Following the public presentation of the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph in 1895, some witnesses commented enthusiastically: "Now death is no longer invincible." The cinema makes it possible to expand the temporal horizon of human beings by immortalizing their moving image, thus preserving a part of them beyond their physical death. One of the founding principles of the Aesthetics / Ontology of André Bazin's cinema theory is the "the mummy complex", that is the aspiration of cinema to "mummify" reality and preserve it, an aspiration that is at the base of each art - sculture, painting, photography, etc ... - but has never reached the completeness of cinema, whose conquest is the mummification of movement.
However every time humans overcome their limits, they face the "risk of Icarus": being confronted with their human fragility, a Memento Mori. Similarly, when cinema crystallizes a place or a person to preserve their image, that very image also becomes the damning testimony of the passing of time. In the following years, comparing that image with the real place portrayed in it, it will be possible to notice the architectural and urban changes happened during the unstoppable course of history. More importantly, the cinematographic image of a person becomes a merciless mirror in which the real person can see her or his own progressive aging process. The cinema preserves the image beyond the existential boundaries of those who have been filmed, but that image is a lifeless and immutable phantom that, in front of the passage of time and the aging of the real persons in the flesh, is a reminder of how death is inexorably working on them. The definition attributed to Jean Cocteau is a famous one: "Cinema is death at work on the actors." Every single film is a Cocteauian mirror, in which the actor can compare her or his mortal person with the eternal celluloid person.
The paper aims to provide a general framework of the Cocteauian definition and then to investigate the case of three films in which this lugubrious conceptualisation of the cinema machine is particularly evident: Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder 1950), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (Robert Aldrrich, 1962), and The Shootist (Don Siegel, 1976). All three films, more or less markedly, show death at work on their respective stars – Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis, and John Wayne. These films, thanks to the presence within of inserts from past films featuring the same stars, showcase the eternal youth conquered on the screen by celluloid stars, but at the same time they reveal the unstoppable aging to which the actors in flesh and blood are submitted in real life.
But films themselves constitute an illusion of eternity. The material support of which they are made is extremely fragile and unstable, as shown by the spasmodic struggle of archives and restorers that work against death at work on the filmstrips. The celluloid simulacrum too is far from eternal, as shown in such films as Grindhouse (Quentin Tarantino, 2007), in which the physical damages that typically the film copies accumulate over the years is recreated and deliberately foregrounded, or in (Nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971), an experimental film examining the slow destruction by burning of a series photographic portraits.