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Join Date: Feb 2010
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Recently I watched A Certain Kind of Death (2003).
It's a documentary that follows around the coroner, morticians, and personnel in Los Angeles county who tasked with finding relatives of people who have been found dead. The dead people are just normal citizens who died of old age, health problems -- not murdered by anyone. The filmmakers actually go into a hotel room where a man was found dead on his bathroom floor. He had slipped on something and hit his head. That's all that had happened. A city employee whose job it is to sift through belongings and call up relatives (whom she sometimes finds in little black books people leave behind) goes through his stuff but finds everyone and all friends of his are also deceased. Four months later, no relative can be found to claim his body, so he is cremated. Interestingly, once cremation has been done, the process of finding a relative to claim or take away the person's ashes starts all over again.
After years and years have gone by, the boxes of unknown people's ashes in the coroner's building build up. I can't remember the cut-off time, but what's really sad is that each year there's a non-descript grave marker made (e.g. 2003, 2004, etc). It's a simple metal grave plate. Because no one been in touch with the coroner's office and all resources (time and money) have been exhausted, all the cremation boxes for each individual year are simply emptied one by one into a single grave. The cemetery workers open each box of ashes and pour the contents into the freshly dug grave --- they do about 40 boxes. The grave is buried over and the year plate is put on the grave. So all the people who died in 2004 are buried under an iron name plate, 4-inches by 6-inches, that reads '2004'.
You see everything in this documentary. This isn't a made for TV documentary. You see workers move a body from a hotel room or a house. You see the guy's decomposed face. You see the body bags in the coroner's crypt. Blood is washed (actually sprayed with water) into the drainage pipes, as if one is washing a car, outside the autopsy room. It's not quite as gruesome as it seems, but nothing is really hidden -- nothing is pushed into your face. It's a bit of a macabre documentary, but nothing darkly Gothic about it.
If you can't find this to download, PM me and I'll send you links.
Here's the documentary's homepage:
Code:
http://www.acertainkindofdeath.com/
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