“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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Join us on our next seminar with Byron Davies, Bruno Varela and Marcela Cuevas
On November 26 3-6PM, join us at NOVA FCSH (Berna Campus, Room A206) for a presentation by three members of Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU): Bruno Varela, Marcela Cuevas and our first resident Byron Davies. They will talk to us about “Nahual Cinema and The Living Idol (Albert Lewin and René Cardona, 1957)”. Abstract In […]
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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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Susana Viegas at the I Symposium Ǝ&E: Intersections Between Ethics and Aesthetics
Susana Viegas will present at the I Symposium Ǝ&E: Intersections Between Ethics and Aesthetics, held at the University of Málaga, 16 and 17 December, 2025. Her talk, titled “Animal Violence: Bazin, Film, and the Ethics of Death,” revisits André Bazin’s seminal essay “La Mort tous les après-midi” (1949) through the lens of Albert Serra’s “Tardes […]
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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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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 […]
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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 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 […]
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