Deathwatch: American Film, Technology, and the End of Life (Film and Culture Series) - Softcover

Combs, C. Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231163479 ISBN 13: 9780231163477

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description:

The first book to analyze American cinema's long history of representing death on screen, Deathwatch considers movie sequences in which the process of dying becomes an exercise in legibility and exploration for the camera. Through readings of attractions-based cinema, narrative films, early sound cinema, and films using voice-over 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. Instead, he shows how the act of dying in film 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.

About the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0231163479
• ISBN 13: 9780231163477
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288