Deathwatch: American Film, Technology, and the End of Life

4. For the general idea scan documentingreality.com (with a variety of sample menus) and facesofdeath.com (where you can order the eponymous film). I will turn to snuff films in chapter 1, when I discuss execution reenactments. For a historical survey of snuff films see David Kerekes and David Slater, eds., Killing for Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff (London: Creation Books, 1994), a picture book not without its formalist virtues.

5. Thomson, “Death and Its Details,” 13.

6. Marilyn J. Field and Christine K. Cassel, “A Profile of Death and Dying in America,” in Approaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life, ed. Marilyn J. Field and Christine K. Cassel (Washington: National Academy Press, 1997), 33–49.

7. See, for instance, the condensed version of Ariès’s compendium The Hour of Our Death in his Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 85.

8. Robert Artwohl, “JFK’s Assassination: Conspiracy, Forensic Science, and Common Sense,” Journal of the American Medical Association 269 (March 24, 1993): 1540–43. This was not the first autopsy of the Zapruder film published in JAMA. John K. Lattimer isolated body movements begun in individual frames to explain the specific wounds suffered by both Kennedy and Senator Connally. See John K. Lattimer, “Additional Data on the Shooting of President Kennedy,” JAMA 269 (March 24, 1993): 1544–47. For scholarly treatment on the relationship between the Zapruder footage and film more generally see Art Simon, Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

9. For Joel Black, the realistic or “graphic” nature of film violence is often borrowed from the techniques of “snuff” footage, that is, purportedly unedited film of actual death. In other words the idea of what real death might look like on film influences the style of fictive scenes. See Joel Black, The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative (New York: Routledge, 2002). I will deal in chapter 1 with the mixture of real and fake to generate believable executions in early cinema.

10. For a full discussion of the use of moving medical images to read the body, and the interplay between still and moving images in the medical context, see Scott Curtis, “Still/Moving: Digital Imaging and Medical Hermeneutics,” in Sound Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 218–54.

11. The 1984 version was updated and republished. See Vivian Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 235.

12. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 92.

13. Dick Teresi, The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating-Heart Cadavers—How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death (New York: Pantheon, 2012), 4.

14. See Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 172–74.

15. For a discussion of the anxiety provoked by dolls, see Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (New York: Anchor, 2003), 31. Wood also discusses the possibly apocryphal Descartes anecdote in relation to mechanistic philosophy (1–13).

16. See also Tom Gunning, “Gollum and Golem: Special Effects and the Technology of Artificial Bodies,” in From Hobbit to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings,” ed. Ernest Mathijs and Murray Pomerance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 319–50.

17. See Annette Michelson, “On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile and the Philosophical Toy,” in October 29 (Summer 1984): 17–20.

18. See Martin Pernick, “Back from the Grave: Controversies over Defining and Diagnosing Death in History,” in Death: Beyond Whole-Brain Criteria, ed. Richard M. Zaner (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 25–27.

19. Plato recommends in Republic a waiting period of three days before burying the body. See Teresi, The Undead, 57.

20. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–4.

21. Pernick, “Back from the Grave,” 17–74.

24. See Teresi’s discussion in The Undead, 125–26.

25. I am grateful to Dr. Micco for making a copy of his paper available to me. His presentation was part of an interdisciplinary conference on death and dying titled “Seeing the Difference” at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, on June 1–2, 2000.

26. John Murray, M.D., Intensive Care: A Doctor’s Journal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 13–14.

27. See Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Stewart reasons that “if photography is a corpse, film is, by contrast, a finality always on the cusp of revival, or otherwise a vividness always in passing” (152). Thinking of death as a spark for medial innovation (form) leads Stewart to privilege cinematic technique, in particular the filmed photograph and the freeze frame, both of which stage stillness as deferred apparent motion, not the lack of motion. And while he acknowledges that “the edited gap within a scene—the cutaway, sometimes the reverse shot—is often the decisive inscription of the death moment, where the intermittent nothingness of the strip may for once burst through on-screen as figurative hole in human temporality” (153), it is equally important to look at what the cutaway or reverse shot shows us, to feel its rhythmic connection to the body that came before, and to trace the bridge to what can be thought to come next. These cutaways and reverse shots to human beholders, it turns out, are utterly foundational in early cinema (an era Stewart does not discuss), paving the way for more abstract end points. Someone’s apparent death does leave a hole, but filling in that “intermittent nothingness” is something moving images undertake uniquely, and to great effect.

28. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2007), 72.

29. Ibid., 87–88. If it is indeed true that Hitchcock hovers at the “uncertain boundary between stillness and movement,” as Mulvey claims, he is also hovering at the uncertain boundary between life and death and must resolve this tension through nonfigural shots that mark Marion’s recognition as a corpse.

30. See Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 211.

31. André Bazin’s essay appears, translated from the French by Mark A. Cohen, in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 27–31. Pasolini’s essay can be found in Heretical Empiricism, ed. Louise K. Barnett and trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 232–37.

32. It might have been, though, for exactly the reason that the footage was not shown again for several years following the assassination. Of course, the very fact that it could be shown again informed the initial impression of the footage and each subsequent viewing.

33. Though Bazin does not promote editing for certain effects, he does suggest the bullfight film makes good “organic” use of editing. The technique that most concerns him here, however, is the very act of replay, with magnification (close-ups, decoupage) coming in second.

34. Stewart, Between Film and Screen, xi, 152.

35. For example, see Bazin’s key essays on Italian neorealism, particularly his essay on De Sica’s Umberto D, which he concludes with the following: “De Sica and [scriptwriter] Zavattini are concerned to make cinema the asymptote of reality—but in order that it should ultimately be life itself that becomes spectacle, in order that life might in this perfect mirror be visible poetry, be the self into which film finally changes it.” André Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 2:82.

36. Mulvey writes that the “photograph’s suspension of time, its conflation of life and death, the animate and the inanimate, raises not superstition as much as a sense of disquiet that is aggravated rather than calmed by the photograph’s mechanical, chemical and indifferent nature” (Death 24x a Second, 60–61).

37. Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space,” 235.

38. See Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death, 88–89.

39. Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space,” 234.

40. Lowenstein theorizes horror spectatorship by first returning to the writing of Maxim Gorky in “Living Dead: Fearful Attractions of Film,” Representations 110 (Spring 2010): 105–28.

41. Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin, introduction to Death and Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 20.

42. The natural bed death “sets up and fulfills its own expectations over a perceived durée,” which marks “little contrast between movement and stillness.” Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space,” 239.

43. See also Silverlake Life (1991), in which Mark Massi contrasts his lover’s death with the death he sees in the movies.

44. Important works on film violence include Stephen Prince, ed., Screening Violence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000); and Prince’s study of classical Hollywood in Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood, 1930–1968 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); and David J. Slocum, ed., Violence and American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2001).

45. One sociological study sampled five hundred films to conclude that “violent death, actually presented or hinted at, dominates all other presentations of death” and points out that “award films” include “significantly more expressions of sorrow and sadness.” See Ned W. Schultz and Lisa Huet, “Sensational! Violent! Popular! Death in American Movies,” Omega 42, no. 2 (2000–2001): 146, 137.

46. bell hooks, “Sorrowful Black Death Is Not a Hot Ticket,” Sight and Sound 4, no. 8 (1994): 10–14.

47. See Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 65.

48. I am aware of the similarity between my title and Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch (1980), a film about moving image recordings of the death moment. Roddy (Harvey Keitel) has a camera in his head, his eyes the lenses. He is hired by a television company to record footage of terminally ill Katherine for the series Death Watch, something like a reality television show. At film’s end Katherine asks Roddy to leave her so she can die alone; leave he does, preventing the paparazzi outside from barging into the country home where she has prepared her final moments. Though the film is structured around a “deathwatch” as an extended metaphor for film (and television) spectatorship, it protects private death as the last stand against public demand. In a twist on Ariès, here the “forbidden” death is the good death in the face of a culture of voyeurism. In this book we will not be so demure as Roddy and Katherine, because we are in search of a perceptible break to understand how film technology has helped shape our sense of when death has occurred.

49. Leslie Fiedler argues the emergence of the novel and the emergence of the United States are relatively synchronous; thus, he looks at the Americanization of prior literary forms and genres: “To write, then, about the American novel is to write about the fate of certain European genres in a world of alien experience. It is not only a world where courtship and marriage have suffered a profound change, but also one in the process of losing the traditional distinctions of class; a world without a significant history or a substantial past; a world which had left behind the terror of Europe not for the innocence it dreamed of, but for new and special guilts associated with the rape of nature and the exploitation of dark-skinned people; a world doomed to play out the imaginary childhood of Europe.” These “guilts” play out particularly in the American writer’s “obsession with violence and his embarrassment before love.” See Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997), 31, 28.

1. By “attractions” I am referring to Tom Gunning’s model of early film exhibition, characterized by a nonintegrated series of cinematic displays of motion. See “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Wide Angle 8, no. 3–4 (1986): 63–70. For an insightful revisiting of the attractions model for horror cinema see Adam Lowenstein, “Living Dead: Fearful Attractions of Film,” Representations 110 (Summer 2010): 105–28.

2. Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (London: Tauris, 2007), 76.

3. Jonathan Auerbach, Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 145.

4. Quoted in ibid., 124.

5. See my own explanation of this film’s connection to execution technique in my article “Cut: Execution, Editing, Instant Death,” in Spectator 28, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 31–41.

6. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: American Film to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 87.

7. Yet Musser explains that the faltering kinetoscope business by the summer of 1895 was mostly the result of external factors, like low profit margin for the selling of individual kinetoscopes and competition from Britain’s Robert W. Paul. See Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 88–89.

8. Note the discrepancy in contemporary responses to the film on www.imdb.com. One reviewer comments that the substitution splice astonished spectators at the time while “for obvious reasons it today looks quite fake.” Another curses the effect as “quite pathetic.” But a couple of reviewers praised the film for its “effective and believable special effects.” Such varying responses demonstrate, among other things, a range of awareness of and respect for film history.

9. See Regina Janes, “Beheadings,” in Death and Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 245.

10. Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 1–30.

11. In fact, Barnouw argues that the film medium absorbed the magician’s performance, the act of prestidigitation itself. As such, we should perhaps be more surprised by our own lack of wonder at contemporary magic. See Barnouw, Magician, esp. 19–35, 107–13.

12. Based on the model of The Widow Jones’s inspiration for the company’s 1896 film The Kiss, it seems likely that the Edison crew were inspired by the popularity of Mary’s trial and execution on the melodramatic stage. Other play versions that adapted Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 play Mary Stuart predated Blake’s, as for example Lewis Wingfield’s version. An illustration of the execution scene in this latter play appears in A. Nicholas Vardac’s Stage to Screen (illustration 29). It should be noted that Schiller’s play omitted the execution, opting instead to place a character onstage (Leicester) who hears the execution.

13. Robert Blake, Mary, Queen of Scots: A Tragedy in Three Acts (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1894).

14. See Peck & Snyder, Nineteenth Century Games and Sporting Goods (1886; Princeton, NJ: Pyne Press, 2001).

15. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 31.

17. AM&B Picture Catalogue, Nov. 1902, 240.

18. Kemp R. Niver, Motion Pictures from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection, 1894–1912 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 240.

19. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 159.

20. Barnouw, Magician, 29.

21. I am referencing Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological reading of the film image in her The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Let me quote in full the relevant passage: “The ‘Here, where eye (I) am’ of the film retains its unique station, even as it cannot maintain its perceptual privacy. Directly perceptible to the viewer as an anonymous ‘Here, where eye am’ simultaneously available as ‘Here, where we see,’ the concretely embodied situation of the film’s vision also stands against the viewer. It is also perceived by the viewer as a ‘There, where I am not,’ as the space consciously and bodily inhabited and lived by an ‘other’ whose experience of being-in-the-world, however anonymous, is not precisely congruent with the viewer’s own” (10).

22. See Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 90.

23. Quoted in André Gaudreault, “Theatricality, Narrativity, and Trickality: Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliès,” in Journal of Popular Film and Television 15, no. 3 (1987): 117.

25. Tom Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema: A Frame-Up? Or the Trick’s on Us,” Cinema Journal 28, no. 2 (1989): 10.

27. Louis Marin, “The Tomb of the Subject in Painting,” in On Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 270.

28. Noël Burch, “A Primitive Mode of Representation?” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), 224.

29. See Vanessa R. Schwartz, “The Morgue and the Musée Grévin: Understanding the Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-siècle Paris,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (1994): 151–73.

30. This quote comes from an interview with Elfelt published in Filmen, June 7, 1926. The interview was quoted in Peter Schepelhern, 100 Ans Dansk Film (Copenhagen: Rosinante, 2001), 16.

31. The Edison film is (aptly) titled The Crowd Outside the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition. I would like to thank Kristen Whissel for first pointing out this film to me. It is possible the camera was recording at the time the crowd was beginning to register the shooting of the president.

32. The momentous occasion of a president’s passing funeral cortege heralded this moment of African American self-presence. This will not be the last time we find African Americans prominently featured as registrants for dead whites; I will return to this in chapter 2, when I discuss The Birth of a Nation.

33. Consider also Edison’s The Martyred Presidents (1901), which featured still photographs of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley.

34. It seems a passing phrase in Silverman’s analysis of the film, but it functions as a crucial turning point in her account. Hitchcock’s suturing the spectator to Marion’s imperiled perspective gets substituted with a roaming camera that moves away from the “corpse” to wander around the room, pause on the envelope of stolen money, then move up to the window and away from our protagonist in an uncomfortable and incomplete attempt to resume narrative. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 211.

35. See, for instance, Richard Moran, Executioner’s Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 75–88; also Mark Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death (New York: Walker, 2003), 92–99. These books are useful partly because their bibliographic traces are more dependable than the notoriously misguiding sources in Thom Metzger’s otherwise scintillating Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla, and the Electric Chair (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1996).

36. “Report of the Commission to Investigate and Report the Most Humane and Practical Method of Carrying into Effect the Sentence of Death in Capital Cases,” transmitted to the legislature of the state of New York, Jan. 17, 1888 (Albany: Argus, 1888), 75–86. Also quoted in Essig, Edison, 98.

37. Essig, Edison, 119.

40. See Moran, Executioner’s Current, 36–62.

41. Kristen Whissel explains the numerous reasons for the “paucity” of war actualities, chief among them the “shifting, unstable” visual terrain in which “smokeless gunpowder and thick tropical vegetation gave Spain the military advantage of invisibility,” while “gunpowder smoke coming from the Americans’ weapons revealed their position and further obscured their already blocked vision.” See Kristen Whissel, “Placing the Spectator on the Scene of History: The Battle Re-enactment at the Turn of the Century, from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to the Early Cinema,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 22, no. 3 (2002): 234–35.

42. The matching of gunpowder with convulsing body appears also in AM&B’s Execution of a Spy (1902).

43. Several traditions of realistically duplicating historic scenes predated the cinema. Mark Sandberg has chronicled the authenticating measures taken by the late nineteenth-century folk museum, its “fine-tuning of the reality effect” articulated in earlier wax museums such as the Musée Grévin. The war reenactment, like the museum tableau, used background and mise-en-scène to contextualize the body within a centripetal “representational cushion” of “authentic details of costume and setting.” Mark Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 23–24. Sandberg’s work on museum displays certainly complicates Anne Friedberg’s notion that the nineteenth-century flâneur was bound to a virtual and mobile gaze, for he explains that “late nineteenth-century museum practice teased spectators with games of voyeurism that could quite conceivably become games of immersion instead,” especially when “the only boundaries separating off display space from spectators were those of social protocol, and not ontological difference.”

44. Whissel, “Placing the Spectator,” 239.

45. “Only an overly histrionic fling of the arm on the part of one of the victims betrays the firing squad ‘shooting’ as fabricated theater filmed most likely in New Jersey” (Auerbach, Body Shots, 32).

46. Electricity poses another limit case for the camera that encourages filmmakers to develop specific strategies of authentication. Czolgosz’s reenacted death mobilized a number of cinematic accoutrements, perhaps the most obvious being the opening pans. These shots could be distributed separately and could be exhibited as attractions in their own right. Combined with the reenactment, they substitute for a direct encounter with the assassin’s execution, reminding us of the camera’s proximity. At the same time these pans usher us into the staged electrocution. Charles Musser comments on these shots as both actualities and rhetorical devices for the complete film: “These shots distinguish this reenactment film from its contemporaries by heightening the realism. At the same time, they are part of a drama that leads the audience step by step to a vicarious confrontation with the electric chair and a man’s death” (189). Musser discusses the film in depth in his Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 187–90.

47. “As he stepped over the threshold he stumbled, but they held him up, and as they urged him forward toward the chair, he stumbled again on the little rubber-covered platform upon which the chair rests” (New York Times, Oct. 30, 1901).

48. These three jolts not only rhyme with the three tests performed on the bulbs, but they are also consistent with the New York Times eyewitness report. After the first two, Dr. MacDonald “stepped to the chair and put his hand over the heart. He said he felt no pulsation but suggested that the current be turned on for a few seconds again. Once more the body became rigid” (New York Times, Oct. 30, 1901).

49. Auerbach, Body Shots, 40.

50. See Kristen Whissel, Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 156–59.

51. Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 187.

52. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

53. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 145.

54. Quoted in ibid., 151.

55. A Career of Crime, No. 5 was described with this detail: “[The executed] can be seen struggling against his bonds, as if charges of electricity are coursing through his body.” Rita Horwitz and Harriet Harrison, with the assistance of Wendy White, The George Kleine Collection of Early Motion Pictures in the Library of Congress: A Catalog (Washington: Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, 1980), 173.

56. Despina Kakoudaki, “The Human Machine: Artificial People and Emerging Technologies” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000), 170.

57. Auerbach, Body Shots, 39.

58. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 174–75.

59. “Perhaps the execution films circulate around the phenomenon of death, striving to capture the moment of death, in order to celebrate the contingency of the cinematic image, a celebration that is always already too late, since the contingent, in the face of the cinematic apparatus, has already received a ‘posthumous shock’” (Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 163).

