Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I

电影从一开始就为当代社会描述和处理死亡提供了一个越来越占主导地位的论坛。它提供了我们对疾病或悲伤、受伤的身体或幽灵、通过令人震惊的风险、悲惨的不幸或令人不快的犯罪而死亡的主要表现。它提供了最生动的想象，关于死前的恐惧，死后的魅力，以及从道德到死亡都要受到惩罚。这本名为《死亡与移动的形象：意识形态、肖像学和我》的书首次研究了死亡在西方电影中扮演的各种角色，并通过死亡在西方文化中扮演了各种角色。这本书的“之前、期间、之后”的结构论证了死亡作为叙事承诺、物理事件和观众反应的关键三角功能。换句话说，西方电影中的死亡远远不止是一个简单的行为。相反，它必须被视为与功能(文本)、肉体现实(身体)和共鸣(观众)相关的复杂问题。这本书远远超越了欧内斯特·贝克尔关于否认死亡的流行论点，讨论了死亡在电影、政治和主观上的意义，调查了移动图像如何以及更重要的是，为什么移动的图像将死亡和哀悼越来越多地转移到文化中。与此同时，媒介/围绕电影奇观、性和观众身份的否认策略/尤其是其情感意图，使这种置换具体化。的确，围绕死亡的图像是如何“移动”的，为询问当代西方文化对人类苦难的调解，特别是其社会政治含义提供了一个及时的范例。

Cinema has, since its inception, provided an ever more dominating forum for contemporary society's depiction of, and dealings with, death. It supplies our main representations of illness or of grief, of wounded bodies or ghosts, of death by stupefying risk, tragic misadventure or unpalatable crime. It offers the most vivid imaginings of what is feared in pre-death, glamourised in the afterlife, and punishable in both/of a morality to mortality. The proposed book, Death and the 'Moving' Image: Ideology, Iconography, and I, provides the first study of the various roles that death performs in western cinema and, through it, in western culture. The book's 'before, during, after' structure argues for the crucial triangulation of death's function as narrative promise, physical event, and spectatorial reaction. In other words, death in western cinema is far more than a simple act. It must, instead, be seen as a complex of issues associated with functionality (of the text), corporeality (of the body) and empathy (of the spectator).Moving far beyond Ernest Becker's popular thesis on the denial of death, the book's discussion of death's cinematic, political and subjective significance, investigates how and, more importantly, why the moving image enacts the increasing displacement of death and mourning into culture. At the same time, this displacement is particularised by the medium/by the disavowing strategies surrounding film spectacle, sex and spectatorship/and, especially, by its emotive intent. Indeed, how 'moving' the images surrounding death are comes to provide a timely paradigm for interrogating contemporary western culture's mediation of human suffering and especially its socio-political implications.