“I am afraid that other people do not realize that the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.”

Socrates, 'Phaedo' 64a

Welcome to FILM AND DEATH

FILM AND DEATH defends the hypothesis that to film-philosophize is to learn to die. This will be achieved by rethinking the innovations that film brings to recent philosophies of death and the metaphysics of time. A new criterion for understanding the relationship between film and philosophy is proposed that claims 1) that film-philosophy’s methodology is a meditation on death, and 2) that films think and have their own ways of creating novel thoughts that are not our own. One of these thoughts concerns death, a phenomenon of which we have no image but that film renders visible as a death-image (a direct image of passing time, facing the impossibility of any representation). We will assert that the cinematic experience is in itself equal to awareness of one’s own mortality, as a memento mori, without which we would not philosophize at all.

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22/05/2025

The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: Jeremi Szaniawski

The next session of our Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars will be led by Jeremi Szaniawski (UMass Amherst), who will talk about “Death, Dying, and the Death Throes (?) of Necrorealism in the Films of Alexander Sokurov and Yevgeny Yufit”. Abstract In the 1980s and 1990s, several filmmakers in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia – including a […]

02/06/2025

Lucas Ferraço Nassif at PUC-SP – Pontifícia Universidade Católica of São Paulo

On June 4 4:30PM, Lucas Ferraço Nassif will be at PUC-SP – Pontíficia Universidade Católica of São Paulo, at the 3rd Symposium of International Dialogues – Chronically Online: Attention in Times of Hyperconnection. His presentation is titled “Slowing down on times of disinformation and hyperconnection” and it will be devoted to the notion of pathos […]

11/03/2025

Reading Group on Catherine Malabou’s “Destructive Plasticity”

Catherine Malabou first arose to prominence in the International philosophical landscape in the 1990s, thanks to her groundbreaking interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel’s system as one revolving around plasticity, which eventually became the key concept of her own philosophical production. Itself a plastic concept, plasticity (“the nature of that which is ‘plastic’, being at once […]

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 […]

ERC-2022-COG

FILM AND DEATH is a 5-year project funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (ERC Consolidator Grant n. 101088956), led by Susana Viegas and currently hosted by the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.

Start Date: 01 Jun 2023 • Duration: 60 months