| The purpose of this examination is to chronicle the specific motifs in four films that lend themselves to an understanding of a socially accepted interpretation of death and to present a proposition regarding their significance. Giuseppe Tornatore's A Pure Formality (1994), Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder (1990), M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999), and Alejandro Amenabar's The Others (2001) address the feeling of having life ripped away in their representation of death as a first-person experience. Each of these films demonstrates a deliberate and affective function of mise-en-scene and serves to put the life of the viewer into perspective by assigning a specific narrative machine to the process of death and loss. As the characters are led to the realization that they have experienced death, the viewer travels with them, ritualistically going through the emotions associated with loss and trauma. |
