This paper is part of a wider project that brings together psychoanalysis and film by focusing on the most disruptive and potentially subversive Lacanian notion, that of the Real. My work explores the dialectical relationship between film as a process of symbolic signification and the unconscious/Real underside that it produces, arguing that only by attempting to read the traces of unconscious desire secreted by film can we encroach upon its “truth”. The key cinematic concepts of editing, suture and gaze are here re-assessed through Lacanian theory, while their theoretical and political potential is measured against the work of Italian directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini.