3 options
Deathwatch : American Film, Technology, and the End of Life / C. Scott Combs.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Combs, C. Scott, author.
- Series:
- Film and culture.
- Film and Culture Series
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Death in motion pictures.
- Mortality in motion pictures.
- Motion pictures--United States--History and criticism.
- Motion pictures.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (289 p.)
- Place of Publication:
- New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2014]
- Language Note:
- English
- System Details:
- text file
- Summary:
- 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.
- 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
- Notes:
- Description based upon print version of record.
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)
- ISBN:
- 9780231538039
- 0231538030
- OCLC:
- 920804456
The Penn Libraries is committed to describing library materials using current, accurate, and responsible language. If you discover outdated or inaccurate language, please fill out this feedback form to report it and suggest alternative language.