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The Final Cut: End-Of-Life Empowerment Through Video Documentary, Broderick Fox

Broderick Fox

This article examines assisted video autobiographies that seek to break taboos around visualizing natural death and dying. Turning the camera onto death in one sense posits limit-cases to photographic representation and documentary ethics. The videos in question, however, each propose routes to active, shared authorship in their production that parallel the possibilities for active, agented, and communally-experienced dying and death that have become all-too-rare in Western society. The chapter closes with a meditation on the potentials for and limitations on such independent video discourse around dying and death in the digital age.