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Paper short abstract:

Based on a Dutch/Indian funeral film, ‘Dead Body Welcome' (2013), and my own anthropological work on 'funeral traveling', my paper speculates how the ethnographic temporality of receiving the dead as a deceased can be turned into a cinematic duration of care.

Paper long abstract:

Dead body welcome (2013; Kees Brienen) is a Dutch/Indian film. The ‘plot’ of the film, which I propose to use as an ethnographic field, is that the filmmaker has come to receive his compatriot Dutch friend who has died mysteriously in North East India. This intention to receive the dead friend is articulated in the film's opening scene as a prologue where a pact of promise between the friends is revealed. The filmmaker addresses the camera as his dead friend and reminds him of the promise he had made to the filmmaker about seeing the total solar eclipse together. Now, the filmmaker and the friend are on two sides of the eclipse. The promise must be kept, however, and the friends must meet. The prologue ends, and the film's title reverberates on the screen in a full frontal bold font with a stroboscopic echo of deep electronic sound while blinding beams of street light, seen-unseen from the taxi window, pass. I refer to this passing duration through the film as the funerary cinematic duration, based on my ethnography of funeral traveling as a contemporary mode of receiving the dead. This duration in the anthropology of death is the social time marked from the moment of death to the ritual restoration of the deceased. In the case of the film, I suggest, it offers a speculative aesthetic form of funerary duration where the dead and the living come together figuratively to grieve and live for each other.