10/02/2025

CfP Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens nº. 63: “Death-Images: Revisiting Deleuze’s “Time-Image” in cinema after 1985”

Death-Images: Revisiting Deleuze’s "Time-Image" in cinema after 1985

In her article “Death as Film-Philosophy’s Muse: Deleuzian Observations on Moving Images and the Nature of Time,” Susana Viegas has shown that Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “time-image” (i.e. a way for moving images to present time breaking with the conception of the latter as a discrete sequence of moments, each mechanically linked to the previous and the next) is inseparable from conceiving of death in ways other than the mere interruption of a linear progression called “life.” That is to say, the “time-image” qua direct, non-mediated presentation of time cannot but be as well a “death-image” foreshadowing the presence of death before it happens in the future; an indirect, oblique way of expressing future nonexistence; a direct image of passing over time.

The “Lazarean subject”, i.e. the subject coming back from the dead as theorized most effectively in the cinematic practice of Alain Resnais (among others, in Guernica, 1950, Night and Fog, 1955, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959), is perhaps the most fitting exemplification of this convergence between “time-image” and “death-image”. To some extent, this convergence can be regarded as Deleuze’s contribution to a strand of French 20th century thought (e.g. Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, among others) fruitfully elaborating on what lies “between two deaths”, i.e. between the subject’s symbolic and real deaths.

The relationship between Deleuze’s cinematic taxonomy and history is a complex one – suffice it to mention the paramount importance of World War II (qua ultimate, collective trauma) in structuring his classification, down to the very division between his two tomes (Cinema 1: Movement-Image, 1983, and Cinema 2: Time-Image, 1985). Without going into the intricacies of this relationship, to affirm that a relationship of some kind with history is there in Deleuze’s taxonomy in the first place is safe enough for the following question to be legitimate and, arguably, inevitable: what happened to the “time-image” after the publication of Cinema 2?

Forty years after the release of Cinema 2: Time-Image, this special issue will collect essays on films and directors working after 1985 that exemplify the convergence between “time-image” and “death-image” in ways that are not perfectly coincident with the ways Deleuze put it in his cinema books but possibly illuminating it with the hindsight of a later historical perspective. We are looking for essays reflecting on post-1985 cinematic instances of this convergence and showing kinds of “death-images” that Deleuze could not have envisaged writing in 1985.

Essays dealing with films and directors from non-Western areas will be particularly welcome. As it is well-known, the section(s) of Cinema 2 on non-Western cinemas are deliberately tentative, and thus implicitly calling for future specification. Several major figures in recent so-called “World Cinema” (to name but a few: Jia Zhang-Ke, Lisandro Alonso, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Abderramahne Sissako, Lav Diaz) engage deeply with “time-image”, and in a lot of cases their cinemas strongly relate to death and the “death-image” too. Essays on lesser-known figures would, however, be no less welcome.

Japan is of course a particularly important case in point. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their large-scale impact, profoundly informs Deleuze’s cinema diptych, and there is no shortage of Japanese works reflecting on them in a Deleuzian way (e.g. from Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain, 1989, to Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Labyrinth of Cinema, 2019; also, Yoji Yamada’s Tora-San series could hardly be seen as very Deleuzian as it unfolded in the 1970s and 1980s, and yet its 2019 culmination Tora-San, Wish You Were Here lends itself to be analysed at the intersection between “time-image” and “death-image” like very few others).

Manuscripts should be submitted online RCL - Journal of Communication and Languages.

Full manuscript submission deadline: May 31, 2025
Review process: July to October 2025
Editors’ decision: October 2025
Expected publication date: November 2025

Articles can be written in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese and will be blind peer reviewed. Visual essays will also be accepted. Formatting must be in accordance with the journal’s submission guidelines, and the submission must be made via the OJS platform.

