Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I

Cinema has, since its inception, provided an ever more dominating forum for contemporary society's depiction of, and dealings with, death. It supplies our main representations of illness or of grief, of wounded bodies or ghosts, of death by stupefying risk, tragic misadventure or unpalatable crime. It offers the most vivid imaginings of what is feared in pre-death, glamourised in the afterlife, and punishable in both/of a morality to mortality. The proposed book, Death and the 'Moving' Image: Ideology, Iconography, and I, provides the first study of the various roles that death performs in western cinema and, through it, in western culture. The book's 'before, during, after' structure argues for the crucial triangulation of death's function as narrative promise, physical event, and spectatorial reaction. In other words, death in western cinema is far more than a simple act. It must, instead, be seen as a complex of issues associated with functionality (of the text), corporeality (of the body) and empathy (of the spectator).

Moving far beyond Ernest Becker's popular thesis on the denial of death, the book's discussion of death's cinematic, political and subjective significance, investigates how and, more importantly, why the moving image enacts the increasing displacement of death and mourning into culture. At the same time, this displacement is particularised by the medium/by the disavowing strategies surrounding film spectacle, sex and spectatorship/and, especially, by its emotive intent. Indeed, how 'moving' the images surrounding death are comes to provide a timely paradigm for interrogating contemporary western culture's mediation of human suffering and especially its socio-political implications.