While cinema is a medium with a unique ability to "watch life"
and "write movement," it is equally singular in its portrayal of
death. The first study to unpack American cinema's long history of
representing death, this book considers movie sequences in which
the process of dying becomes an exercise in legibility and
exploration for the camera and connects the slow or static process
of dying to formal film innovation throughout the twentieth
century.
C. Scott Combs analyzes films that stretch from cinema's origins
to the end of the twentieth century, looking at attractions-based
cinema, narrative films, early sound cinema, and films using
voiceover or images of medical technology. Through films such as
Thomas Edison's "Electrocuting an Elephant" (1903), D. W.
Griffith's "The Country Doctor" (1909), John Ford's "How Green Was
My Valley" (1941), Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard" (1950),
Stanley Kubrick's " 2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), and Clint
Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" (2004), Combs argues that the end
of dying occurs more than once, in more than one place. Working
against the notion that film cannot capture the end of life because
it cannot stop moving forward, that it cannot induce the
photographic fixity of the death instant, this book argues that the
place of death in cinema is persistently in flux, wedged between
technological precision and embodied perception. Along the way,
Combs consolidates and reconceptualizes old and new debates in film
theory.
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