Editors: Marco Grosoli, Lucas Ferraço Nassif, Vasco Marques e Susana Viegas

📸 Hiroshima, Mon Amour [1959], by Alain Resnais

Film and Death
Film and Death
  • About
    • Background and key aims
    • Overview
    • Team
    • Advisory Board
    • Related projects
    • References
  • Film-Phil Seminars
  • Outreach
    • Conferences
    • Reading Groups
    • Media
    • Videos
  • Publications
    • Articles
    • Books
  • Blog
  • Job openings
  • Contact

Blog

Tags
Alain Resnais Alfred Hitchcock Animation anime Anna Elsner Anti-image Architecture and Cinema Bande Dessinée Bárbara Bergamaschi Béla Tarr Bernd Herzogenrath Bill Morrison Call for Papers Calls Catherine Malabou Catherine Wheatley Chantal Akerman Christine Reeh-Peters Cinema Journal of Philosophy Cinema Studies CJPMI Conferences Cristóbal Escobar David Ferragut David H. Fleming David Lynch Death and Technology Death-Image Disappearence End-of-life care Events Farshad Zahedi Félix Guattari Female Biopic FIlm Film and Death Film Philosophy Film Studies Film-Phil Seminar Gilles Deleuze Grief Ingrid Rodrigues Gonçalves Jacques Derrida Jaime Pena Jakob A. Nilsson James Williams Jamieson Webster Japan Jean-Marc Rochette Jonathan Glazer Kanen Barad Lacrimae Rerum Lucas Ferraço Nassif Lucy Bolton Manoel de Oliveira Marc Cerisuelo Marco Grosoli Media Studies Michael Cholbi Michael Haneke Mortality Muhammad Haris Nélio Conceição Outi Hakola Paolo Taviani Patrícia Castello Branco Patricio Guzmán Pedro Inock Philosophy of Death Publications Reading Group Robert Sinnerbrink Salomé Lamas Slavoj Žižek Slow Cinema Stanley Cavell Star Biopic Susana Viegas Swan Songs Testament Films Thomas E. Wartenberg Thomas Lamarre Time-Image Vasco Baptista Marques Video Visiting Researcher Walter Benjamin
16/06/2025

Our team will be at the Film-Philosophy Conference 2025 (L-Università ta’ Malta)

From June 23 to June 25, the Valetta Campus of the University of Malta will host the Film-Philosophy Conference 2025. Our team will present a panel titled Death-Images, on the first day, June 23, at 3:45PM (Room 103). This panel explores the concept of the death-image through the work of Alain Resnais, focusing on what […]
11/06/2025

Our team will be at NECS 2025 (Lusófona University of Lisbon)

From 18 to 21 June, Lusófona University of Lisbon will host The NECS 2025 Conference, dedicated to the theme Discovering/Uncovering: Navigating the Complexities of Screen Media. On June 19 2-3:40PM, our project’s PI, Susana Viegas, will be present at the section Panels & Workshops, for a ERC Info Session led by Nicoleta Bazgan from the […]
06/01/2025

CfP Special Issue on Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films

Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films Dedicated to the last films of renowned filmmakers, often referred to as “testament films” or “swan songs,” this Special Issue will examine their thematic, narrative, and stylistic elements, viewing these final works as profound summations of their creators’ careers and philosophical syntheses of […]
20/06/2025

The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: Bárbara Bergamaschi

The next session of our Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars will be led by Bárbara Bergamaschi (NOVA University Lisbon), who will talk about “Eroticism, Formlessness, and Death in Tscherkassky’s Cinematic Hauntology”. Abstract This paper examines the work of Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherkasskythrough the lens of Georges Bataille’s concepts of l’informe (the formless), eroticism, and expenditure. Positioned […]
16/06/2025

Lucas Ferraço Nassif at the University of Essex and the Freud Museum

Lucas Ferraço Nassif will be present at the Nature and Its Discontents Conference SIPP/ISSP (International Society of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy), happening on June 25-27 at the University of Essex in Colchester and on June 29 at the Freud Museum in London. On June 27, he will give a presentation titled “Multiplanar Unconsciouses: Studying Ferenczi’s Thalassa […]
1234…23
Hosted by
Supported by

Funded by the European Union (ERC, FILM AND DEATH, 101088956). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

DESIGN