If the present book may appear to the reader as an exercise in hardcore film theory, especially of psychoanalytical provenance, then it is worth recalling that its initial impulse arose from a cinephilic attachment to certain irritating details of specific films, rather than from a will towards theoretical abstraction in the first place. While watching films by Antonioni, Haneke, Kubrick or Schrader, to name just a few directors whose works will be closely analyzed in the following pages, I was fascinated by a phenomenon that in strict technical terms would be regarded as an error in the construction of a character’s point-of-view. In an apparently purely transitional scene in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo for example, Richard Gere is driving in his convertible as the first shot shows his head turning right towards the surrounding landscape of the highway. The next reverse shot occupies his subjective look and pans from right to left to embody the turning of his head. Nothing could be more conventional in terms of cinematic syntax than this sequence of objective shot and subjective reverse-shot. But all of a sudden the same movement of the camera discloses the view of Richard Gere from behind. What began as a perfectly causal linking of shots ends up as an illogical and impossible detachment of the point of view from the carrier of the same point of view. In trying to grasp this paradoxical short circuit of stitching and de-stitching in between one cut, I gradually came to the conviction that the old psychoanalytical paradigm of “suture” provides the most adequate and most elaborate theoretical tool to come to terms with this fundamental negativity of what Jean-Pierre Oudart, in his formative article on suture, called the “absent one”. While the theoretical ramifications of this structuring absence are extremely complex – and the whole first part of this book is devoted to tracing its complicated path throughout the history of psychoanalytical film theory – its basic premise is radically simple: the absent one in film is none other than the camera itself. In other words: the camera is logically excluded from the very cinematic image it has captured itself. Or, to put it even more simply: the camera cannot film itself.