Spring Break
Dead Man Talking
C. Scott Combs, St. John's University
Issue date: 6/1/08 Section: Spring 2007
"He's dead now, except for he's breathing."
The Killers (1946)
One way to introduce film studies as its own unique discipline is by sharing a part of my own research. As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I wrote on some of the perdurable ways that American cinema has visualized the process of dying. Titled Final Touches: Registering Death in American Cinema, my dissertation studies how American movies see dying by focusing on key moments of technological shift within cinema history, like the transition to story films around 1908, or the transition to synchronized sound around 1928. My emphasis throughout is on "dying," not "death." Unlike the still images of painting and photography, the moving image records time. It would therefore seem more capable of apprehending the process between alive and dead, and thus of harnessing the death moment as something visible, certifiable, immediately recognizable to audiences. But exactly because it is so bent on showing process, the movie camera inherits the more general problem of how to determine when and whether death has occurred. The solutions cinema has improvised to fill this gap-to confirm and finalize death-have been under-theorized and deserve to be studied carefully.
Early filmmakers intuited the camera's potential for seeing dying, a fact supported by the very ubiquity of one-shot films made before 1905-in the US, France, and Denmark, mainly-that variously purported to show bodies at the moment they ceased to function voluntarily. Some of these bodies were beheaded, a good many others were hanged. A few were electrocuted. Despite the range of technique, filmed executions (both real and fake) introduced perceptual problems surrounding the confirmation of death. Though motions such as twitching, convulsing, and jolting could visualize the process of dying, only the immobile body could connote "lights out." Not moving was just not enough to convince us. Conviction was supplied by other figures surrounding the body-doctors, prison wardens, historic kings, policemen-who step in to check vital signs, occasionally looking at the camera as though to assure us dying has elapsed. I call these figures "registrants" to honor the service they perform for us absent and ever-curious spectators.
The Killers (1946)
One way to introduce film studies as its own unique discipline is by sharing a part of my own research. As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I wrote on some of the perdurable ways that American cinema has visualized the process of dying. Titled Final Touches: Registering Death in American Cinema, my dissertation studies how American movies see dying by focusing on key moments of technological shift within cinema history, like the transition to story films around 1908, or the transition to synchronized sound around 1928. My emphasis throughout is on "dying," not "death." Unlike the still images of painting and photography, the moving image records time. It would therefore seem more capable of apprehending the process between alive and dead, and thus of harnessing the death moment as something visible, certifiable, immediately recognizable to audiences. But exactly because it is so bent on showing process, the movie camera inherits the more general problem of how to determine when and whether death has occurred. The solutions cinema has improvised to fill this gap-to confirm and finalize death-have been under-theorized and deserve to be studied carefully.
Early filmmakers intuited the camera's potential for seeing dying, a fact supported by the very ubiquity of one-shot films made before 1905-in the US, France, and Denmark, mainly-that variously purported to show bodies at the moment they ceased to function voluntarily. Some of these bodies were beheaded, a good many others were hanged. A few were electrocuted. Despite the range of technique, filmed executions (both real and fake) introduced perceptual problems surrounding the confirmation of death. Though motions such as twitching, convulsing, and jolting could visualize the process of dying, only the immobile body could connote "lights out." Not moving was just not enough to convince us. Conviction was supplied by other figures surrounding the body-doctors, prison wardens, historic kings, policemen-who step in to check vital signs, occasionally looking at the camera as though to assure us dying has elapsed. I call these figures "registrants" to honor the service they perform for us absent and ever-curious spectators.
Be the first to comment on this story