Deathwatch - American Film, Technology, and the End of Life

Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-0-231-16346-0
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 159 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 499 g

Reihe: Film and Culture Series

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Combs, C. Scott

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmproduktion, Filmtechnik
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmtheorie, Filmanalyse
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: An Elusive Passage1. Mortal Recoil: Early American Execution Scenes and the Electric Chair2. Posthumous Motion: The Deathwork of Narrative Editing3. Echo and Hum: Death's Acoustic Space in the Early Sound Film4. Seconds: The Flashback Loop and the Posthumous Voice5. Terminal Screens: Cinematography and Electric DeathCoda: End(ings)NotesBibliographyIndex

Über Autor(innen)

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