Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary will consider the con-sequences of that new practicality, examining documentarians’ recent pursuits of death with equipment that promises to capture its “full detail.” In The Note-books of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Rainer Maria Rilke composes the phrase I have appropriated for my title. In context, its meaning refers to a style of dying rather than a style of displaying death that my title references. Rilke uses the phrase to describe waning death rituals at the turn of the twentieth century: “Who cares anything today for a finely-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury of dying in full detail, are beginning to be careless and indifferent; the wish to have a death of one’s own is growing ever rarer.” Rilke and historians alike characterize the twentieth century as an era of death’s denial in the West, a time when the “full detail” of life’s end was little attended to and kept from the public eye—nowhere more so than in the United States. As contact with death diminished in modern life, the idea of its unsimulated, documentary appearance on film screens became highly charged. In his 1974 writing about the enduring taboo of filming actual death, Amos Vogel expresses the frustration of death’s cultural banishment and the grim fascination that it creates with watching life end: “For when we witness unstaged, real death in the cinema we are frightened, caught in the sweet and deadly trap of the voyeur; mixed feelings of attraction and repulsion take hold of us as we anxiously watch the actual end of another being and search his face for hints of the mystery or proper rules of conduct.