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The first book to analyze American cinema's long history of representing death on screen, Deathwatch considers movie sequences in which the process of dying becomes an exercise in legibility and exploration for the camera. Through readings of attractions-based cinema, narrative films, early sound cinema, and films using voice-over 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. Instead, he shows how the act of dying in film 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.
The first study to unpack American cinema’s long history of representing death
Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity:Combs shows that death in cinema is never just a random theme, but forms an essential aspect of a film's narrative structure and stylistics. I consider this one of the most impressive works I have read in recent years.
Adam Lowenstein, author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film:Genuinely exciting and brimming with original insights. Given cinema's eternal fascination with death, coupled with film theory's obsessive need to explore the crossroads of photographic representation and the end of life, Combs's ambitious attempts to interweave these concerns are welcome and illuminating.
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