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Connecting with the Real: Death, Dying and Displacement in Andreas Dresen's Halt auf freier Strecke (2011) and Michael Haneke's Amour (2012)
Brigid Haines 
Andreas Dressen, Pages: 169 - 192
Swansea University Author:
Brigid Haines
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DOI (Published version): 10.3726/b10540
Abstract
Contemporary Western culture is built on a denial of death, yet death is prominent on our screens (Sontag and Aaron). This is not a paradox, for death as depicted on screen is metaphorised, romanticised and meaningful; it is linked to crime, misadventure and heroism; it entertains. It serves, in fac...
| Published in: | Andreas Dressen |
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| ISBN: | 978-1-78707-205-3 |
| Published: |
Oxford
Peter Lang
2017
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| Online Access: |
https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/11428 |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa23812 |
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| Abstract: |
Contemporary Western culture is built on a denial of death, yet death is prominent on our screens (Sontag and Aaron). This is not a paradox, for death as depicted on screen is metaphorised, romanticised and meaningful; it is linked to crime, misadventure and heroism; it entertains. It serves, in fact, not to underline but to distance the spectator from his or her own mortality. This article examines two films which disrupt the normal cinematic language of dying by focusing on the banal and terrible reality of death and the pain of the onlooker. Human vulnerability and connectedness are thereby celebrated in an ethical project in line with Judith Butler's call for the humanities to return us to the human. However, while Amour both mystifies and protests against death, raging ‘against the dying of the light’, Dresen's more radical film ultimately comes to terms with it. Dresen portrays death in its very naturalness and thus goes beyond art-house cinema's tendency to mystify it, a tendency to which Haneke ultimately conforms. |
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| Item Description: |
in Andreas Dresen, Edited by Julian Preece and Nick Hodgin, pp. 169-192 |
| Keywords: |
Death in cinema; Michael Haneke; Andreas Dresen; Susan Sontag; Judith Butler |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Start Page: |
169 |
| End Page: |
192 |