60. Harold P. Brown, “Death Current Experiments at the Edison Laboratory,” Medico-Legal Journal 6 (1888): 387.

62. Essig, Edison, 146.

63. See Carlos MacDonald, “The Infliction of the Death Penalty by Means of Electricity,” New York Medical Journal 326 (May 7, 1892): 506.

64. “With her own life she paid for the lives of the three men she had killed”: New York World, Jan. 5, 1903. One suspects the stories of Topsy’s badness were generated by the film (or the knowledge that a film would be made)—thus, execution first, justification second.

65. See Lisa Cartwright, “‘Experiments of Destruction’: Cinematic Inscriptions of Physiology,” Representations 40 (Fall 1992): 129–52, esp. 148–50; and Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 159–60.

66. Not having enough electrical power, or gunfire for that matter, did not stop subsequent circus owners from executing rogue elephants. Not, at least, in Erwin, Tennessee, where in 1916 an elephant named Mary was hanged by a derrick chain that lifted her into the air, twice.

67. In Lippit’s analysis we are reminded that the difference between human beings and animals has long occasioned philosophical reflection. He tells us that animals have been frequently distinguished from humans as beings that do not die (a claim only humans, equipped with language, can make), but merely perish: “By tracking the animal across the philosophical spectrum, one discovers the systemic manner in which the figure of the animal comes to portray a serial logic: the animal is incapable of language; that lack prevents the animal from experiencing death; this in turn suspends the animal in a virtual, perpetual existence.” See Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 73, 187–88.

68. MacDonald, “Infliction,” 506.

69. Quoted in Niver, Motion Pictures, 244.

70. Similarly, Linda Williams accounts for the “money shot” of male ejaculate as a substitute for the cinema’s desire to visualize the secrets of female jouissance. One should note, however, that dying can be more easily faked than male jouissance; as such, the registrant seems more salient than does the female pornographic body who comes in contact with, even relishes in, the ejaculate. See Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

71. Doane writes: “Just as electricity could be activated as a technological control over life and death, the cinema must have seemed to offer the same promise in the field of representation” (Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 164). Indeed, the promise seems to have been and still be there, and likewise the failure of that promise of controlling the barrier.

72. Again, the analogy between film and technology sounds a note here with respect to divining a clear death moment. See Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space,” 234.

73. As such, the lightbulb reverses the placement of the incandescent bulbs on the chair before the execution in Execution of Czolgosz.

74. It goes without saying, but I will say here, that the early execution films are not critical. It would seem that as the history of execution in narrative film continues, it does so as a stronger and stronger invective against execution.

75. The opening words of the film are Eddie Vedder’s, singing, “Look in the eyes of the face of love.”

76. Nor is the filmic rendition of the rape and murders during the execution, a montage that implicitly connects both acts of killing.

77. Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 258–59.

78. The footage thus brings moving image technology to bear on a dying that has no technological support.

1. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Observations on the Sequence Shot,” in Heretical Empiricism, ed. Louise K. Barnett, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K Barnett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 237.

2. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character Growth of a New Art Form, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Dover, 1970), 52.

3. Tom Gunning writes: “We are also seeing a real, not an imagined event, the death of the child, and, in fact, learning through an omniscient narrator of an event the mother does not know of: the death of her child.” See Gunning, "Behind the Scenes," in The Griffith Project, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London: BFI, 1999), 1:97.

4. In fact, Griffith seems to have been reluctant to provide any cut-ins, including close-ups, early on in his development as a filmmaker. Such a break in the narrative space may have drawn attention to the act of filmic discourse, recalling earlier modes of representation.

5. Thompson describes the false eyeline match that appears in films such as After Many Years, The Golden Louis, and A Drunkard’s Reformation: “The character looks offscreen and seems to see something which is in fact in another space; this attempt to convey mental images by cutting to events that are actually taking place within the diegesis was a distinctive device in Griffith’s work.” See Thompson, "The Golden Louis," in The Griffith Project, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London: BFI, 1999), 2:25.

6. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 52.

7. The “narrator system” is developed in Gunning’s D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). For the disambiguation of the narrator system from other approaches to filmic narration see especially 25–28.

9. See Peter Wollen, “The Auteur Theory,” in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 78.

10. Allan Langdale, ed., Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (New York: Routledge, 2002), 95. Münsterberg’s original study was published in 1916.

11. Gunning concludes his remarks on Behind the Scenes in this way: “Mourning over a dead body is almost as frequent an ending for Griffith’s early Biograph films as the happy re-united family. Perhaps Griffith saw sorrow as a primary means to audience empathy and involvement in the film” (Usai, The Griffith Project, 1:98). In 1908, finding a character dead concluded many Biograph films besides Behind the Scenes, including Wallace McCutcheon Sr.’s The Outlaw, but also Griffith’s For Love of Gold (which ends, actually, in a double suicide and no living character), The Girl and the Outlaw, and The Song of the Shirt.

12. The phrase appears in Gunning’s discussion of Griffith’s The Girl and the Outlaw, but it recurs throughout essays in volumes 1 and 2 of Paolo Cherchi Usai, ed., The Griffith Project.

13. The first theorization of this concept appears in her essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess,” in Film Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1991): 2–13.

15. Or in any film, for that matter. The fact is that we very rarely see characters die alone onscreen; they are almost always accompanied by a human counterpart to at least register that death has occurred, if not convey narrative momentum.

16. Jacques Aumont, “Griffith—The Frame, the Figure,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), 354.

17. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 69.

19. As I will show later in this chapter, Griffith pursued the registration scene for longer than any reunion scene where the family celebrated its being rescued, producing a distinguishable “halt.”

20. Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 207.

21. Ibid., 67–68. “[Linked vignettes] preserve the essential continuity of the chase but substitute a linked series of gags,” like increasingly destructive sneezes, for example, in Hepworth’s That Fatal Sneeze (1907).

22. Linda Williams makes a similar point about The Jazz Singer, a film I will deal with in the following chapter. In a film that very much uses the soundtrack to explore the scenic dimensions of “too late,” Jakie Rabinowitz makes it back to his father’s synagogue to sing the Kol Nidre. His father, the cantor, hears him and peacefully passes away. Williams writes that Jakie sings “just ‘in time’ to make his father die happy but ‘too late’ to save him from death.” Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 153.

23. Writing about Romance of a Jewess, Scott Simmon suggests that cutting would have added to the power of the husband’s death scene: “The relative lack of cutting … does render certain plot points implausible, notably in shot seven which includes both the fatal fall of the husband and the doctor’s arrival to pronounce him dead.” See Scott Simmon, "Romance of a Jewess," in The Griffith Project, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London: BFI, 1999), 1:133. But such a cut would likely have placed the wife somewhere else at the time of death (or at least the accident that caused it), and this in turn would have altered the meaning of Solomon’s fall from an accident to an event we viewed first omnisciently and then through another person’s late shock. As we saw in Behind the Scenes, separating the dying person from the registrant in this way tends to assign responsibility to the missing figure, thus cementing the melodramatic pathos of too late.

24. In agreement with Garrett Stewart, we can say that what makes a death scene is that death is seen—only, it is not just “seen”; it is also sensed through touch, hearing, etc. See Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. 151–89.

25. Roberta Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), esp. 21–23, 32–38.

26. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theater to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

27. Stage versions of the play featured prominent tableaux, for example at the end of act 2 of Uncle Tom’s Cabin when Phineas Fletcher has pushed Tom Loker off the cliff, or in another version as Cassy pushes Legree off a high rocky pass. One of the most common tableaux in all versions followed the death of Tom himself, often but not always occurring at the end of act 6, scene 5. Sometimes that scene was broken down into three shorter scenes, divided by multiple pauses for Tom’s death or violent attacks that each culminated in a tableau.

28. Quoted in Brewster and Jacobs, Theater to Cinema, 41.

29. The stage tableau availed itself of more resources than simply the bodies of the actors. Dramatic pauses might be produced with painted backdrops that would appear, for example, after Tom’s and Eva’s deaths, concealed theretofore by a curtain. No matter the medium, the theater’s tendency to construct tableaux out of opposed elements (including, of course, onstage death and the transcendence of the soul) underscored a general conception of the actor’s pose in symbolic terms.

30. Brewster and Jacobs, Theater to Cinema, 41.

31. Though one might object to this clear-cut division, I believe we are encouraged to view the two as opposite ends of a spectrum. Many films include examples of both kinds of gesture, and the point seems to be that we can look more closely at Biograph acting as shades between histrionic and verisimilar.

32. Pearson summarizes that “the histrionic code is always marked by a resemblance to digital communication and a limited lexicon, but performers had to choose the time, stress and speed, and direction of their gestures. And since the performance of gesture could vary, an actor could use various combinations of oppositions to suit the movements to the nature and intensity of the character’s state of mind” (Eloquent Gestures, 27).

