Barbara,
Nicholas Roeg's "Don't Look Now" has a field trip with this theme. Unlike Hamlet meeting ghost Dad, Donald Sutherland handles premonitions of his encroaching death with total denial and rejection. "The Seventh Seal" and old Hollywood hankie "On Borrowed Time" feature death as main characters to be tricked or defeated. Hitchcock's "The Trouble with Harry" makes comedy out of avoiding death, which is kind of a nuisance for disrupting lives that border on the charmingly banal.
Adding to Richard's comments, Fritz Lang's western and noir ("The Return of Frank James", "The Big Heat", "You Only Live Once") turn the memory or imminent death of a beloved into a quest for social meaning of the deceased. Avoidance is an ongoing and heroic action over the oppressive choices given by the world (a noir specialty.) Come to think of it, Bette Davis creates an aesthetic monument out of avoidance in "Dark Victory".
Jacqui
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