An Interview with Christian Byers

“Cinema is death at work.” – Jean Cocteau

Around about the time I first saw Christian’s Byer’s new film, Death of an Undertaker (2025), I happened across this quote by Cocteau. Happened across again, I should say; Cocteau’s idea of cinema as death at work has been repeatedly cited as an inspiration or guiding principle for filmmakers and writers whose genealogy can be traced back to post-war Europe: André Bazin, Jean-Marie Straub, and even more recently, Bernardo Bertolucci.¹ Like some of cinema’s other famous maxims – “every film is a documentary about its own making,” “cinema is life 24 times a second” – Cocteau’s gives both an aesthetic orientation about the medium’s foundations, as well as a potential guiding principle for individual films. 

Byer’s first feature film, a documentary hybrid about a funeral home that doubles as a reflection on the decay of cinematic materials, appears to have taken Cocteau’s words to heart. Watching the film felt like a good opportunity to revisit key literature on cinema and death, and also to have a conversation with the film’s director about the intermingling of these ideas, both in his own work and in moving images at large. This interview is interspersed with quotations, which were used as the springboard for our own discussion. 

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“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality … Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” – Susan Sontag² 

Christian Byers: Death of an Undertaker is a documentary-hybrid, shot in a real funeral home in Leichardt, Sydney, over the course of 10 years. There’s a fictional element to the film: it follows a character called Sparrow, played by me, who is a part-time worker in the funeral home tasked with doing odd jobs like dealing with exhumations, while also dealing with his own grief. Initially, the film was actually an exploration of exactly this idea that we’re talking about today: cinema and the moving image participating in its subject’s mortality in some essential way. The film’s doc-hybrid conceit actually came later as a way of attempting to translate those ideas into a legible story, while also giving myself the ground to explore and play with these ideas.

Does not every image of death – precisely insofar as it is an image – seek to deny death, by inscribing itself within a time that does not perish, withdrawn from the corruption of living organisms? Funerary steles, marble, the earliest ornaments that crowned tombs, were fashioned in the most durable material, representing the dead through eternal death, made immortal by matter — matter that, by transfer, contained the essence of the living: its statufied status, a narrative inscribed in stone, nothing but an idea (king, emperor, merchant). […] The project of rendering death can only pass through [a] detour that, in some sense, denies it. And the entire history of images in the West proceeds from such a negation. If, according to [Régis] Debray, art “is born funereal,” it is by “opposing to the decomposition of death the recomposition by the image.” The image renders death by triumphing, in some sense, over it – more precisely, over its time, over time itself. – André Habib³

Ivan Cerecina: Habib’s ideas here seem to belong to, or at least respond to, a somewhat familiar line of argument in the history of film criticism, one which has sought to place cinema in relation to the history of Western art. That line of argument – which maybe starts with Bazin responding to the debates on abstract art of his day⁴ – tells us that the history of Western art has always sought to create these masks that fight against death; artworks attempt to transcend death by, on the one hand, fashioning a material that is designed to outlast the maker, and on the other, grasping from the morass of life an idea for eternity. 

Cinema has a complicated relationship to that aesthetic lineage. For some, it’s the realisation of that ideal. But in a way, it’s more complex; the ontological muddle comes from the idea of time that cinema proposes. The time of the model is the same as the time of the material that is being used to figure the model; which is to say they’re taken from the same blocks of time. 

Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (1533). Oil on canvas.

Well, you could say that cinema is seeking to deny death by inscribing itself within a time that does not perish. Undertaker plays with that idea by inscribing in cinematic time (unperishable, repeating) a plot built around an exhumation, the story of a body’s process of decay. In the film’s depiction of a funeral home, we see a particular kind of response to death (funerals, coffins), which is orderly, beautiful in a way. The reality is of course that everything is perishing, always changing, always decaying.

I think that’s the point Debray is trying to make when he says there that art is “funereal,” especially as it relates to depicting the real; by virtue of taking an image of a person or a place at a moment in time, you are guaranteeing almost in a strange way that people will change. There’s something about arresting it that is kind of beautiful, but it is also an inherently futile gesture.

Do you think it makes sense to put film in that lineage? Do you think the idea of that lineage holds water? 

Absolutely, I do. I mean, we have the idea of sculpture, especially the idea of a bronze statue, which is an inherently heroic form; it’s triumphant in its rejection of death and of the decay of time in a very deliberate gesture towards immortality. Not just towards immortality, but continuity beyond the life of the artist. These bronze statues often depicted people, they often had human proportions, but there was also a temporal aspect there: its purpose is to, on some ontological level, freeze time for us. You can see that impulse – the ‘statufied status’ Habib talks about – in cinematic images; they deny death by in some sense triumphing over it, or more precisely, by triumphing over time. 

When it comes to film, moving photographic images, there’s something in the moment of transcription, which is an act that reaches beyond your own death. To depict is to attempt to transcend the object or person’s disappearance, and I think there’s something in that very attempt which is, for me, on some level self-knowing; there’s an awareness that it is futile, despite the blunt reality of showing the person. There’s something about the refusal of death that is inherent to cinema. It’s a refusal of the slow march forward: there is this machine that we can use to create the illusion that the past is present, that these things are not gone, that these moments aren’t dead, and in some way, we will not die… because they are not dead. I’ve staged this idea in my film with the dead of one of the principal characters, Mick, who dies in the film’s fictional story. We witness the last day of his life in flashback as he sits at his desk, watching old home movies from when he was a child. So, even at the very door of death, we are attempting to reach back.

La course de taureaux

“Death is surely one of those rare events that justifies the term, so beloved of Claude Mauriac, cinematic specificity. Art of time, cinema has the exorbitant privilege of repeating it, a privilege common to all mechanical arts, but one that it can use with infinitely greater potential than records or radio. […] The reality that cinema reproduces at will and organizes is the same worldly reality of which we are a part, the sensible continuum out of which the celluloid makes a mold both spatial and temporal. I cannot repeat a single moment of my life, but cinema can repeat any one of these moments indefinitely before my eyes. If it is true that for consciousness no moment is equal to any other, there is one on which this fundamental difference converges, and that is the moment of death. For every creature, death is the unique moment par excellence. [Death] must be experienced and cannot be represented […] without violating its nature. This violation is called obscenity. The representation of a real death is also an obscenity, no longer a moral one, as in love, but metaphysical. We do not die twice.” – André Bazin⁵ 

Bazin’s quote comes from one of those freakishly perceptive pieces he was pumping out on an almost weekly basis in the early 1950s; this one’s on Pierre Braunberger and Myriam’s somewhat interesting bullfighting documentary, La course de taureaux [Bullfight, 1951], in which he manages to pack in all of this wonderfully complex language and reflection. Later in the review, he talks about the shocking newsreel footage he had watched of communist insurgents being executed in Shanghai, and how watching that moment of death be repeated felt somehow like a line was being crossed. Death and its depiction come up in your film, and I feel like you approach it in a lot of different ways. 

Well, I’m not interested in the depiction of death in a documentary sense, and am much more interested in its subjective depiction. In making the film, I was doing a lot of thinking on the more imaginary depictions of death over time, especially in painting: dancing skeletons and the like. These are all imaginative strategies to respond to the problem of death, especially as it relates to how we imagine it. I also did some reading on the different ways Jesus’s death was depicted over time. In the 16th century, Holbein depicted him dead in the tomb – he went beyond the boulder, and depicted him as a dead body, in a way which clearly showed he had gone to observe dead bodies in a morgue. During the de-Christianisation of Europe, these images start to show a different way of conceiving of the dead Christ. In a way, that depiction is a litmus test, especially when thinking about the different imaginative strategies that had been developed over time to respond to the problem of death.

I think there is an interesting cultural point to make, though, going off Bazin, about what it means for us to be constantly seeing death. News media has this snuff material element to it, and I think it’s probably the moving image at its worst; blunt reality in an almost perverse way. There are other responses, too. I’m thinking of Timothy Treadwell’s death in Grizzly Man. We see Herzog listening to the audio, and you’re watching the face of the woman watching his face listening to it. That is as close as he will get to depicting this moment that Bazin is talking about, and I feel similarly. 

Grizzly Man

We could flip the question, though, and ask it from the perspective of those who were thinking about the specificity of moving images as a medium. Say we needed to show this very mysterious passage from living to not living, which is one we don’t understand. If we thought about this in functional terms, it has to be moving images that would be tasked with doing it. I think maybe that’s where the fear comes from. 

And to my mind, that is the greatest active hackery of artlessness, to just depict it. And I think it’s telling that the most common version of that is in news media, where the point of these images is that they’re coming from a position of objectivity in visual form. Enlightenment rationalism.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. What is the different between having said, “one hundred civilians were killed while seeking aid today” and then trying to depict it in some way? What do you show? How far do you go? And what are you trying to convince people of by doing so? On the one hand, there’s a sense that we have this documentary evidence of a thing that has happened, and we ought to show people. But on the other, the ways in which we respond to those images is troubling because in the current balance, it doesn’t seem to be particularly effective. 

My response to this is deeply personal, it’s my own response. The attitude news media takes to the quote unquote real is so empirical and materialist that I find it a little objectionable. I think that using rationalist techniques in a realm that is fundamentally a storytelling realm is really bizarre. Obviously, it has to serve a function, but it’s not something that I feel particularly comfortable submitting myself to. 

There’s a technological aspect to the question as well. The fact that a video of a child dying in Palestine is now not only able to replayed, but also able to be broadcasted to every corner of the earth within seconds is frankly, terrifying. Amongst other things, it’s frightening in its immateriality. That immateriality means those images can be distributed in this fashion, but what we are looking at is something that is physically happening; we share a slice of time with this person, even if we don’t share a spatial relationship with them. 

Death of an Undertaker

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” – Brian Eno⁶

This is something I’ve observed when this topic of immateriality and reality crops up. The question of the real disappears until it doesn’t. What I mean is, with every new technological advance – colour, digital, CGI, what have you – reality becomes the elephant in the room. So, while you have one side talking about democratising the tools of image-making and making storytelling through images simpler by feeding a prompt into an AI-model, you have another where people start asking themselves: “What am I looking at here?” And that question keeps coming back until people get tired of asking it. 

I feel like it’s so much a part of the culture now that people don’t question it, and the only context in which people question it is Christopher Nolan or PTA saying, “I want to shoot on film.” And that’s it. It’s dumbfounding to me how little conversation there is about how that structures our relationship to what we see. And theorists are catching up, but a lot of the major texts are from several generations ago. If you think of someone like Susan Sontag, who is writing about photography in that essay on Plato’s Cave, those insights seem a world away from where we are now. When it comes to something like digital images, I’m a huge pessimist; I think that all the problems that these writers have identified is orders of magnitude more intense when you apply them to digital. 

I feel like this pessimism has had some impact on the way you worked on Undertaker. 

Absolutely. Every image in the film is through some form of tape processing. The sound is all tape processed, because there’s something about its material quality that changes our relationship to it. Undertaker was in part for me about grappling with the materiality of form, both of bodies and of filmed materials. Almost everything is immaterial now, and I think this alienates us from embodied experience. I think the completely non-linear nature of digital technology, especially news media and social media, distorts our relationship with our bodies. I really wanted to do something that produced a visceral experience of your own body, because while you are watching the film, you are deeply aware of the physicality of the medium you are watching. 

One example of this: a lot of the film was passed through VHS, and when I was transferring it to VHS, it was a 40-degree summer day. And I left it to run, and the VCR heated up to about 50 degrees and started warping and bending the tape. And when I got back and looked at what had happened, I was really upset. But then I realised after about a minute, “Oh, this actually has its own beauty that really reminds me: this is a material thing.” And it behaves in response to physical factors, like heat. It was bending the aspect ratio as well, so it was literally breaking apart the form of the film itself. And it was so pertinent in a film that is about the breakdown of bodily forms, that the form itself would down.

The brokenness that is enabled by material forms is something that for me, really, is a beautiful metaphor for what it is to occupy a material form. And to have a body is this thing that breaks and especially as you get older, it just naturally decays, but also still functions.

Endnotes