34. This early “reaction shot” does not break the tableau framing throughout the film. The cut follows Sweet from one tableau to the next, connecting the room where she drops her protective shawl to the loss of her former identity. In fact, the anteroom functions as a portal to the horror in the other room and also as a pivotal place between the desire to run away and to take care of things herself (the first time to shoot the intruder, the second time to remove his mask). This cut indicates the camera wants to go elsewhere besides the body to finalize a death scene or stamp its dramatic peak. This is not to take away from the performance but actually seems to celebrate it. In his discussion of the film, Russell Merritt rightly praises Sweet’s verisimilar reaction. See Russell Merritt, "The Painted Lady," in The Griffith Project, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London: BFI, 2008), 6:155–56.

35. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), esp. 68–73, on gestural acting.

36. But not the scene. The Colonel carries her body home and lays it out on a couch: one by one mother, sister, and father enter the room to register the body. Griffith seems to even dim the lights of the room as if to enshroud the family in a private darkness. And then the intertitle “And none grieved more than these” leads to a brief shot of the faithful slaves, one crying, the other sitting with head on his fist. Griffith uses the death to confirm his vision of the union of faithful slaves and whites.

37. “Comments on the Week’s Films,” Moving Picture World, June 26, 1909, 872.

38. Charles Affron, Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 131.

39. The static images that underlie the illusion of motion can be called forth in the freeze-frame and other such evocations of the photogram. See Garrett Stewart’s discussion of the freeze-frame, which he punningly calls the “frieze frame” to get at the impossibility of film to reveal its frames, in Between Film and Screen, 132–34.

40. I would like to thank Anne Nesbet for pointing this film out to me and for her reference to the caesura of the sailor’s death in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, a related instance of an apparent end that makes room for future movement, a revolution consisting of stasis and change.

41. Special-effects dyings in later classical and postclassical cinema will remove some doubt but are nonetheless influenced by this tradition of confirming change outside the body or beyond what the viewer can see in the body.

42. Ariès concludes a study of Western death iconography by looking briefly at films: “The nothingness of death occupies an important place in one of the arts of our time, which is an art of the image, of the living image—namely, the cinema.” Philippe Ariès, Images of Man and Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 266–68.

43. “The ‘text of muteness’ can be considered to include mute tableau and gesture … and the mute role,” writes Brooks, thus alluding to the preponderance of mute characters in both text and play that must gesture to speak aloud the verities of their moral dilemmas. The corpse plays a mute role, of course, but the immediacy of the registrant’s gestural response to apparent death points to the mute condition of witnessing death in silent film. See Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 56–60.

44. Vivian Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 287. As I noted in my introduction, Sobchack writes that “representations of death in fiction film tend to satisfy us—indeed, in some films, to sate us” (235).

45. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 31.

46. In his reading of Charles Wilson Peale’s 1772 mortuary painting Rachel Weeping, Jay Ruby acknowledged the custom to portray the dead child with grieving parents. What is interesting is that it is the mother’s face that confirms the baby is not in a state of repose: “It is the mother’s facial expression which clearly indicates that the child is dead.” Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 31–33.

47. Such a cut demonstrates the difference between the fiction film from the earlier period. With titles like Execution of Czolgosz and Electrocuting an Elephant, death in earlier films was a foregone conclusion. But here death emerges as a possibility, conditioned on cuts. The earlier films likewise used cuts (the head chop, Topsy’s staggered finality) but not to hesitate.

48. In fact, the death shot occurs exactly between the exterior shots of the homes occupied by Harcourt.

49. I say semblance because it is, of course, not the backward projection of the first shot. For one thing, the door is closed, and the family does not walk backward into the house. Also, the first shot contains a moment of editing, for a lawnmower is unwittingly recorded, forcing Griffith to shoot the second half of the shot and splice it to the first. But the effect is very much to repeat the image we have seen, and it is important that repetition occurs as an explicit reversal.

50. See, again, Jay Ruby’s work on mourning photography Secure the Shadow, especially his discussion of the posthumous mourning painting, 36–49.

51. See Ruby, Secure the Shadow, 41. Phoebe Lloyd first pointed out the posthumous portrait as distinct from other mourning images; see Phoebe Lloyd, “Posthumous Mourning Portraiture,” in A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in 19th Century America, ed. M. Pike and J. Armstrong (Stony Brook, NY: Museums of Stony Brook, 1980), 71–87.

52. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 187.

53. Gunning, “The Country Doctor,” in The Griffith Project, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London: BFI, 1999), 2:165.

54. Hysteron proteron becomes a crucial possibility of cinematic reversal in the face of death that Peggy Phelan will claim, viewing Tom Joslin’s death from AIDS in his 1991 documentary Silverlake Life, offers a healing recourse to the problem of a particularly effaced death: “The end of a filmmaker’s life is not the end of his film. In the transference enacted across the body of the film, the making of the film, like the making of the memory of the filmmaker’s life, continues in the unfolding present. For that continuity to continue, the filmmaker’s filmic body, the film itself, must be replayed, revised, reprojected.” Peggy Phelan, “Dying Man with a Movie Camera,” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2, no. 4 (1995): 387–88. Such claims are made in liberating tones about film’s actual ability to reverse the effects of time (the “filmic body” lives on), so there is some degree of disavowal about film’s ability to show the change left behind in the world in someone’s absence.

55. See Annette Michelson, “The Man with the Movie Camera: From Magician to Epistemologist,” in Artforum 10, no. 7 (1972): 60–72.

56. Simmon, “After Many Years,” in The Griffith Project, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London: BFI, 1999), 1:144.

57. Stewart calls attention to this freeze-frame: “The embryonic (photograph) is there as the cellular (cinematic photogram), the origin implicit in the increment. Death breaks the chain of succession, its totalizing force in such contexts transforming the photographic increment to a mark of cessation.” Or, we might say, a mark of future cessation, since there is no cut to an additional image posited later in the pre-posthumous “friezes” that end Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Thelma and Louise. See Stewart, Between Film and Screen, 49.

58. This film also recalls Griffith’s earlier The Unchanging Sea (1910), also based on a Charles Kingsley poem, in which the bodies of lost fishermen wash onto shore, moving from left to right and thus reversing the direction of the film’s central character left behind on another shore.

59. Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 248.

60. The device frequently appears in television soap operas. After a character dies, we will often get a montage sequence consisting of images of him or her taken from previous episodes. In fact, television’s temporality favors such a device of remembrance because spectators attach to, and live with, characters over a much longer time than they generally can in movies. The last five minutes of the death-drenched television series Six Feet Under varies this format by projecting forward the future deaths of significant characters.

61. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Film and the New Psychology,” in Sense and Non-sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). This particular essay was written in 1945 and evokes the phenomenological thrust of postwar writings on cinema. This may smack of Eisenstein’s theory of montage, but Merleau-Ponty’s guide is Pudovkin, for whom continuity was essential.

62. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 1–27.

63. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 58.

64. Gunning, “The Country Doctor,” 165.

65. See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 1:9–16

66. Steve Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” Screen 27, no. 6 (1986): 7. See also Franco Moretti, “Kindergarten,” in Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1983).

67. Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” 11.

69. Williams, “Film Bodies,” 5.

70. Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” 19.

1. “Music to Be Born to, Music to Die To,” British Medical Journal 321 (Dec. 23–30, 2000): 1577.

2. “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators.” See Freud, “Our Attitude Towards Death,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1915), 14:289.

3. See Balázs’s critique of sound cinema in Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Dover, 1970), 195.

4. For Robert Spadoni, who traces the foundation of the horror genre through the technological possibilities of synchronized sound, Dracula and Frankenstein (both 1931) creep and crawl along, inducing an uncanny return to the earlier slow pace of the first sound films. See Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound and the Origins of the Horror Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), esp. 8–30.

5. Mary Ann Doane, “Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 55.

6. See Yopie Prins, “Voice Inverse,” Victorian Poetry 42, no. 1 (2004): 48–50.

7. See, e.g., Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Carol J. Clover, “Dancin’ in the Rain,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Summer 1995): 722–47.

8. The effect of simultaneity achieved, and the union between two characters experienced by the viewer, recalls Griffith’s earlier use of the cut to suggest the impossible union of a couple spatially separated. Griffith often used such a device to underscore mutual desire as if witnessed, Tom Gunning tells us, by a “transcendent witness”: “Griffith transforms the melodramatic tradition of expressive gesture into a discovery in filmic discourse.” See Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 113. As we will see, The Jazz Singer makes a similar discovery through the union of voice with another visible body.

9. Linda Williams provides perhaps the most accurate description of the effect of this reversion to silence: “The father’s prohibition plunges the film back into an intensely embarrassing silence. For a stunningly prolonged moment, it is as if the film does not know what to do. Eventually, of course, it falls back into conventionalized pantomime with recorded background music and picks up the plot as, for the second time, a crestfallen Jakie leaves his father’s house, his ‘jazz’ viewed as a profane (and perhaps even an incestuous) threat to the father’s power” (Williams, Playing the Race Card, 146).

10. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 83.

11. See Michel Chion, The Voice in the Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 9.

13. Chion focuses much on this present absence: “For the spectator, then, the filmic acousmêtre is ‘offscreen,’ outside the image, and at the same time in the image.” This fugitive voice “wander[s] along the surface, at once inside and outside, seeking a place to settle” (ibid., 23).

15. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 153.

16. There are some minor adjustments, of course. Were this a typical Biograph scene, the earlier cut-in to the father’s important words would probably not be there, and most likely the scene would come to an end once the mother’s collapse returned the screen to bodily stillness.

17. She traces such a fusion back to Sampson Raphaelson’s original insight into Al Jolson’s “true” identity while watching him perform in Robinson Crusoe Jr.: “My God, this isn’t a jazz singer. This is a cantor!” Thus, Williams argues that Jakie’s singing of “Mother of Mine” and the finale, “My Mammy,” both in blackface, delivers on “Raphaelson’s insight that the two cultural forms—cantor and mammy singer—resemble one another” (Williams, Playing the Race Card, 153). I will return a bit critically to her position later in this section.

18. Chion, Voice, 4.

19. Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 170.

20. I recognize there is some slippage between “on time,” which first appeared in Williams’s “Film Bodies” essay to describe pornography’s temporally gratifying encounter between viewer and object of fantasy, and “in the nick of time,” or “in time,” which appeared later in application to the successful rush to the rescue necessary in many melodramas to purify the otherwise misrecognized heroine. Nevertheless, I find the two experiences offer similar buildup and relief from excitation, and I am generally comfortable with the slippage to describe the timing of events on the screen and the general effect of such timing on spectators, as well as the specific affects or bodily reactions to this timing. See Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Genre, Gender, Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1991): 2–13.

21. For Griffith posthumous motion did not simply recapitulate the dead’s change from motion to stillness; it added closure, circularity, and marks of diegetic change. Sound itself soon functioned as an agent of posthumous motion, providing confirmation that a death had been perceived (or not perceived, as we will see next in Applause) without resorting exclusively to body gesture.

22. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 197–98.

23. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 142.

24. Doane, “Ideology,” 61.

26. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 116.

27. Chion, Voice, 47.

29. It might look like Anju’s suicide-by-water in Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954), traced as the concentric circles emanating from where her body was just breathing air.

30. Balázs drew an interesting conclusion about the effects of seeing a face react to music: “The reflected effect of the music may throw light into the human soul; it may also throw light on the music itself and suggest by means of the listener’s facial expression some experience touched off by this musical effect” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, 209).

31. Doane, “Ideology,” 56.

32. Ibid., 57. See also Lucy Fischer, “Applause: The Visual and Acoustic Landscape,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 240.

33. Metz’s notion is mentioned and elaborated in Doane, “Voice,” 166.

34. Ibid., 171 (my emphasis).

35. A wonderful example of this occurs several times in Fritz Lang’s M (1931). In one sequence a newspaper takes up the entire frame, silently. What appears to be an insert turns out to be shot in depth: a policeman’s voice resumes on the soundtrack at just the moment a magnifying glass crosses over the newspaper, revealing that this is in fact a paper seen in occupied space.

36. From Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 235. Also quoted and discussed in Fischer, “Applause,” 245.

37. See the dialogue between Ann Kaplan and Linda Williams on the issue of multiple viewing positions, and points of identification, for the female spectator of Stella Dallas, in Williams, “‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,” Cinema Journal 24 (Fall 1984): 2–27.

38. Mamoulian’s fully talking backstage musical features a sequence that revises the dilemma of separation found in Griffith’s Behind the Scenes and altered in The Jazz Singer, and like both those films it contrasts domestic happiness with a stage career.

39. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 33–34.

40. See Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 210–11.

41. It is striking that both The Jazz Singer and Applause introduce us to children who leave home and return as adults. When they do return, they enter a difficult familial arrangement. The backstage musical bordered easily on the family melodrama, in particular the mother-daughter or father-son weepie.

42. Altman explains how the backstage musical divides the world between city and stage. In between lies the space of dilemma: “For the backstage, like Janus, turns both ways. Two doors—one opening onto the street, the other onto the stage. Only there do the problems of life and those of the stage cross” (Altman, The American Film Musical, 202).

43. Fischer, “Applause,” 233.

44. The director’s acoustic realism is on the surface surprising given that he had just come to cinema from the theater, but as a stage director he had previously experimented with the layering of sounds. See Fischer, “Applause,” 237.

45. The death scene formally echoes previous scenes in which a character’s destiny is determined by an acousmatized voice. For example, when Kitty’s friend Joe King tries to convince her to send April to a convent, the camera moves up close to the girl playing with her new necklace while we hear the two discuss her future. In a later scene in which Hitch talks Kitty into bringing April back to the stage (where he can exploit her youth), his offscreen body casts a large shadow over the seated Kitty as we hear him talk of “one big happy family.”

46. Arthur Knight, “The Movies Learn to Talk: Ernst Lubitsch, René Clair, and Rouben Mamoulian,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 218 (my emphasis).

47. Fischer, “Applause,” 245 (Fischer’s emphasis).

48. See Rick Altman, “Sound Space,” in Sound Theory Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), 58–60.

49. The offscreen voices in the rooms throughout the film do have the effect of sealing the fates of the screen bodies. Balázs appreciated immensely the asynchronous voice as having a life of its own: “If the sound or voice is not tied up with a picture of its source, it may grow beyond the dimensions of the latter [picture]. Then it is no longer the voice or sound of some chance thing, but appears as a pronouncement of universal validity.” He goes on to suggest that “the surest means by which a director can convey the pathos or symbolical significance of sound or voice is precisely to use it asynchronously” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, 209–10).

50. Doane, “Voice,” 167.

51. Ibid. For the gendered power of the voice-off, and thus a critique of the earlier scholarship on the film voice, see Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). See also chapter 4 of this book for a fuller discussion of Silverman’s work on voice-over.

52. Doane, “Ideology,” 60.

53. Fischer, “Applause,” 240.

54. Balázs had this to say: “Silence is when the buzzing of a fly on the window-pane fills the whole room with sound and the ticking of a clock smashes time into fragments with sledge-hammer blows” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, 206).

55. Sound is also edgeless, say critics. Doane tells us that sound “is not ‘framed’ in the same way as the image” and thus “envelops the spectator.” Because it is edgeless, Jakie’s voice envelops his onscreen father too, who at the moment of death becomes something like an “internal auditor”—that is, a point of imaginable audition whose position we seem to share (Doane, “Voice,” 166).

56. For Balázs sounds “throw no shadows” and “cannot produce shapes in space.” Unlike the way the offscreen visible world can sneak into the frame through light and shadow, offscreen sounds remain present in themselves: “Sounds cannot be blocked out” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, 213, 211).

57. The film also uses sound space in early scenes to represent the conversations between Jekyll and the scientists. This sequence is shot from the “point of view” of the doctor himself, so the first time we hear his voice it is a voice-off. The film’s opening destabilizes the viewer’s connection between the world of appearance and a world behind, or beneath, it.

58. Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies, 62–70.

59. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 41.

60. And like The Jazz Singer, Hallelujah! features the conflict between jazz and religious music that would become a common theme of the all-black musical. See Altman, The American Film Musical, 109.

61. Jessica H. Howard, “Hallelujah! Transformation in Film,” African American Review 30, no. 3 (1996): 441–42.

62. Variety, August 28, 1929.

63. PCA file for Hallelujah! Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library, Special Collections, 2.

64. It is well known that Vidor’s use of sound to authenticate his film has come under the criticism of later film historians, including Lewis Jacobs, as part of “all the conventionalities of the white man’s conception” (PCA file for Hallelujah! 27). But a few reviewers at the time put forward something like this view as well: “Hallelujah revealed the conventional viewpoint about the Southern negro, picturing him according to the lowest estimate held him by the white man, a singer of spirituals, a patron of cheap dives, a petty gambler, a fanatical revivalist,” wrote B. G. Braver-Mann (PCA file for Hallelujah! 27).

65. See Alice Maurice, “‘Cinema at Its Source’: Synchronizing Race and Sound in the Early Talkies,” Camera Obscura 17, no. 1.49 (2002): 32.

66. Knight, “Movies Learn to Talk,” 214.

67. Altman, The American Film Musical, 299.

68. For Balázs such a crescendo of offscreen sound while we view the listener can “impress us with the inevitability of an approaching catastrophe with almost irresistible intensity” in that a “slow and gradual process of recognition can symbolize the desperate resistance of the consciousness to understanding a reality which is already audible but which the consciousness is reluctant to accept” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, 213).

70. Howard, “Hallelujah! Transformation in Film,” 446.

71. The racialized depiction of African American figures with a preternatural connection to the dead is persistent. Ghost (1990), for instance, is a return to Griffith’s separately grieving “faithful souls,” such as with the death of Flora in The Birth of a Nation. In Ghost Oda Mae Brown, a medium, can hear the deceased Sam Wheat and thus acts as another medium through which he contacts his girlfriend, Molly Jensen.

72. Stephen M. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 256–61.

73. For a psychoanalytic reading of the Mammy figure see Maria St. John, “The Mammy Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Race, and the Ideology of Absolute Maternity” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2004).

