ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the life and critical practice of Cahiers du cinéma critic Jean-Pierre Oudart. Oudart has long been associated with the notion of suture, which he imported into film theory in his groundbreaking 1969 text. But the success of this term in film studies has obscured a larger body of writings produced by Oudart while at Cahiers between 1969 and 1980 and stands in stark contrast to the mystery of his personal fate. With a background more in psychoanalysis than cinephilia, Oudart was chief among the Cahiers critics responsible for introducing Lacanian theory to the film journal, but his texts were also marked by a stylistic inscrutability and idiosyncratic critical judgement that was remarked upon by readers and his fellow critics alike, tendencies that only became more exacerbated later in his tenure at Cahiers. With a particular interest in the work of Fritz Lang, Robert Kramer, Stanley Kubrick and, above all, Robert Bresson, his writings nonetheless form a fascinating corpus of film criticism.
