University of Wolverhampton RiCH Seminar

Activity: Participating in or organising an eventParticipation in workshop, seminar, course

Description

"'The Raw and the Cooked': Genre, Attitude and the Spectatorship of Death." There are a great many films that treat death as a means of entertainment, as neither a sad nor a horrific event. Such films portray death in an offhand way while trying to entice their audience into a similarly nonchalant attitude towards death, thus establishing a mutual viewing attitude. This attitude is potentially the key to rendering the spectatorship of death acceptable: something to which the utilisation of special effects is essential. The focus of this paper is on films in which characters are consumed by animals: a body of films which features the shifting dynamics between predator and prey, so that the food chain itself becomes something of a spectacle of battle. The hubris of man is assaulted by nature, or indeed, man’s own genetic creations, and the two must fight for supremacy. Films such as Deep Blue Sea (Renny Harlin, 1999) and Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (Dwight H. Little, 2004) show humans behave like animals and vice versa, subverting what we think of as the natural order of things and death's place in this order. The in which humans become prey is also worth noting, as jungles, bodies of water and cities become recurring territorial battle grounds in which human characters are potentially reduced to animalistic states. This body of films will be discussed with a view towards establishing how the spectator engages with images of death as a means of entertainment.
Period2 May 2012
Event typeSeminar
LocationWolverhampton, United KingdomShow on map

Keywords

  • Attitude
  • Genre
  • Semantic/Syntactic
  • Food Chain Film
  • Death
  • Film Form