74. Spadoni writes, “While no one would deny that such sounds are ingredients of the horror film as we know it, to recognize as much is not the same thing as identifying the major influence of the coming of sound on the genre’s initial formulation” (Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies, 2).

75. Quoted in Richard Maltby, “The Spectacle of Criminality,” in Violence and American Cinema, ed. J. David Slocum (New York: Routledge, 2001), 120.

76. In fact, Richard Maltby suggests that murder was not filmed with a “two shot” but rather was broken apart into at least two shots to ensure any key plot information would remain intact after censorship. See Maltby, “The Spectacle of Criminality,” 120.

77. PCA file for Scarface, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library, Special Collections.

78. The notion is Peter Wollen’s. See his Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1972), 86.

79. Maltby, “The Spectacle of Criminality,” 121.

80. Altman, “Sound Space,” 49.

81. See James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 139. For a meticulously conceptualized discussion of both fidelity and intelligibility as models for sound in Hollywood see esp. 138–50.

1. On Griffith’s “narrator system” see Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 25–28. For a similar account that finds within the actual formal organization of films a structuring force, or “narrator in the text,” see Nick Browne, The Rhetoric of Filmic Narration (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), esp. 25–43.

2. Framing voice-over as a solution to the ambiguity of literary realism, Guido Fink explains the device returns film to “telling” after 1940s cinema made “showing” so ambiguous: “Reality, as visually reproduced, looks dark and treacherous; sooner or later we need clarification, a meaning or a moral, which can only be expressed by words.” Guido Fink, “From Showing to Telling: Off-screen Narration in the American Cinema,” Letterature d’America 3, no. 12 (1992): 8.

3. It is ex nihilo because “the artist is forced to metaphorize beyond the realm of what can be experienced.” See Robert Detweiler, “The Moment of Death in Modern Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 13, no. 3 (1992): 269–94.

5. Quoted in ibid., 274.

7. And of course there’s also Citizen Kane, in which several characters flashback to different stages in the life of Charles Foster Kane, only to come up short in decrypting Kane’s deathbed utterance, “Rosebud.” The Power and the Glory may well have been an influence on Welles. Fink brings up the failure of Citizen Kane’s voice-over to clarify the past: “The special obituary issue of ‘News on the March’ has all the relevant data and figures on Charles Foster Kane, but desperately needs an ‘angle,’ and [reporter] Thompson’s search for such angle(s) leads him, and us, to look for other voices and other points of view, each probably as insufficient in itself as the previously discarded documentary” (Fink, “From Showing to Telling,” 15).

8. Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 54.

10. Kozloff points out that this scene softens the original impact of the corresponding scene from Richard Llewellyn’s novel in which Bess all but blames and turns away from God. If placed in the context of a film so much about memory’s power to resurrect the past, Bess’s skepticism would have called overt attention to the frailty of the discourse surrounding death.

11. Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers, 60.

12. Ibid., 62; Brian Henderson, “Tense, Mood, and Voice in Film (Notes After Genette),” Film Quarterly 36, no. 4 (1983): 16–17.

13. Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers, 62.

15. The leave-taking inaugurated by the adult Huw (voice by Irving Pichel) from his beloved valley and his report of Gwilym’s death (played by Donald Crisp) form a dialogue that comes back in John Ford’s wartime documentary The Battle of Midway (1942), for which he employed these two actors to provide voice-over commentary. It is possible that the fictional father and son pairing later evoked the sense of separation of soldiers from their home fronts during World War II. See Charles Wolfe, “Historicizing the ‘Voice of God’: The Place of Vocal Narration in Classical Documentary,” Film History 9, no. 2 (1997): 158–61.

16. It thus recalls prior instances in which the documentary evidence of dying lacks a clear end point without an onscreen act of registration, as in Edison’s Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), discussed in chapter 1.

17. J. P. Telotte locates the subjective camera’s origins in the silent expressionist sensibility carried into Hollywood by key émigré directors like Fritz Lang to express a character’s paranoia and anxiety. Also, he sees it as a cinematic equivalent to the first-person hard-boiled narration like that found in Raymond Chandler’s novels. See J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), esp. 40–56.

18. This seat of authority is included by Michel Chion in his list of acousmatic powers. See Michel Chion, The Voice in the Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 34.

19. Here, as throughout, I refer to the temporalities of gratification in the body genres, applying them to the camera’s encounter with the dead body. See Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1991): 2–13.

20. As I mentioned in my introduction, in Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Garrett Stewart claims that cinema death is kept in “perpetual abeyance,” that it is always “still at work,” because of the germ of movement in all moving images. That is, cinema never arrives because it is still moving (past). This chapter argues, in effect, that cinema never arrives—or rather, that it arrives more than once. The films considered here represent a two-death model that allows the narrative to develop out of cinema’s inherent movement past death.

21. The phrase “space of innocence” is Peter Brooks’s. See his The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 29.

22. Eric Smoodin, “The Image and the Voice in the Film with Spoken Narration,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 8, no. 4 (1983): 19.

23. Pasolini argues that cinema can better process death in hindsight—narrative films can approach dying from its future. What matters here is that the voice coincides with the body, and as such, the irreversible one-way flow of time is equipped with a voice that looks back. In other words the voice-over would seem on the surface capable of decoupage. See Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Observations on the Sequence Shot,” trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett, in Heretical Empiricism, ed. Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 235–37.

24. Note the remarkable metacinematic quality of this statement. Bigelow is in front of us but not, ghostly in his presence, like all screen bodies. Even the poison extracted from his body for proof evokes the cinema—as the second doctor shows it to Frank, he turns off the light to let the liquid shine its fluorescence.

25. There is many an Ivan Ilyich in classical Hollywood, Judith Traherne (Bette Davis) in Dark Victory being perhaps the finest example. Traherne refuses to submit to doctor’s orders or to hear her condition discussed. Suffering from a “glioma,” or brain tumor, she sends everyone away from the house on the onslaught of her lazy-eye blindness, or “amblyopia,” so she can die privately; the camera shies away too, blurring out her final image as she approaches her death, unseen.

26. Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge, 1989), 184.

27. Speaking of denial, we might remember Mary Ann Doane’s point that the substitution splice in early execution reenactments is a “denial of process” in its impression of an instant. See Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 159.

28. Recall the correlate scene in Double Indemnity in which Walter Neff tells Keyes that he could not hear his own footsteps when walking back home after murdering Dietrichson: “It was the walk of a dead man.”

29. Telotte’s argument is made with force in his reading of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948), whose narrating Michael O’Hara “leaves us with a narrator speaking of those gaps his story seeks to close up—ones the narrative has left open—while visually acknowledging our own desire for closure” (Telotte, Voices in the Dark, 71, and more generally, 65–71).

30. See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975): 45, 61; André Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 1:97.

31. Telotte writes: “The bloodstain that gradually spreads across the jacket of Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff as he talks reminds us that his life is, in effect, already spent; however, while he recounts his fatal encounter with Phyllis Dietrichson, he can postpone that inevitable end and even draw some meaning—a cautionary note about the dangers of desire—out of his demise” (Telotte, Voices in the Dark, 199). As will become typical of film noir, the female body is the catalyst and source of threat for the male’s self-reflections on mortality.

32. One cannot help but recall the line, spoken by the warden, in Oshima’s Death by Hanging (1968): “Death is real only if we can see it coming.”

33. The general care taken by narrators in molding their flashbacks certainly brings to mind Paul Schrader’s thoughts on noir narration as romantic. See Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” in Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight, 1996), 53–63.

34. Detour’s dialogue is full of anxiety about the exactness of a future death. While held hostage in Vera’s hotel room, Roberts compares morbid philosophies with his captor. Vera tells him to lighten up: “There’s plenty of people dying this minute. They’d give anything to trade places with you. I know what I’m talking about.” Roberts rebuts her claimed authority: “I’m not so sure. At least they know they’re done for. They don’t have to sweat blood wondering if they are.”

35. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Film (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 56.

36. For a discussion of this film as an example of melodramatic too-lateness see Steve Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” Screen 27, no. 6 (1986): 6–22.

37. Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 22.

38. J. P. Telotte, “The Big Clock of Film Noir,” Film Criticism 14, no. 2 (1989–90): 3, 2.

39. See Yopie Prins, “Voice Inverse,” Victorian Poetry 42, no. 1 (2004): 49.

40. Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot: A Model for Narrative,” in Reading for the Plot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 93–94.

41. For Kermode the reader is driven into the “middest,” from which we desire the union of beginning with ending. See particularly his reading of Ulysses in The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 58.

42. To quote but one of several passages: “The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 83–109, 101. For more explanation for why we never draw the warmth of death from our own fate, see 93–94 from the same essay.

43. See Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot,” 99. For one film version of this see Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987), in which Harry Angel is haunted by flashback images that turn out to belong to another man, whom Angel earlier devoured but forgot in his vain effort to escape the Devil.

44. Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot,” 102.

48. Quoted in Richard Wunderli and Gerald Broce, “The Final Moment Before Death in Early Modern England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 2 (1989): 261.

