“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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Susana Viegas’ new open-access article on Haneke’s Death Images
Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke confronts death and violence in his films, using provocative aesthetics to challenge ethical boundaries. This analysis examines how Benny’s Video (1992) and Funny Games (1997) explore mortality through the use of the rewind gesture, sparking a dialogue between the films and their audience. “Death Images in Michael Haneke’s Films” explores the […]
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Marco Grosoli’s new open-access article explores Plasticity in Rivette’s Film Criticism
This article shows the productiveness of “plasticity” (a concept famously developed by French philosopher Catherine Malabou) for cinema, by using Jacques Rivette’s film criticism as a detailed case study. In several greatly influential writings (which have, among others, decisively contributed to the formation of the French New Wave), Rivette relied on an interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy […]
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Christine Reeh-Peters has published a new open-access article exploring the concept of a spectral ethics of film
The article “The Non-Anthropocentric Other in Film: Towards a Spectral Ethics of Film“ is part of the Special Issue Cinema and Philosophy: Exploring the Intersections of Time, Identity, Ethics, and Aesthetics, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath for the online journal Philosophies. The article seeks to develop a speculative and spectral ethics of film, grounded in an […]
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Welcoming Ingrid Rodrigues Gonçalves, visiting PhD student
We are happy to host Ingrid Rodrigues Gonçalves, a Brazilian PhD student in Education at the School of Education, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (PPGEdu/UFRGS), during her research visit in October, 2024! Her research focuses on autobiographical documentaries, using an interdisciplinary approach to explore the intersection between audiovisual images, archives, and education. She […]
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The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: James Williams
The next Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar (2024-2025) will be led by James Williams (Deakin University, Australia) who will talk about “Death, Démontage and Time in Bande Dessinée as a Precursor to Film: The Works of Jean-Marc Rochette.” The session is hybrid and will be held on October 23, 2024, at 15:00 PM (Lisbon time), at Colégio […]
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The Anime Philosophy Lab
We are organizing a 2-day hybrid workshop on The Anime Philosophy, associated with Cinema Journal n.16, and Thomas Lamarre (University of Chicago) will be our invited keynote speaker! Thomas Lamarre teaches in the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization at the University of […]
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NEW Reading Group on Malabou’s “Destructive Plasticity” – Spring 2025
Catherine Malabou is mostly known as the philosopher of plasticity, a concept she drew mainly from her groundbreaking interpretation of Hegel. Not only “the nature of that which is ‘plastic’, being at once capable of receiving and of giving form”, plasticity is also the destruction of form as its non-transcendental condition of possibility. “Destructive plasticity” thus concerns the […]
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Ifilnova Youtube channel
Did you miss any of our recent events? You can catch up on the Ifilnova YouTube channel, where some are available to watch online. For example, Jamieson Webster’s lecture, ‘Breathing and the Unconscious’, has garnered over 1.7K views. You can also find recordings of our Reading Group on Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Lacrimae Rerum’. Stay tuned, more will […]
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