Overview

The first book to unpack American cinema's long history of representing death, this work considers movie sequences in which the process of dying becomes an exercise in legibility and exploration for the camera. Reading attractions-based cinema, narrative films, early sound cinema, and films using voiceover or images of medical technology, C. Scott Combs connects the slow or static process of dying to formal film innovation throughout the twentieth century. He looks at 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), among other films, to argue against the notion that film cannot capture the end of life because it cannot stop moving forward. Instead, he shows how the end of dying occurs more than once and in more than one place, understanding death in cinema as constantly in flux, wedged between technological precision and embodied perception.

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9780231163460

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Reviews

Genuinely exciting and brimming with original analytic insights organized around deft close readings of films from the dawn of cinema to the present. Given cinema's eternal fascination with death, coupled with film theory's rightfully obsessive need to explore the crossroads of photographic representation and the end of life, Combs's ambitious attempts to interweave these concerns are welcome and illuminating. -- Adam Lowenstein, University of Pittsburgh, author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film Combs shows that death in cinema is never just a random theme, but forms an essential aspect of a film's narrative structure and stylistics. He traces the cinematic portrayal of death from the pantomiming of silent films through the deadly flashbacks of film noir to the technological registering of death in post-sixties cinema, such as the death of the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I consider this one of the most impressive works I have read in recent years. -- Tom Gunning, University of Chicago Combs shows that American cinema has come into its own by repeatedly returning to the elusive moment marking the transition from life to death through scenes of slow or un-sensational dying. Beautifully written and masterfully balanced between historical research and theoretical reflection, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in what cinema still has to tell us about our relationship to death and dying. -- Domietta Torlasco, Northwestern University

Author Information

C. Scott Combs is associate professor of English at St. John's University in New York City.

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