Mourning Films: A Critical Study of Loss and Grieving in Cinema

221 Pages·2012·1.457 MB·English

by  Richard Armstrong

Mourning Films
ALSO BY RICHARD ARMSTRONG
Billy Wilder, American Film Realist
(McFarland, 2000; paperback 2004)
Mourning Films
A Critical Study of
Loss and Grieving in Cinema
R A
ICHARD RMSTRONG
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Armstrong, Richard, 1959–
Mourning films : a critical study of loss and grieving
in cinema / Richard Armstrong.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-6699-3
softcover : acid free paper
1. Loss (Psychology) in motion pictures. 2. Grief in
motion pictures. 3. Psychic trauma in motion pictures.
4. Bereavement—P sychological aspects. I. Title.
PN1995.9.L59A75 2012
791.43'6165—dc23 2012029422
BRITISHLIBRARYCATALOGUINGDATAAREAVAILABLE
© 2012 Richard Armstrong. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, i ncluding photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without p ermission in writing from the publisher.
On the cover: Juliette Binoche in Three Colors: Blue
(1993 France) aka Trois couleurs: Bleu(Miramax/Photofest)
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
For my sister
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Contents
Preface 1
Introduction 7
Chapter 1. Manifestation 37
Chapter 2. Realization 67
Chapter 3. Acceptance 108
Chapter 4. Release 155
Conclusion 193
Bibliography 197
Index 205
vii
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Preface
This is a book about the representation and aesthetics of loss and mourn-
ing in modern cinema. It is important to stress at the outset that this is not
a book about the representation of death in films, but about the representation
of the emotional and psychological consequences of death. There have been
numerous treatments of death in film books, just as there have been numerous
deaths represented in films. But until very recently, the treatment of loss and
the films which treat loss and its consequences have been significantly over-
looked in cinema scholarship. This is a gap which I hope this book goes some
way towards filling.
Significantly, while the theme of loss finds the aesthetics of a film address-
ing an experience which is very real and very quotidian for many people, and
will be very real for everyone in due course, it is also intrinsic to what cinema
is as an apparatus. Put simply, the cinema is a space in which we see someone
who is no longer there. In its very mechanism, in the furious alternation between
presence and absence as the images and their frames rush over the projector
beam, cinema technically embodies the play of presence and absence as states,
and in consequence of this flicker of presence and absence we gaze up at, and
typically adore, a figure who once stood before a camera, perhaps many years
ago, yet is now nowhere to be found. By this light, the term “medium,” used
both to describe the organizing figure at a spiritualist séance, and a mode of
aesthetic representation such as film, seems especially apt. The cinema both
embodies loss and mediates those whom we have lost, whether they are a dead
film star or the deceased relative in a home movie. The aesthetics of loss,
therefore, are essential to film history because, literally and figuratively, they
chime with what film is, arguably a necropolis of dead souls. Meanwhile, in
addressing the consequences of death, what I am calling the “mourning film,”
that film in which the drama revolves around a loss grieved over, looks beyond
the cinema’s myriad spectacles of death at the feelings death engenders in the
living, and by ghastly implication, the prospect of mine and your own finitude,
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