Framing Death. La morte in diretta, tra cinema e media digitali

As demonstrated by the increasing number of cases reported by the news media, handling images of death seems to concern the viewers, producers and broadcasters, since their emergence in the media landscape in which we are immersed is increasingly evident. Even though Sociology and Anthropology generally agree that, compared to the past, death is less present in the life of common people †" that tend to keep grief private †" however, it is perceived as a pervasive presence because scattered throughout the media. The dissertation, focusing specifically on audiovisual productions, considers the possibility inherent cinema - and its derivative forms - to record a live event, and attempts to map some of the dynamics involving actual deaths captured on camera. After a survey of the tensions between the urge to think of death as the ultimate taboo, and the events that instead take place in the so called "necroculture", it is clear that the pornographic paradigm is now ineffective to frame death in the media, and therefore requires more complex analytical perspectives. The focus of this analysis is thus the production and consumption of specific subgenres such as snuff, cannibal and mondo movies, and those horror films that blurred the line between fact and fiction: the attempt is to map some trends ranging from silent films to the contemporary remix mediascape, considering case studies in moral panic such as the Video Nasties, the mythology of the snuff movie and the contagion arising from consuming and spreading images of death.