Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I

by Michele Aaron

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748677764
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	01/31/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION - EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

PART I BEFORE - FLIRTING WITH DEATH

1. Self-endangerment and the Subject of Film
-Self-endangerment and Narrative Structure: the Recovery Momentum
-Mavericks and Martyrs: Action Cinema and the Marvellous Anticipation of Death
-Favourite Subjects

2. Cinema and Suicide
-The Forms of Cinematic Suicide
-Cinema about Suicide
-The Vanishing Point I: Femininity, Suicide, Cinematicism
-The Vanishing Point II: Blind Spots and the Dead-already

3. Sacrifice and Spectatorship in Context
-Conflict and Complicity in Post-9/11 Film
-From Complacency to Culpability: Self-sacrifice and Post-9/11 Film
-Looking On and Looking the Other Way: Hotel Rwanda and the Racialised Ethics of Spectatorship

PART II DURING - DEPICTING DEATH

4. The Cinematic Language of Dying
-In Morte Veritas: The Lexicon of Dying in the Mainstream Terminal Illness Film
-Beyond Hollywood: Human Fallibility and Bodily Failure

5. Grammar Lessons: Dying and Difference
-The Holy Trinity: Triumph, Betterment, Futurism (a.k.a.Whiteness, Rightness and Compulsory Heteronormativity)
-The Grammar of Dying I: White Redemption and Black Death
-The Grammar of Dying II: Hollywood's Unconscious and Black Progenicide
-Equilibration
-White Futurity = Black Progenicide?

6. Watching Others Die: Spectatorship, Vulnerability and the Ethics of Being Moved
-Against 3D: Un/Special Effects and Intensive Care
-The Moving Image

PART III AFTER - RESPONDING TO DEATH

7. At Last: Towards a Cinema of No Return
-The Mad and Maverick Hero
-The Dead-already
-Ethics in/as Context
-Eloquent Bodies
-Against Solipsism: Ethics as/of No Return

Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index

What People are Saying About This

'This compelling and exhaustive study will be a must read for scholars working at the intersection of visual culture and studies of death. Michele Aaron moves through several genres of film and spans the production of films from the 1940s into the 21^st century. Specifically, she argues that there is a pervasive aesthetic of self-risk in cinema, a death-drive that secures our several understandings of how contemporary culture masks its own political ends. Moving beyond the psychoanalytic, Aaron ultimately and convincingly demonstrates that it is the ethical in cinema that continues to be denied its proper place, even in the midst of its centrality in the genre. This is bold and welcomed new work.'

Duke University Sharon P. Holland

'This compelling and exhaustive study will be a must read for scholars working at the intersection of visual culture and studies of death. Michele Aaron moves through several genres of film and spans the production of films from the 1940s into the 21^st century. Specifically, she argues that there is a pervasive aesthetic of self-risk in cinema, a death-drive that secures our several understandings of how contemporary culture masks its own political ends. Moving beyond the psychoanalytic, Aaron ultimately and convincingly demonstrates that it is the ethical in cinema that continues to be denied its proper place, even in the midst of its centrality in the genre. This is bold and welcomed new work.'

King’s College London Sarah Cooper

'Through a series of sophisticated and highly nuanced readings of a wide range of films, Michele Aaron exposes the mortal economies on which cinema depends. This important book will cause readers to think again about the ethical and political stakes of the filmic treatment of death in mainstream cinema and beyond.'

Editorial Reviews

This compelling and exhaustive study will be a must read for scholars working at the intersection of visual culture and studies of death. Michele Aaron moves through several genres of film and spans the production of films from the 1940s into the 21st century. Specifically, she argues that there is a pervasive aesthetic of self-risk in cinema, a death-drive that secures our several understandings of how contemporary culture masks its own political ends. Moving beyond the psychoanalytic, Aaron ultimately and convincingly demonstrates that it is the ethical in cinema that continues to be denied its proper place, even in the midst of its centrality in the genre. This is bold and welcomed new work.'

Duke University Sharon P. Holland

Through a series of sophisticated and highly nuanced readings of a wide range of films, Michele Aaron exposes the mortal economies on which cinema depends. This important book will cause readers to think again about the ethical and political stakes of the filmic treatment of death in mainstream cinema and beyond.'

King’s College London Sarah Cooper

'Through a series of sophisticated and highly nuanced readings of a wide range of films, Michele Aaron exposes the mortal economies on which cinema depends. This important book will cause readers to think again about the ethical and political stakes of the filmic treatment of death in mainstream cinema and beyond.'
Sarah Cooper, King's College London

'This compelling and exhaustive study will be a must read for scholars working at the intersection of visual culture and studies of death. Michele Aaron moves through several genres of film and spans the production of films from the 1940s into the 21st century. Specifically, she argues that there is a pervasive aesthetic of self-risk in cinema, a death-drive that secures our several understandings of how contemporary culture masks its own political ends. Moving beyond the psychoanalytic, Aaron ultimately and convincingly demonstrates that it is the ethical in cinema that continues to be denied its proper place, even in the midst of its centrality in the genre. This is bold and welcomed new work.'
Sharon P. Holland, Duke University

From the Publisher