“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.
Events Events Events Events Events Events Events Events Events Events
“Whose Deaths Are Worth Mourning? Gendered Death in a Turkish TV Series” by Gülce Zeynep Bektaş
Whose Deaths Are Worth Mourning? Gendered Death in a Turkish TV Series By Gülce Zeynep Bektaş (Yeditepe University) One of Turkey’s most-watched TV series, the mafia-themed Valley of the Wolves (Kurtlar Vadisi, 2003-2005) and its sequel series, Valley of the Wolves: Ambush (Kurtlar Vadisi Pusu, 2007–2016) frequently portray death, but not all of them are […]
View more
“Ars Moriendi”: screening and debate with Tiago Cravidão and Ana Catarina Infante
On January 29, Casa do Comum will host a screening of Ars Moriendi and a debate between the director Tiago Cravidão and Ana Catarina Infante. Ars Moriendi is an experimental film. It asks the same questions to social participants receiving palliative care and to actors portraying characters at the end of life. Six of the eight […]
View more
Susana Viegas and Lucas Ferraço Nassif at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon
On 29 January, Lucas Ferraço Nassif and Susana Viegas will speak at an event on TV series, organised by the Programme in Literary Theory at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon (C138-B). In the morning, Lucas Ferraço Nassif will speak about the micro-perceptions and death-images in anime with Studio Trigger’s show Kill la […]
View more
Virtual Roundtable: Thomas Wartenberg’s “Thoughtful Cinema: Illustrating Philosophy Through Film” (2025)
Join us on February 3, 2026, at 18h00 London time for a virtual roundtable dedicated to Thomas Wartenberg’s new book “Thoughtful Cinema: Illustrating Philosophy Through Film” (Oxford University Press, 2025). We are delighted that Thomas Wartenberg will also be joining the session, offering an opportunity for direct conversation with the author. This event brings together […]
View more
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, […]
View more
New article from Patrícia Castello Branco for our Arts’ Special Issue on Swan Songs
We are pleased to announce that our Arts‘ Special Issue on Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films keeps growing. You can now read a new open-access article from Patrícia Castello Branco, titled “The Anti-Testament of Ozu: Time, Finitude and Repetition in ‘An Autumn Afternoon'”. This new article offers a reading […]
View more
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 […]
View more
New article on our Arts’ Special Issue on Swan Songs
The editors of Swan Songs, Vasco Baptista Marques and Susana Viegas, are pleased to announce the publication of a new open-access article: “A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) as the Spiritual Swan Song of Stanley Kubrick” by Alexandre Nascimento Braga Teixeira. The article proposes a reading of “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” as Kubrick’s spiritual swan song, despite the film’s […]
View more