Cinema as Relief and Final Goal

Abstract

In the history of cinema many films, from fiction to documentaries, have reflected how death and disease affect human beings. A few of them, however, have established a total and truthful relationship, almost symbiotic, between a terminal patient and the recorded image. Lightning Over Water (1979) by Nicholas Ray and Wim Wenders, and Las alas de la vida (2006), by Antonio Pérez Canet have explored the role of the camera not only as an element of communication for the patient to transmit his or her sensations in the final stretch of life, but also as a kind of palliative care for the patient. But the presence of the camera, the filming of the dying moments to convert them into a film can also lead to some intimate reflections and moral dilemmas around the terrain that falls somewhere between the documentary as a source of knowledge and the spectacle that cinema always entails, although in a slight and tangential way.

Keywords

• cuidados paliativos
• enfermedad terminal
• filmación de la agonía
• representación
• ética
• espectáculo
• tabú
• amistad
• entrega