The moment of concluding

The book ends where it began, with the structure and temporality of retroaction, and an interdependent relation where the past does indeed determine the present, but the present itself determines what such a past can be. I argue that the possibilities for a Lacanian approach to the cinema remain a vital resource for theoretical orientations in Film Studies, providing an alternative discourse to the Deleuzian and phenomenological traditions currently dominant in film-philosophy. While I recognise the worth of such philosophical orientations, my project demonstrates the value of a properly Lacanian understanding of the cinema: one that was overlooked in contemporary film analysis and was in fact never realised by the first psychoanalytic film theorists. I emphasise that it comes from the uniquely Lacanian contributions of this project to the understanding of film noir and point to the broader implications that such theorisation can have for the contemporary study of the cinema.