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

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. The first study to unpack American cinema’s long history of representing death