“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.”
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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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 […]
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The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: Muhammad Haris
The next Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar will be led by Muhammad Haris (Habib University) who will talk about “Natural Language Generation and the Script for a Film on Genocide”. Muhammad Haris is the Director for the Program in Comparative Humanities at Habib University in Karachi, Pakistan. The program’s curriculum is grounded in cross-disciplinarity, cooperation, and a […]
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Call for Short-Term Residencies in Film-Philosophy and Death
We are inviting applications for short-term residencies spanning Autumn 2025 through Summer 2026. Residents will become members of the FILM AND DEATH project during their stay and will be provided with access to workplace, internet, and university libraries. Residents are expected to actively participate in the project’s activities, present their research through a seminar open […]
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Susana Viegas at Seminário Aberto de Estética (Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto)
This May 30, from 3 to 6PM, Susana Viegas will speak at IFP – Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto, at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto, with a presentation titled “Memória, Morte e Ausência na “Trilogia do Chile” (2010-2019) de Patricio Guzmán”. In this talk, Susana Viegas […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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