Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema The Outside of Film is a contribution to an aesthetics of cinema rooted in Marxist theory Rather than focusing on the role that certain films or the cinema as an institution might play in political consciousness the book asks a different question how can the subject of politics in film be thought This problem is presented in a systematic theoretical rather than historical manner The main aim of this book is a retrospective film theoretical rehabilitation of the psychoanalytical concept of suture whose political core is progressively revealed In a second step this rereading of suture theory is mediated with the Marxist aesthetics of Fredric Jameson From the perspective of this reconfigured aesthetics of negativity films by Hitchcock Antonioni Haneke and Kubrick are analyzed as articulations of a political unconscious