Australian
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Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows people who work in the funeral industry talking about the first time they saw a dead body in the course of their work. The speakers mainly come from the funeral industry, but also include two pathologists and a police officer. All the speakers, who are interviewed in their respective workplaces, talk in a matter-of-fact manner about their experiences. Their reactions range from the funeral director who feared that she would be haunted by the first dead person she saw, to the police officer who found that the first post-mortem examination he attended was not as bad as he had expected.

Educational value points

• Director David Caesar and researcher Chris Pip spent 7 months talking to people 'who make a living out of dead bodies’, from pathologists to embalmers and gravediggers, before making the documentary Body Work. The film traces what happens to a dead body from the time of death to burial or cremation and depicts the range of people involved in this process. It not only attempts to satisfy the viewer’s curiosity about a subject that is largely taboo in contemporary society, but also sets out to demystify it.

• The clip suggests that it is common in modern-day society to be fearful or uncomfortable in the presence of a dead body. In the past, death was part of everyday life; most people died at home surrounded by family, who were often actively involved in preparing the body for burial. Caesar attributes the current-day squeamishness and morbid curiosity about death to the fact that people are now distanced from it. Despite choosing to work in roles or professions where it would be highly likely they would see dead bodies, the experience of seeing a corpse for the first time generates a range of responses from the practitioners in the clip.

• Today, death tends to be sanitised or hidden, with about 90 per cent of Australians dying in a hospital, a hospice or a nursing home. Significantly, most of the people in the clip first saw a dead body through their work. There is now a growing trend for relatives to view deceased family members in the funeral parlour to help bring about closure.

• The people in the clip talk candidly and with some humour about the experience of seeing a dead body for the first time. By placing the subject of death in an everyday work context where it is neither sensationalised nor seen as gruesome, the documentary challenges taboos relating to death. However, by focusing on the 'first time’, it also acknowledges that people who work with dead bodies may initially find the experience disturbing.

• The clip uses a stylised mise en scène (stage setting) to make the audience aware of the camera’s presence. Caesar believes that even in documentaries, subjects 'perform’ for the camera and he wanted the audience to 'never forget that there’s a camera there’. He did this through very careful lighting and positioning of the subjects, who were instructed to look directly at the camera, even when not speaking. By drawing attention to the process, this reflexive style of filmmaking positions the documentary as a construct or representation rather than as an objective truth.

• By showing people who work in occupations that deal with death, the clip gives some indication of the range of people whose jobs involve the dead. Many of those interviewed for the film were keen to dispel misconceptions about their professions. Caesar deliberately chose subjects who could tell a good story and filmed each person in their workplace because he believes a 'person’s environment tells you an enormous amount about them’.

• The clip exemplifies David Caesar’s work as a filmmaker. After graduating from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Caesar made Living Room (1988), about life in the suburbs, and Body Work (1988), which won him consecutive awards for Best Documentary at the Melbourne Film Festival. His feature films, including Idiot Box (1996), Mullet (2000) and Dirty Deeds (2002), have tended to focus on ordinary characters in everyday settings and to explore the dilemmas facing contemporary Australian men. Caesar has also written and directed extensively for television.

This clip starts approximately 4 minutes into the documentary.

The clip shows a series of interviews with people working in the funeral industry. Two men are interviewed in hospital uniforms, their faceshields are up. They are in a hospital corridor with lockers behind them.

Man 1 The first time at – well, it was my father. But the first one in the industry was, we went for an interbranch removal and my mate opened up the fridge and there was a body, lying down, eyes open, mouth open – it wasn’t a pretty sight. But you always remember your first one.

Two women are interviewed in casual attire in an unoccupied mortuary.

Woman 1 What did I – my first time, I was 19 and it was a nun. ‘Cause we did a lot of nuns’ funerals where I first worked at, because we had a high affiliation with the Convent Church in Parramatta. So we did a lot of their funerals, and she was the first one I saw, and she just looked exactly the same as if I’d see her walking down the street.

Two women are interviewed in a pink and lace decorated living room.

Woman 2 I was very nervous. I was the sort of person that schoolfriends would read old epitaphs in a cemetery and I would wait on the roadside. I didn’t even want to do that. So when it came to actually seeing a body, I was very nervous and the first actual removal I did was more or less thrust on me through my circumstance in a nursing home, and I sort of agreed to go on the condition that the elderly lady would be completely covered up by a sheet and I wouldn’t be able to see her and therefore she wouldn’t come and haunt my dreams that night.

Man is interviewed in a dark room with candles and a cross, the curtains are drawn behind him.

Man 2 They took me into this room which had a terrible – terrible stench coming from, and on this particular table, there was a form of some description laying on there and I asked him what it was, and he said, 'That was human remains’. With that, he turned around and said, 'Well, you haven’t turned green’, he said, 'You can start tomorrow.’

Back to first two men in corridor.

Man 3 The first dead body I saw was that of a very small baby. It was from the hospital where I went to. Obviously I didn’t have much experience, so I was encouraged to visit another nearby hospital that we were affiliated with to watch an autopsy. Uh…to this day, I can remember the person’s name, I can remember the date. I just didn’t believe that the person was dead.

Women in pink and lace living room.

Woman 3 I just didn’t sleep all night. I was terrified. I was over 40 and I’d never seen a deceased person. But when we went to the hospital the next morning, and the mortuary attendant put the body out for us to take on to the stretcher, and I thought 'Whatever was I frightened of? The poor lady’s only looking as if she’s asleep’.

Police officer in shirt and tie is interviewed in a science classroom.

Police officer In the police force, of course, we all have to see dead bodies. We all have to see things that, uh, we’ve had no experience of. Here the coroner’s sergeant said to me one day – I’d been here a couple of days – 'Right, Cooling, you’re going to the mortuary and you’re going to see a post-mortem’. Cooling had to see a post-mortem, and I did. And I walked away from it afterwards thinking 'Gee, I’ve seen it, and it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be’.