Death and the Moving Image

This book examines the representation of death and dying in mainstream cinema. 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. It examines the formal, psychological and political exchange between cinema and death. It offers an accessible 'before, during, after' structure, of death's presence as narrative promise, physical event and spectatorial reaction. It also provides a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to film (draws on critical race, political theory and mise en scene analysis and case studies from beyond Western and fiction film).