The frontier between life and death in the history of cinema

Thèmes abordés

Frontier, life, death, cinema, dante, paradise, hell, purgatory, wim wenders, bergman, kusturica

Résumé du document

The old conception of death has always been scary and morbid, a thing that has always been hard to accept, so that it had to be mysterious. Something that people would not want to talk about, that was considered as a taboo. Of course, it was the same as all the taboo subjects, like the cinema, as had the case been in the beginning of it; but especially during the late nineties, everybody became very interested in it. That is why we have a lot of horror movies with scary creatures like vampires, zombies and demons. It is no surprise that these movies were very popular because people were superstitious and these kinds of stories comforted them in their believes by exaggerating everything and presenting the situation as impossible.
So when considering the "Divine Comedy", we can compare this aspect to Dante's Hell, a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife.

First of all, I chose to talk about the late nineties' horror movies that had the image of death presented as bad and scary. Death is seen like a demonic character that hurts and tortures other people and not as an extension of life. We have in most of the movies, stories where people are possessed by evil and occupied by dead peoples' souls, etc.

We can cite a very popular movie which comes under the category of possessed child movies produced in the late sixties, "Rosemary's baby" by William Friedkin. The movie, as everyone knows, is the story of a young girl possessed by evil and that the mother tries to save her by calling a priest to exorcize her (to deliver her from evil), in other worlds, it is the battle of good against evil. Everything in this film is made to disturb the audience. The image and the sound are saturated: we have plenty of blood, crying and screaming people, insults, violence, etc. This saturation shows how terrified the people are about death and the inhuman efforts people take up to avoid it. Seeing her child in the border between life and death makes the mother crazy from sadness. The girl, who is possessed by evil, brings the dead peoples' world to ours and that is what scares everyone around her. In fact, it is very interesting to see that what really frightens us is not the idea of death but it is the idea of meeting of the two worlds, the combination of the two of it.

So we can say that, through Friedkin's eye (and most of the directors of that period), the frontier between life and death is as "lived" as real Hell, where we suffer and become demonic.

Extraits

[...] Hell is like imprisonment where we have to confront the other's eye: to watch and being watched (indeed, the spectators can only watch themselves because they can see nothing else with a sheet over their head). The purgatory, in a different approach, presents the purgatory by a child's eye, as a dream he makes (just like Kusturica). [...]

[...] It is present in all of his films. By trying to suicide themselves, Kusturica's characters think they can reach a better somewhere they would not have any problem, somewhere they would not have to support others jealousy and viciousness. But the interesting fact is that many of them fail in their attempt of suicide and we assist to the moment they realize that they are not going to die. For example, in Underground, Ivan, a young zookeeper, hangs himself because his zoo is being destroyed by the bombardments. [...]

[...] To generalize, I separated the different visions of the frontier between life and death like in Dante's way of seeing it: the Hell, the Purgatory and the Heaven. These three concepts are definite and studied in detail in Dante Alighieri's masterpiece: The Divine Comedy. Dante's work is based on the allegory of death and the journey the writer made through Hell, Purgatory and heaven but at a deeper level, it represents allegorically the soul's journey towards God (of course The Divine Comedy is a religious publication). [...]

[...] In fact, he reaches his goal in perfection because when I saw the movie a few years ago in the cinema, nearly the half of the cinema hall quit the movie before it's ending. What is interesting about the vision of Pasolini is not really who he sees death but how he sees the paths that lead to it. In fact, in Salo, or the 120 days of Sodom, we have a virulent critic of the fascism. To Pasolini, what is scary and awful is not death but the way that the government used and conducted people to death in horrible conditions of torture. [...]

[...] Then, when he really kills himself he is old, feels let down, and has no more hope. So I think that for Kusturica, dying is something that people have to merit, it is not a simple way out that we can take when things become a little more difficult that we are used to: to reach this permanent calm people have to prove themselves. Death is not something to be scared of, at the contrary it has to be everyone's ultimate aim. [...]