Deathwatch : : American Film, Technology, and the End of Life / / C. Scott Combs.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Combs, C. Scott,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Film and Culture Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 p.) :; ‹B›B&W Illus.: ‹/B›23.

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Mortal Recoil -- 2. Posthumous Motion -- 3. Echo and Hum -- 4. Seconds -- 5. Terminal Screens -- Coda -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Backmatter