Cinematic Cuts Theorizing Film Endings

 <i>Explores the  philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings.</i><br>  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 <i>Cinematic Cuts</i>, 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.<br>