Death and the Moving Image examines the representation of death and dying in mainstream cinema from its earliest to its latest renditions to reveal the ambivalent place of death in twentieth and twenty-first century culture: the ongoing split between its over- and under-statement, between its cold, bodily, realities and its fantastical, transcendental and, most importantly, strategic depictions. Our screens are steeped in death’s dramatics: in spectacles of glorious sacrifice or bloody retribution, in the ecstasy of agony, but always in the promise of redemption. This book is about the staging of these dramatics in mainstream Western film and the discrepancies that fuel them and are, by return, fuelled by them. Exploring the impact of gender, race, nation or narration upon them, this groundbreaking study isolates how mainstream cinema works to bestow value upon certain lives, and specific socio-cultural identities, in a hierarchical and partisan way. Dedicated to the popular, to the political and ethical implications of mass culture’s themes and imperatives, Death and the Moving Image takes this culture to task for its mortal economies of expendability. Ultimately, it also disinters the capacity for film, and film criticism, to engage with life and vulnerability differently and even generatively.
Michele Aaron is Senior Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham.
Introduction: Everywhere and NowherePart I: Before - Flirting with Death1. Self-endangerment and the Subject of Film2. Cinema and Suicide;3. Sacrifice and Spectatorship in ContextPart II: During - Depicting Death4. The Cinematic Language of Dying5. Grammar Lessons: Dying and Difference6. Watching Others Die: Spectatorship, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Being MovedPart III After - Responding to Death7. At Last: Towards a Cinema of No ReturnNotesBibliographyFilmographyIndex
Through a series of sophisticated and highly nuanced readings of a wide range of films, Michele Aaron exposes the mortal economies on which cinema depends. This important book will cause readers to think again about the ethical and political stakes of the filmic treatment of death in mainstream cinema and beyond.'
