I believe that the first thing cinema does is to embalm a moment in history, and then it keeps it forever, in a way.

They are used in taxidermy and by natural history museums to clean animal skeletons.

A time for even grimmer stuff than that, like autopsies and embalmings in Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits.

The grotesque idea of embalming Chávez s body was finally discarded precisely because of the damage suffered by the corpse during its display to the masses in a chaotic exercise in political manipulation.