Having recently edited a Special Issue on Death and the Screen for Revenant (to be published later this year), with podcast co-host, friend, and all-round wonderful person Bethan Michael-Fox, I have found myself delving deeper in the topic of mediated death, death in popular culture, and distinctions between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ deaths. Both fiction and non-fiction depictions of death in films, documentaries and television series can tell us a lot about current ideologies and ideas around death, dying and the dead.
Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary by Jennifer Malkowski, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, is a fascinating account on portraying death and dying, or trying to capture death and dying on the screen. The book provides great insight into the history of recording death and dying, and how technological advancements have altered the ways in which death is captured on film.
In the first chapter ‘Capturing the moment’ Malkowksi explores how death footage has been recorded throughout the history of photography and film. They note how the costs of film limited how much footage a filmmaker could shoot, as simply filming for the sake of filming was too expensive. This makes capturing ‘the moment of death’ quite rare and difficult when you are filming a death documentary. Yet even in present day, with cheaper and often unlimited capacity of filming, capturing this moment is still not easy, if not, nearly impossible. As Malkowski puts it:
“The digital is unable to show death in “full detail”, as it remains beyond representation even amid image technologies that can record it more fully than ever. Failures to fully reveal it on the documentary screen affirm that death is enigmatic and internal, with limited external signs that the camera doggedly pursues. It refuses to appear as a transcendent, identifiable instant capable of video capture. Especially resistant to media visibility is the “moment of death,” a supposed point of transition from living being to corpse that has fixated image-makers and audiences, and that obscures the more frightening reality that dying is a durational process.”
— Malkowski (2017, page:7)
Increasingly audiences want and expect that ‘the moment of death’ is captured on film, but this has not always been the case. As can be seen in the picture above, the front cover depicts one of the Twin Towers, which was hit by a plane in 2001. 9/11 is an event with strong cultural significance, and I wrote briefly about where I was in my review of When the Dust Settles. In the introduction Malkowski quotes a person whose voice is captured in a video recording of the Twin Towers attack in 2001, “Don’t take pictures o’that. Whattsa matter with you?”. The filming of the event as it is happening (particularly people falling to their deaths from the towers) is considered obscene by this person. This quote shows the stark contrast and change in expectations, as in 2022 a cultural expectation when something bad happens is, “Why didn’t you film it?”.
In the chapter The art of dying, on video, which focuses on documentaries of natural deaths, Malkowski posits that these documentaries predominantly capture the period before dying and the period after dying. Again, the ‘moment of death’ is hard to lock down even if you are waiting for it.
This being part of someone’s dying raises many ethical questions; should natural dying be captured on film and be the subject of documentaries? The subsequent chapter “A Negative Pleasure” takes this question to another level. Malkowksi analyses the controversial documentary The Bridge which documents the suicides of people jumping of the Golden Gate bridge. Building on Vivian Sobchack’s work that outlines 5 visual gazes that filmmakers encounter when filming death (the accidental gaze, the helpless gaze, the endangered gaze, the interventional gaze and the ethical stare), Malkowksi introduces the expectant gaze, that was present when filming footage for the Bridge:
“Characterized by the new, technology enabled ability to simply run a camera and wait, the expectant gaze is accompanied by an ambivalent desire for deaths to occur. The documentarian looking in this way has primarily sought out an opportunity to record a life ending, not an opportunity to safe one; it is death he waits for expectantly, not rescue. Gestures to the contrary(such as this crew’s calls to the bridge patrol) can be commended, but they must also be reconciled with the project’s broader aim.”
— Malkowski (2017, page 116)
There are different qualities to being a fly on the wall when someone is dying of an illness, versus expectantly waiting for someone to take their own life. The topic of suicide raises questions on how ethical it is to capture the deaths of people that did not consent to be filmed, and, when filmed, whether these depictions are allowed to be aesthetic in the final cut, or should solely be educational, or a future warning.
The final chapter Streaming Death: the politics of dying on Youtube has taught me more about the darker side of the web and the ‘death porn’ webpages that are dedicated to collecting all videos that depict, predominantly violent, deaths. Malkowski touches on the emotional labour of watching these videos as a researcher. These videos not only beg the question of ‘why did you film this?’ but also, “why do you put these videos online?’.
“Of all the research I have done for Dying in Full Detail, browsing death porn sites have been the most distressing- not because this footage is the most explicit (though it is) but because of the brutally unsympathetic environment these sites foster for watching people lose their lives, because of the palpable aura of inhumanity and disrespect that hangs in the virtual air there”
— Malkowski (2017, page 164)
Mobile phones and unlimited data have given everyday people the potential to capture both violent and non-violent deaths, and to put them online. Malkowski suggests that audiences, particularly in the US, have been confronted with way more fictionalized accounts of deaths through popular culture, than actual deaths in their own lives. These images have taught, or are teaching, audiences what death and dying looks like. This is particularly problematic in the case of circulating videos of the real deaths of Black people. This is both a popular trope in films, as well as a very real threat in the lives of African American people. Malkowski discusses the example of Eric Garner and the video capturing his death. During his dying, he utters the powerful words ‘I can’t breathe’, which took a life of their on afterwards (but can also feel almost forgotten in 2022). Malkowski wrote their book in 2017, and it is disturbing how many recordings of violent police deaths have followed in such a short period of time.
This points to the ubiquitous gaze, another gaze that Malkowski introduces, and which I have hinted at above:
“This category connotes the sense in which death’s recording has become common, often accomplished by multiple cameras in a single case- (…) It also connotes the increasing extent to which the public now presumes that a camera will be present and recording when a public death occurs”
— Malkowski (2017, page 174)
It has been suggested that particular forms of violent death are not necessarily more common; they are simply more often caught on film. Their circulation can (re)traumatise viewers, but given their ubiquity, can also feel like part and parcel of everyday life. Malkowski suggests that often fictional deaths in film have a stronger impact on audiences, as filmmakers can use all the bells and whistles to emotionally impact their viewers.
Dying in Full Detail has given me lots of food for thought regarding how death is captured on film, how audiences largely consume fake deaths, but how technology is blurring the line between what a ‘real’ death and a ‘fake’ death looks like, and which deaths we should be outraged by. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in theories of death and filmmaking. Dying in Full detail shows how societal attitudes influence how technology is used in capturing death, but equally how capturing death with the latest technology is influencing societal attitudes.
Dying In Full Detail: mortality and digital documentary was published by Duke University Press in 2017. To learn more about Jennifer Malkowski click here.
Leave a Reply