5th Global Conference
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 11: Visual Arts
Chair: Jeremy Wisnewski
'Not a day has gone by in my life when I haven't thought about death'
- Ingmar Bergman
Ananya
Ghoshal
Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, India
In my paper I aim to explore the notion of death in the cinema of Ingmar Bergman. Ranging from The Seventh Seal and a knight playing chess with a personified Death to Autumn Sonata impregnated with a fear of death haunting impaired bodies and minds, the notion of death and oblivion are dynamically represented in Bergman. Though at the center of these films lie Bergman's spiritual quest for God and why he seemes absent from the world. Whereas, In Through a Glass Darkly the mentally ailing heroine has a vision of God as a spider, the severe Winter Light, tells the story of a country priest whose faith is threatened by the imminence of nuclear catastrophe. Who is there to answer? In Persona televised images of war cause an actress to simply stop speaking and Cries and Whispers redeems a woman suffering from cancer and yet finding consolation in a faith her sisters cannot understand or share. What are these visions? How are they relevant for us now? How do they help us understand the notions of death and dying? Let’s discuss a filmmaker who had dared to ask perhaps the most rhetorical question available to human beings: “Why live at all?”
"I am Dead": Notes on Cinema's Refutation
of Time
Jan
Holmberg
School of Arts and Communication,
Malmö University College, Sweden
"From here on in,
believe me, I'm a dead man!" This
particular exclamation belongs to the character David Ferrie in Oliver
Stone's JFK (1991), but as anyone who has seen more than a
few gangster movies will testify, the oxymoronic phrase "I am dead" abound
in the genre, particularly in cases like the one just cited, when someone
is called to witness against powerful evildoers. Obviously, the proposition
speaks of a probable future rather than of a present state. Taken literally,
the phrase "I am dead" is of course impossible: if I am "dead", then "I" have
not lived to tell it.
The purpose of phrases
like these (rather than simple communication) is poetry, much like when
the most famous of poets lets his hero, fatally wounded, exclaim: "I am dead Horatio, thou live’st.
Report me and my cause aright."
In the first movie review ever, on December 30th,
1895, a reporter of the Paris paper La poste claimed that "when
these devices [meaning the Lumière brothers' cinématographe]
are in the hands of the public, then death will no longer be absolute,
final." From this excited expectation, to the ghost-like appearance
of the deceased Marlon Brando in Superman returns (2006),
runs a line of instances in cinema where the seemingly irreversible
states of death and dying are questioned, even refuted.
By
examining a number of these peculiarly numerous occasions, this paper
will try to demonstrate that the impossibility of being dead and simultaneously
claiming it, fits well with the paradoxical temporality of cinema, challenging
the most fundamental of human conditions: that our existence, with Martin
Heidegger's term, is a "being-to-death".
A Chance to Live Forever? Cloning and Personal Survival
in The 6th Day
Rudolph
Glitz
English and Interdisciplinary Studies, University
of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
In this paper, I propose to draw some generalising conclusions from the conceptions of death and personal identity that underlie the Hollywood blockbuster The 6th Day (released in 2000, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger). The primary focus of my investigation will be on the villain's highly conspicuous indifference towards his own violent demise. This indifference, as the film makes clear, is due to his pre-arranged physical and mental duplication and revival, which in turn, like the plot of the entire movie, is based on the assumed feasability of human cloning. Thus, through its central (science-)fictional premise, the film draws an interesting connection between certain 'concepts of afterlife' and our 'social expectations of medical possibilities' (to speak with your call for papers). In doing so, it might have been inspired by the cult movement known as the RaëlianChurch, whose alleged pursuit of immortality through the company Clonaid attracted some media attention in the 1990s. Rather than concentrating on the belief system of this movement, however, which would require a study of its own, I will approach the phenomenon of the villain's indifference philosophically - in the terms, that is, of current theories of death and personal identity by, among others, David Parfit. In addition, there is a more broadly sociological dimension to the attitude of the villain, who clearly embodies the latest type of the IT-and-media-savvy corporate wiz-kid. Perhaps, as I will argue in the second part of my discussion, which also takes into account the filmic medium of The 6th Day, the film makers' thanatological decisions and the largely absent critical response to them in contemporary reviews of the film indicate a shift of popular intuitions with regard to death that can be meaningfully described as post-modern.
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