“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: Christine Greiner
The next session of our Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars will be led by Christine Greiner (Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo), who will talk about the “Death-Image: modes of existence”. Abstract Based on Vinciane Despret’s studies on the philosopher Étienne Souriau and the urgency of establishing modes of existence for the dead (and for death), we […]
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CfP Death in the Eyes 2: Philosophical Perspectives on Film Genres and Death
NOVA University Lisbon, 28-29 May, 2026 Keynote Speakers: Michele Aaron (University of Warwick) and Jean-Baptiste Thoret (Universitéde Poitiers) Like philosophical categories, film genres function as ways of unifying the manifold of experience, determining under what conditions the particular can be subsumed under the universal. This effort of inclusion lies at the very root of Western […]
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Extended Deadline! CfP Special Issue on Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films
We are happy to announce the new home for the Special Issue “Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films”! The editors have chosen to publish it in Arts, an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal (also published online by MDPI) devoted to research on all facets of the visual and performing arts, […]
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Welcome to Byron Davies, our first resident!
We are very happy to announce the arrival of Byron Davies to our team, the first short-term resident we’ll receive until the Summer of 2026. Byron Davies is a researcher in philosophy, film programmer, and visual artist originally from the U.S. and a naturalized Mexican citizen. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the […]
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New book chapter by Susana Viegas on Androids, Mortality, and Death-Images
A new book chapter by FILM AND DEATH’s PI Susana Viegas is out now. Titled “On Androids, Mortality, and Death-Images: Blade Runner and Westworld”, this new chapter is published in SecondDeath: Experiences of Death Across Technologies, edited by Alger Sans Pinillos, Vicent Costa, and Jordi Vallverdú (Springer, 2025). What happens when cinema makes androids confront […]
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New article by Marco Grosoli
A new open-access article by Marco Grosoli is out now, having been published in Arts as part of the Special Issue Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films. The article “Wrapping Up “Through the Eyes of Those Who Are No Longer”: Paolo Taviani’s Leonora addio (2022)” is available here. In […]
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New book chapter by Susana Viegas on Derrida and Film Studies
A new book chapter by FILM AND DEATH’s PI Susana Viegas is out now. Titled “Derrida on Cinema’s Spectral Images: Time, Repetition, and Belief”, this new chapter is published in Derrida and Film Studies, edited by Kamil Lipiński and Andrzej Marzec (Brill, 2025). This chapter by Susana Viegas begins as a meditation on the relationship […]
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New article by Marco Grosoli on zombies, Catherine Malabou and Freud’s ‘death drive’
A new open-access article by Marco Grosoli was just published in Ocula (35), a special issue dedicated to Zombesque. Sociosemiotica di un’epidemia culturale, curated by Andrea Bernardelli, Eduardo Grillo e Federico Montanari. This new article is titled “More Zombies than Zombies: Catherine Malabou’s ‘New Wounded’ and their Ethico-Political Implications, According to Victor Erice’s Cerrar los […]
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