Funeral Customs the World Over

Duration: 600

Year Published: 1962

Creator: Pohlman Film Prodcutions

Complete Record: The film examines different cultural treatments of the dead in relation to those of the United States. It presents its argument in a very structural fashion, with an introduction, thesis, chapters, and a conclusion, mostly showing still images out of the newly published book of the same name. The introduction shows footage from the November 1961 funeral of Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, held in Bonham, Texas. President John F. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, and former president Harry S. Truman are all shown in attendance. Scenes from this funeral, the speeches, the casket carrying, the hearse, the cemetery, the burial plot, and the last prayer, are shown as examples of a conventional American funeral. The film now moves to using still images from the book, in order to show the similarity across the world in ways of honoring the dead. It shows, in order, funeral halls (in Canada, South Africa, China, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines); coffins (from Europe, Australia, and West Africa); funeral processions (in China, Jerusalem, Italy, and Puerto Rico); the funeral customs of the Amish in the US; other methods of burial (in Italy, Latin America, Hungary, Rome, India, West Africa, Sumatra, and Mexico); cemeteries (in South Africa, Rome, Dominican Republic, Hawaii, from an American Indian tribe, and British Columbia); war burials in the US (the interment of WWII soldiers with President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon present); religious personnel (Buddhist, Jewish, and Catholic); and symbols used in funerals ( in Hungary, Burma, India, and those of American fire fighters). The film concludes in noting that a common thread throughout the funeral customs throughout the world (and especially in the US) is that the ceremonies help those still living, perhaps more so than they honor the dead.