Death in documentaries : : the Memento Mori experience / / by Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter.

• Superior document: Value Inquiry Book Series. Philosophy of Film, Volume 306
• VerfasserIn: Bennett-Carpenter, Benjamin,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, The Netherlands ;, Boston, [Massachusetts] : : Brill Rodopi,, 2018.; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Value inquiry book series ; Volume 306.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (232 pages) :; illustrations.

Memento mori is a broad and understudied cultural phenomenon and experience. The term “memento mori” is a Latin injunction that means “remember mortality,” or more directly, “remember that you must die.” In art and cultural history, memento mori appears widely, especially in medieval folk culture and in the well-known Dutch still life vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet memento mori extends well beyond these points in art and cultural history. In Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience , Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter suggests that documentaries are an especially apt form of contemporary memento mori . Bennett-Carpenter shows that documentaries may offer composed transformative experiences in which a viewer may renew one’s consciousness of mortality – and thus renew one’s life.

Table of Contents

Front Matter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Memento Mori in Art and Literature -- Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten as Memento Mori -- Memento Mori as “Consciousness of Mortality” and as a Cultural Phenomenon -- Ethical Memento Mori: Wim Wenders’s Notebook on Cities and Clothes -- Documentaries as Contemporary Memento Mori -- Quintessential Memento Mori Experience: Derek Jarman’s Blue -- Personal Memento Mori: The Iconic 9/11 Footage and the Threat of Death -- Conclusion and Future Prospects.