“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: Maria Serafini
October’s next Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar will be led by Maria Serafini (University of Milan) who will talk about “At the Limits of Mediation: Eulogy, Digital Afterlife and the Media of Finitude”. Abstract What happens when an image no longer marks the distance between the living and the dead, but promises to overcome it? Taking the […]
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CfP Death in the Eyes 3 – The Iconographies of Death in Cinema: Personae, Representations, and Imaginaries
University of L’Aquila (Università degli Studi dell’Aquila), Italy, 24-25 June 2027 Keynote Speakers: Stacey Abbott (Northumbria University, UK) and Katarzyna Ancuta (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand) Few cinematic images have entered the collective imagination as profoundly as Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1957). A pale-faced man cloaked in a long black mantle, challenging […]
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CfP Workshop on The Life of Images: Death, Materiality and Animist Cinema
The FILM AND DEATH project is organizing an international workshop on The Life of Images: Death, Materiality and Animist Cinema at NOVA FCSH, Lisbon, on 11-13 February 2027. A face that breathes beyond itself, a maid who buries herself in the earth, a man dissolving into the river: these are the kinds of moments this […]
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FILM AND DEATH TALKS: A New Podcast from our team
We are excited to introduce FILM AND DEATH TALKS, a new podcast series from the FILM AND DEATH team. The podcast FILM AND DEATH TALKS brings together conversations with filmmakers and other cinema practitioners with short critical reflections on films that offer different ways of thinking about death, mortality, memory, and time. Each episode of […]
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Join us at the Goethe-Institut Portugal for the cycle “Falar sobre a morte (nunca matou ninguém)”!
Organized by the Goethe-Institut Portugal, with contributions from the FILM AND DEATH team, Death Café, the association Doulas do Fim da Vida, and many other partners, the festival Falar sobre a morte (nunca matou ninguém) [Speaking About Death (Never Killed Anyone)] will open on September 17 at 5:00 pm with the interactive sound installation Memorial […]
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Diana Neiva at the 12th Iberian Meeting in Aesthetics
On October 23, Diana Neiva will present at the 12th Iberian Meeting in Aesthetics, taking place at FLUP – Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto. Her presentation is titled “Horror without definition: collective attention and genre recognition”. Abstract Horror film is one of the most recognisable and simultaneously most definition-resistant of […]
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Welcoming Ana Clara Freitas
We are very happy to welcome our new visiting researcher, Ana Clara Freitas, to the FILM AND DEATH team! Ana Clara Coutinho de Freitas is a graduate student in Image and Sound at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), where she is conducting research with a grant from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). […]
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Susana Viegas at Fundação Serralves
There are images that seem to want to stop time. Originally written and conceived in the late 1940s, but only made more than half a century later, The Strange Case of Angélica (2010) tells the story of how a photograph of a dead woman becomes, for Isaac, a disturbing presence – somewhere between desire and […]
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Susana Viegas will be at the ‘Philosophy of the City Conference’
At the ‘Philosophy of the City Conference’, hosted by the Faculty of Architecture, Czech Technical University in Prague (15-17 October 2026), Susana Viegas will present the paper ‘Chantal Akerman and the City as a Space of Exhausted Life’. Building on her ongoing research on the death-image, Viegas examines how Chantal Akerman’s ‘News from Home’ (1976) and […]
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