“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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The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: Isabel Gamero
May’s Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar will be led by our resident Isabel Gamero (Complutense University of Madrid), who will talk about “Mind / Body & World / View(ed): Some questions about dualism, horror films and Cavell’s philosophy”. Abstract In my presentation I am interested in raising philosophical questions about the peculiar place that horror films occupy […]
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Death in the Eyes 2: Philosophical Perspectives on Film Genres and Death
From May 27 to 29, the conference Death in the Eyes 2: Philosophical Perspectives on Film Genres and Death will take place at NOVA FCSH (Berna Campus). Organized by Lucas Ferraço Nassif, Marco Grosoli, Pedro Inock, Susana Viegas, Tiago Cravidão and Vasco Marques, all members of the FILM AND DEATH team, this conference aims to […]
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Welcoming Isabel Gamero, our new resident!
We are delighted to welcome Isabel Gamero, our new short-term resident, to the FILM AND DEATH team! Isabel Gamero Cabrera is Associate Professor at the Philosophy Faculty, Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). Her fields of research are political philosophy, anthropology, feminist philosophy and contemporary epistemology. She has coedited the Bloomsbury Handbook of Wittgensteinian Feminism (2025). […]
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New article by Nélio Conceição published in our Arts Special Issue on Swan Songs
The guest editors of the Arts’ Special Issue on Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films, Vasco Baptista Marques and Susana Viegas, are pleased to announce the publication of a new open-access article: “On Wrinkles, Laughter, and the Self-Reflexivity of Joris Ivens’s A Tale of the Wind“, by Nélio Conceição. In his swan song A […]
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Lucas Ferraço Nassif’s Interview for TV Scholar
A new intervew with Lucas Ferraço Nassif for TV Scholar is out now! In this interview, Lucas Ferraço Nassif reflects on his work at the intersection of cinema, television, and philosophy, outlining a research practice shaped by psychoanalysis and experimental media. Drawing on his book Unconscious/Television, he explores how TV and anime operate as sites […]
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Presenting Film and Death: A Conceptual Knowledge Map
We are pleased to announce the launch of Film and Death: A Conceptual Knowledge Map, a dataset developed within the FILM AND DEATH project. Guided by the focus question “How does film make us think about death?,” the map visualizes the network of relations between films, filmmakers, formal strategies, concepts, and thematic subjects, highlighting their philosophical […]
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Manoel de Oliveira and Portuguese Cinema: 3. Turns of Life – Yesterday as Today (1990–2015)
Susana Viegas, Marco Grosoli, and Vasco Baptista Marques have been invited to contribute to the third volume of ‘Manoel de Oliveira and Portuguese Cinema: 3. Turns of Life – Yesterday as Today (1990-2015)’, published by the CCMO-Serralves Foundation, and throughout 2026, they will also join screening sessions at the Auditório (15 Mar-21 Oct 2026) as […]
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New publication by our team: “Death-Images: Revisiting Deleuze’s ‘Time-Image’ in Cinema after 1985”
As invited guest editors, Susana Viegas, Lucas Ferraço Nassif, Marco Grosoli and Vasco Baptista Marques are pleased to share “Death-Images: Revisiting Deleuze’s ‘Time-Image’ in Cinema after 1985” (Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens | Journal of Communication and Languages no. 63), published by the NOVA Institute of Communication – ICNOVA of NOVA University Lisbon. Marking forty years since […]
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