Jennifer Malkowski, Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary

Abstract

In the early days of Facebook Live, Emily Bell, a veteran of the short history of online news, wrote, ‘In charge of an international news website during the Iraq war, I saw graphic footage on the wire service feeds, but I have seen more people dead or dying through Facebook in the past few months’.1 This statement effectively sums up the timeliness of Jennifer Malkowski’s account of the documentary capture of death. The subtitle Mortality and Digital Documentary may be slightly misleading, however, since the book proceeds chronologically through the history of cinema from its earliest years to the present. It might more accurately be described as a theoretical history of the moving image’s capture of ‘live death’ from the vantage point of the digital. In Malkowski’s account, our experience of death through digital media reveals the central assumption that has informed this history: that we are attracted by the promise of moving image technologies to capture and reveal the moment of death, understood as the instant at which the human body transitions from life to death. The task she sets herself is to demonstrate that moving image media have failed to deliver on this promise for more than a century, even as each successive technology has only amplified this foundational premise of recording and viewing documentary death. They have failed for the simple reason that the assumption that life and death are divided by a moment is an incorrect one, as Malkowski argues by drawing upon the work of the social historian Philippe Ariès and through a discussion of the increasing medicalization of the process of dying.