Ethnographic suturing: Towards a psychoanalysis of ethnographic filmmaking

Suture is understood in Lacanian psychoanalysis as the paradoxical function through which a subject turns into a blind Cartesian by exercising its power to see. The gaze as the object a that overdetermines one's identity is thus shut off from the subject's consciousness, where this visual paradox can no longer be detected. It is from the burning child dream related by Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams that Jacques Lacan formulates this dialectic of suture and the gaze in his Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Setting out by detailing the reasons why film theory has failed to master this dialectic, this project holds the failure to be an ethical one in that film theory has not lived up to its claim as a political critique. It does not therefore reach the level where Lacan formulates his ethics of seeing along with the logic of desire. Guided by this ethics, the present project takes up a political analysis of Jean Rouch's Les maitres fous, an ethnographic documentary on the possession rite among the Songhay migrant workers in colonial Ghana. This film parallels the structure of Freud's burning child dream, revealing the structurality of the colonialist and imperialist project as the one to graft the white man's desire onto the colonized in visual terms. In contrast, the mimicry theory proposed respectively by Homi Bhabha and Michael Taussig remains as it is a phenomenology of such a colonial condition. In Chinese cinemas, the same dialectical structure of suture and the gaze brings this inherited white man's desire further as to produce a phylogenetic phantasy as nation-building. There Freud's Totem and Taboo helps shed a new light on how the Fifth Generation Chinese (male) filmmakers conduct their auto-ethnography by evoking their awe and detest of the primordial father. They soon seek relief through an exchange of women's images on screen. At bottom, the filmmakers, like the subjects filmed by Rouch, are simply dreaming Freud's burning child dream, presenting another nightmarish picture of our modernity. Wo Es war, soll Ich werden: where this dream of modernity was, there the present psychoanalytic study shall be.