52. Telotte notes this “recurring noir motif” to “speak ‘so as not to die’” and cites Kiss Me Deadly (1955) as a late and great example. It is certainly a fine candidate. See Telotte’s discussion of that film in Voices in the Dark, 198–213.

53. Even when the modern state took over the role of lethal judgment, as with execution, the condemned exerted some autonomy: “The state allowed moriens to say his last pious exhortations and prayers and, most important, allowed him to control the final instant of his life by giving his ‘sign’ to the executioner” (Wunderli and Broce, “Final Moment,” 274).

54. There is of course a long tradition of execution movies, starting well before Hollywood and outside the United States, that depict the long process through stages of the condemned’s bodily and psychological preparation. Without the flashback later Hollywood films like I Want to Live! (1958) and Dead Man Walking (1995) show dying as a legal process of decisions made by all but the condemned. See chapter 1 for a discussion of these films in relation to the bureaucracy of decision making.

55. Perhaps unintentionally, Oscar Micheaux’s 10 Minutes to Live (1932) stages the possibility of a character dying in a flashback. Letha is given a note that says she has ten minutes to live, at which time she’ll receive another note. The film flashes back to earlier in the day, but strangely, after about ten minutes of screen time expires, a man appears outside Letha’s apartment whom she believes may be a murderer.

56. The distinction is Lacan’s, from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. See Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death (New York: Routledge, 2001), 135.

57. This call from the stairs surely evokes the vampire’s first address, from within his castle, to the newly arrived Hutter in Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922).

58. This traveling shot resembles the camera movement after Marion Crane’s shower stabbing in Psycho, a shot that Kaja Silverman argues particularly reveals the apparatus as aggressively selective. See Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 210–11. I will return to this point in the next chapter.

59. See Erlend Lavik, “Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense: A New Twist in ‘Twist Movies’?” Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall 2006): 56.

60. In this it is like the detective’s relationship to the scene of the crime, that is, a quest to close a gap in temporality that implicates the detective’s own relationship to mortality. See Domietta Torlasco’s The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) for a discussion of the temporality of the detective’s vision in postwar Italian cinema.

61. In the first example I have in mind—American Graffiti (1973)—it follows the credits, but in Stand by Me (1986), for instance, it is told to us by the voice-over narrator.

62. Telotte, Voices in the Dark, 17.

63. “If each frame of a motion picture were counted as a single photogram … then cinema, as Bazin implies, is more like a walking mummy, the undead, or the reanimated corpse of Frankenstein’s monster. If the photograph implies, in Barthes’s terms, ‘that-has-been’ and thus death, then cinema only gives the dead a semblance of life.” See Scott Curtis, “Still/Moving: Digital Imaging and Medical Hermeneutics,” in Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, ed. Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 237.

64. Curtis also links the cinematic image to the process of evanescence and to human dying (Curtis, “Still/Moving,” 246–47).

65. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 78, 85.

66. Leonard Maltin liked the film but referred to its “interminable ending” as a deterrent. I find the death scene, replete with a percussive version of “Bye Bye Love,” too long to be discussed in toto, so I’ll spare my reader by omitting some of its flourishes.

67. At one point we see an after-diegetic image of Joe looking at Angelique in what appears to be a mirror, alternated with a “real life” image of him clutching his heart on the street, then back to the two frowning, then to him holding his chest, street level. One shot is of Gideon’s lateral body with a breathing mask, foretelling his stay in the ICU. This continues until we hear the comedian on the soundtrack act out his “Denial” segment: “No, no, that’s not me man, somebody else maybe, but not me.” This is really a sound bridge to the next scene of Joe in the editing room.

68. It may go without saying, but I must point out, that Cole theorizes in this sentence the film spectator: we, too, see dead people all the time.

69. Pasolini, “Observations on the Sequence Shot,” 235.

70. I should finally point out that this filmic recoil might also describe the plot of Vertigo, especially if we focus on Scottie’s passive witnessing of deaths in front of him as the film’s disavowal of his own suicidal wish to leap from the tower. A very similar doubling occurs in Don’t Look Now (1973).

1. John Murray, Intensive Care: A Doctor’s Journal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 13.

2. The principle of double effect originates in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica as justification for a homicide committed in self-defense.

3. See “A Definition of Irreversible Coma: Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death,” in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) 205 (August 5, 1968): 337–40.

4. See Dick Teresi, The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating-Heart Cadavers—How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death (New York: Pantheon, 2012), 144.

5. M. L. Tina Stevens, Bioethics in America: Origins and Cultural Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 87–88.

6. And even earlier, judging from a film like Donovan’s Brain (1953), about a scientist who keeps alive a millionaire’s brain that possesses him to commit murder. Curt Siodmak’s novel was adapted to the screen earlier, in 1944, as The Lady and the Monster.

7. Quoted in Stevens, Bioethics in America, 91.

9. Edward Shaw’s comment is a strange flashback to early movie deaths, particularly the Edison Company’s sequences of beheadings previously discussed. Edison’s 1895 Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, for instance, hardly proved exact about such an instant; the moment of separation of head from body decoyed for another, cinematic instant—that of the splicing together of two film strips to produce the illusion of beheading. Providing the image of a clear dividing line seems always to lead to an erosion of that line. Shaw is quoted in Stevens, Bioethics, 94.

10. Quoted in Stevens, Bioethics, 105.

11. Subsequent British and American medical research has shown PVS to be commonly misdiagnosed. A British report stated that of forty patients diagnosed with PVS, seventeen were misdiagnosed, thirteen eventually came out of the vegetative state, and only ten remained vegetative. Stressing that testing for PVS must take time, the article concludes “diagnosis cannot be made, even by the most experienced clinician, from a bedside assessment.” See Keith Andrews et al., “Misdiagnosis of the Vegetative State,” British Medical Journal 313 (July 6, 1996): 13.

12. Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, 497 U.S. 261 (June 25, 1990).

13. A radiologist claimed there were improvements in the CAT scans from 1996 and 2002. Cranford examined Schiavo for forty-two minutes. This was sufficient because he had seen so many similar cases in the past, he claimed. Meanwhile the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Arthur Caplan, disapproved of Dr. Cheshire’s method: “There is just no excuse for going in and making any pronouncement about the state that Terri Schiavo is in unless you’re going to go in and do some form of technologically mediated scanning that would overturn what’s on the record” (John Schwartz and Denise Grady, “A Diagnosis with a Dose of Religion,” New York Times, March 24, 2005).

14. Cranford, a neurologist and bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, frequently denigrated all dissenting medical experts as “charlatans.” This doctor who fought the right to life himself overcompensated for his own rhetorical role in the situation. “I am 105 percent sure she is in a vegetative state,” he told Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, who in turn registered his disappointment with Cranford’s bombastic arrogance: “Too many doctors out there can be bought off by attorneys on either side. And then they come out, instead of telling you facts, you get into debate like you are talking to an attorney.” Clearly there was more to the story than medical expertise and knowledge about the EEG.

15. Quoted in Stevens, Bioethics, 127.

16. That writer was B. D. Colen, one of the few nonmedical guests allowed into Karen’s room (quoted in Stevens, Bioethics, 127).

17. “Undead” does have a ring to it, as evidenced, too, by its analogy to cinema in works by Garrett Stewart and Scott Curtis. See Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Scott Curtis, “Still/Moving: Digital Imaging and Medical Hermeneutics,” in Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, ed. Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 218–54.

18. Like the “so-called noninvasive diagnostic imaging techniques such as cardiography,” Cartwright tells us, “Marey’s early recording devices were noted for their lack of intervention in the physiological process under study.” Lisa Cartwright, “‘Experiments of Destruction’: Cinematic Inscriptions of Physiology,” in Representations 40 (August 1992): 136.

19. President’s Council on Bioethics, “Controversies in the Determination of Death: A White Paper by the President’s Council on Bioethics,” Dec. 2008, http://bioethics.georgetown.edu/pcbe/reports/death/.

20. See Susan Diem, John Lantos, and Jaime Tulsky, “Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation on Television—Miracles and Misinformation,” New England Journal of Medicine 334 (June 13, 1996): 1578–82. The authors studied episodes from ER, Chicago Hope, and Rescue 911 from 1994 and 1995. They found that television increases the rate of first-round and complete survival from CPR: “For short-term survival, the rate of success on television was 75 percent, as compared with 40 percent in the literature … and for long-term survival … the rate of success was 67 percent as compared with 30 percent.” See also the rebuttal by coproducer and former student at Harvard Medical School Neal Baer, titled “Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation on Television,” in the same volume. Baer defends the scriptwriters as producers of entertainment, not reality: “On ER, we often present cases of trauma, in which CPR is required, because of the dramatic impact. These episodes are fast-paced and visually exciting. If we were to reenact a minute-by-minute account of actual events in the emergency department, we would not have 35 million viewers each week. Real life in an emergency room is often quiet, even boring; a television drama cannot be” (1605). Misrepresentation of CPR on American television is not matched, it seems, by the numbers accrued from a study on British programming. See P. N. Gordon, S. Williamson, and P. G. Lawler, “As Seen on TV: Observational Study of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation in British Television Medical Dramas,” British Medical Journal 317 (Sept. 19, 1998): 780–83.

21. And we find Dixie Flatline in William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. The computer-generated construct cannot stop functioning even after its human model has died. See Tom Gunning, “Re-newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century,” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 39–60.

22. Quoted in Stevens, Bioethics, 146.

23. Responding to the “prophetic humor” of a moment in the film when a screen monitoring an astronaut’s sleep announces the euphemism “Life functions terminated,” Michel Chion contends: “But medical progress has given us good reason to use euphemisms: cardiac death no longer sufficing to define the state of cessation of life, what criterion is viable that will not be revised in its turn some day?” Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey (London: BFI, 2001), 132.

24. Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 115. Kubrick himself noted that he wanted his entire film to be “essentially a nonverbal experience.” Quoted in Peter E. S. Babiak, “2001 Revisited,” Cineaction 52 (2000): 65.

25. Without a body the death scene appeals to Chion as an “entirely metaphorical” enactment (Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 115).

26. That prehistory is explored in Lisa Cartwright’s Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), esp. 33–46.

27. Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 117.

28. Voice-over comes awfully close, especially in the third-person voice, such as Buñuel’s, announcing the future perfect death of a documentary subject in Las Hurdes.

29. Robert Burgoyne, “Narrative Overture and Closure in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Enclitic 5/6 (Fall 1981/Spring 1982): 175.

30. Babiak, “2001 Revisited,” 64.

31. Burgoyne, “Narrative Overture,” 175.

32. The tone is so paranoid, in fact, that Ellis Hanson for one reads the entire film as an invocation of paranoia in the Freudian sense, that is, as a cover-up for unacceptable male homosexual desire, as suggested by Freud in his Schreber case (and later spelled out by Ferenczi). Hanson points to the increasing disappearance of women and reproductive organs as evidence of the film’s contraception between men, an act whose homosexual implications are displaced onto the all-too-knowing machine, Hal. Given Kubrick’s envisaged sexual revolution in his 1968 Playboy interview, the otherness of the machine among men—who themselves are intimately coexisting—is strikingly marked by Hal’s touchy-feely behavior. But I find claims about his “faggoty voice” too far beyond the film and themselves paranoid. See Ellis Hanson, “Technology, Paranoia and the Queer Voice,” Screen 34, no. 2 (1993): 137–61.

33. Burgoyne, “Narrative Overture,” 176.

34. “The consciousness is noplace, the source of the voice is noplace, Hal’s eye is noplace” (Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 83).

35. Teresi’s interview with Baden includes this exchange: “‘You are dead when death is pronounced officially, by a doctor, or police, or even an EMT. The ‘time of death’ is when a body surfaces from the lake even though it may have been dead for months. Sometimes the body may have been dead for ten years.’ You are dead, then, when someone notices? ‘Yes. It’s thought that more people die in hospitals in the morning. That’s just when the nurses make their rounds’” (Teresi, The Undead, 233).

36. The novel’s treatment in comparison offers a little more remorse: “For an instant, [Dave] Bowman felt the skin prickling at the base of his scalp. The words he was about to call died on his suddenly parched lips. For he knew that his friend could not possibly be alive; and yet he waved.… For a long time David Bowman stared after it into the emptiness that still stretched, for so many millions of miles ahead, to the goal which he now felt certain he could never reach.” Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New York: Signet Classics, 1968), 142.

37. See specifically Chion’s discussion of Baum’s prerecorded voice in Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, in Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 33–34, 36–37.

38. Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 103.

39. The computer-human connection recalls the work of nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard, who believed astronomy was a restrictive enterprise because the telescope augmented sight but could not intervene. If, as Lisa Cartwright explains, nineteenth-century observatories employed machines to monitor the telescopes in a “self-correcting system” that minimized the subjective element of embodied perception, then Dave takes back that subjective power in this, his ultimate task of tending to the faulty computer. See Cartwright, “‘Experiments of Destruction,’” 144.

40. Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 116.

41. Babiak, “2001 Revisited,” 66.

42. I do not agree with Chion’s assertion that Hal’s death is “purely an effect of editing,” for unlike that of the astronauts we are caught up in the duration of something like an organic, sentient failure.

43. Several critics point out how the film approximates point-of-view shots of human characters, but to me only Hal’s gaze is anchored in this way.

44. Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 116.

45. Cartwright points out that “chronophotography was made to conform to the logic of the kymograph” (Cartwright, “‘Experiments of Destruction,’” 145).

46. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980), 123.

47. As examples of the “invisible parts of cinema,” Comolli lists “black between frames … negative film, cuts and joins of editing, sound track, projector.” Some of these “invisible parts of cinema,” as we have seen, are employed to define death with accuracy. See Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” 125.

48. It may be true that the EKG and EEG machines improved on the sensorium of the human registrant, taking the terminal gaze into remote zones of inner intractable activity, but they always stand at some distance from those present. If impression of reality is the goal of the “dominant ideology,” as Comolli claims, these graphic screens help us merely to disavow our lack of knowledge about what counts as the privileged moment of cessation or the visible evidence of inactivity.

49. Curtis, “Still/Moving,” 219.

50. This phrase comes from a physician interviewed in ibid., 239.

52. See Eugene Thacker, Biomedia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 13.

53. Any claim of merely supplementing the human senses should be qualified. Arguing against the position that modernity’s subcutaneous exploration of the body called on machines to augment the limited human sense of vision and touch, Lisa Cartwright claims that the technologies produced “graphic inscriptions that effectively subsume the sense-based perceptions of an autonomous subject” (Cartwright, “‘Experiments of Destruction,’” 134). And clearly with Claude Barnard we see the invasive techniques of measuring a body’s reaction to active alteration from the outside.

54. Kaja Silverman writes that the shot/reverse shot formation “alerts the spectator to that other field whose absence is experienced as unpleasurable while at the same time linking it to the gaze of a fictional character. Thus a gaze within the fiction serves to conceal the controlling gaze outside the fiction.” Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 204.

55. More than to the image, these reverse shots respond to offscreen noises. The impression that someone is watching him throughout (“us,” says Chion), first by Hal, then by some alien observer, only underscores the fact that an unreturned gaze has operated throughout to register death. This last sequence continues what Colette Balmain calls the “refusal of suture” performed by the rest of the film: there is still something missing. See Colette Balmain, “Temporal Reconfigurations in Kubrick’s 2001,” in Enculturation 3, no. 1 (2000): http://enculturation.gmu.edu/3_1/balmain.html.

56. Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, 210.

57. Actually, his appearance first comes on the soundtrack, as we hear him shout the words “Mother! Oh God Mother, blood! Blood!”

58. Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, 212.

59. See chapter 1 herein for a discussion of irreversibility in relation to early cinema’s production of the death moment.

60. See Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), esp. 166–230.

61. Jonathan Romney interprets Iñárritu’s representation of this death offscreen as an evocation of September 11: “The event is unrepresentable, but its awful concreteness is underlined by the fact that we later learn exactly when it occurred—at 6:50 pm on 10 October. It is hard not to see in this precise notation an echo of the cataclysm of 11 September 2001, an inescapable reference point in American dramas of bereavement made after that date.” See Romney’s “Enigma Variations,” Sight and Sound 14, no. 3 (2004): 11. Iñárritu also made a short film titled 11′09″01. I might add that the scene where Cristina listens over and over to her husband’s last phone message certainly recalls the many stories of such posthumous cell phone messages that emerged after the event.

62. Lisa Tyler argues that the mother-daughter myth of Demeter and Persephone becomes here a family romance in which the death of the daughter binds the two in periodic renewals. Note the film begins and ends on Easter. Unlike the men, who flee the death shot, the mother is there for both birth and death. M’Lynn herself makes this distinction after the funeral: “We turned off the machines. Drum left; he couldn’t take it. Jackson left. I find it amusing. Men are supposed to be made out of steel or something.” Clearly M’Lynn demonstrates that she can “take it.” See Lisa Tyler, “Mother-Daughter Myth and the Marriage of Death in Steel Magnolias,” Literature/Film Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1994): 98–104.

63. Given the film’s racial politics, it makes sense that the black man registers the death from afar, enfolding Frankie’s ethically ambiguous act within a narration spoken by a figure historically denigrated by cinema. See Robert Sklar and Tania Modleski, “Million Dollar Baby—A Split Decision,” Cineaste 30, no. 3 (2005): 6–11.

64. Mario Falsetto has claimed that Kubrick’s depiction of the astronauts’ deaths accomplishes something close to “pure cinema” because the monitor takes over the usual role of the camera and of dialogue to enunciate the death moment. This evocation of pure cinema as something produced as if self-evident brings to mind observational documentary’s interest in terminal illness. See Mario Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 106.

65. Arthur Kleinman, “Do Not Go Gentle,” New Republic, Feb. 5, 1990, 29.

67. One gets the sense from the Frontline special on Nancy Cruzan that the support group for parents of PVS patients encourages them to stay numb so as to not make any decision. They watch videos on depression and seem medicated by that genre of self-help videos shown in AA meetings and the like—but the parents of those in a vegetative state are shielded from the fact that they could make a decision.