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Book Review — “Death in Classic & Contemporary Cinema”

Patrick Shen
4 min readSep 24, 2019

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Cries and Whispers (1972, 91 minutes, Sweden, Dir. Ingmar Bergman)

Death in Classic and Contemporary Film: Fade to Black (Sullivan and Greenberg, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) is a fantastic collection of essays which surgically examines cinema as a lens through which to understand our relationship with death. If cinema is as Shakespeare believed the role of dramatic performance to be “whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” then it’s no surprise that the authors of this book would look to it for insight into our relationship with mortality. Indeed, throughout history artists have often found more illuminating and interesting ways to shed light on the things that lay at the core of being human than many other disciplines could. And which other medium best embodies the art Dewey referred to as “refined and intensified forms of experience” and which so regularly gives us a glimpse of life under extreme circumstances, life in extremis?

As Sullivan and Greenberg state in the preface of Fade to Black “mortality is a recurrent theme in films across genres, periods, nations, and directors.” Though there were some surprising omissions such as contemporary Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his excellent “death trilogy”, I suspect that selecting the…

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Patrick Shen
Patrick Shen

Written by Patrick Shen

I make things mostly of the cinematic sort. Interested in art as process of self alteration. Support me on patreon.com/patrickshen.

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