or similarities which we take to be continuities -- and after all, this is a cinematic object; everything is reflections, right?) also accumulate.

This, then, is the primary means by which suture structures narrative: there is a double-accumulation at work. First, the accumulation of absences, the absences of the scenes just prior; and second, the complementary accumulation of the continuities, between those scenes, such as the musical themes, naming of characters, and so on. It is precisely the conflict between these two accumulations that makes up the narrative suture. The narrative progresses to the degree that the objects of the previous scenes (primarily, the development of the protagonist's character) are fulfilled or frustrated. And all this, of course, goes on at the level of content, apparently quite autonomous from the domain of the technical apparatus and the structures which underlie the production and distribution of the movie and of the cinematic industry as a whole. The most important suturing of all, the most invisible and the most influential, is the suture that binds the content to its technical and social conditions of possibility.

* This is another good article on "suture" by Stephen Heath, including this tasty Venn Diagram: