ABSTRACT
One of the few certainties even in (post-)modern societies, is the finiteness of life. For centuries, religions offered accepted meanings for death and the ritualised frameworks to cope with it. However, with modernity and secularisation, traditional religions lost their binding forces. Still, when faced with the death of a loved one today, the individual refers to religiously framed rituals for consolation. This will be illustrated by comparing the presentation of death rituals in three feature films, namely the Taiwanese film Seven Days in Heaven (2010), the Japanese film Departures (2008) and the British film Death at a Funeral (2007). These three films show remarkable similarities in their narration and visualisation of their plots that refer to notions of universalism as well as to the influence and impact of globalisation on local cultures. The analysis shows that neither tradition nor the missing ritual knowledge are criticised per se, but rather the failure of the ritual to respond to the individual’s needs for consolation. The three films thus illustrate that in (post-)modern societies death rituals have to be transformed from serving cosmological to serving psychological needs in order to enable effective individual grief work.
