Death and the Moving Image Ideology, Iconography and I

by Aaron, Michele

• ISBN13: 9780748697014
• ISBN10: 0748697012
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2014-09-18
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Summary

Death and the Moving Image provides the first in-depth study of the representation of death and dying in mainstream Western cinema from its earliest to its latest renditions. It explores the impact of gender, race, nation and narration upon death's dramatics on-screen and 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, this book takes mainstream cinema to task for its mortal economies: for its adoration and absolution of some characters and expendability of others. It also ultimately disinters the capacity for film, and film criticism, to engage with life and vulnerability differently.

Aimed at the burgeoning field of death studies and explosion of interest in trauma and ethics within film studies, this book charts important new territory for the discipline whilst arguing for the centrality of this subject to the socio-political significance of cinema.

Author Biography

Michele Aaron is Senior Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Death and the 'Moving' Image

PART I: BEFORE - FLIRTING WITH DEATH
1. Narrative Suicide and the Subject of Film
2. S&M and (or as) Cinema: Sexual Risk and Visible Pleasures
3. Un/Safe Texts: Apocalypse, Millennial Cinema and the Traumatised Spectator

PART II: DURING - ACTUALISING DEATH
4. The Language of Pain: Illness, Injury and the Aesthetics of Dying
5. Who Buys It? Dying and Difference
6. Murder and Self-Reflexivity: the Implicated Spectator

PART III: AFTER - DEALING WITH DEATH
7. Medium, Memory and Mortality
8. Good Grief: Ghosts, Spectres and the Denial of Death
9. The Unconscious and the Unconscionable: Filming Death and the Complicitous Spectator

Conclusion: The Trauma of Cinema, or the Still 'Moving' Image.