“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
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 […]
View more
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 […]
View more
New Open Access article by Susana Viegas on Cavell and Deleuze
What can death reveal about the unexpected connection between Cavell and Deleuze? Susana Viegas has published the open-access article ‘Cavell and Deleuze: Genre as Medium, Death as Image’, part of the Philosophies dossier ‘Film-Philosophies of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze’, edited by Jeroen Gerrits & Sandra Laugier. Following her recent presentation at ‘Stanley Cavell at 100: An […]
View more
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 […]
View more
New Open Access article by Lucas Ferraço Nassif
We are happy to share that Lucas Ferraço Nassif, our post-doc researcher and FILM AND DEATH team member, has just published a new article titled “The epistemology of dizziness in psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis: Individuation, screen-based media, and the production of unconsciouses” in Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatologia Fundamental (2026), no. 29. Concerned with the reconceptualization of […]
View more
New publication by Susana Viegas
Can a firefly and a toxic spore make us think differently about death? In her latest book chapter, Susana Viegas explores how Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Grave of the Fireflies invite us to reflect on mortality through what she calls the death-image. Spores and fireflies, one commonly associated with toxicity, the other […]
View more
“Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films” is out now!
We are pleased to announce the completion of the Special Issue “Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films”, guest edited by Vasco Baptista Marques and Susana Viegas for Arts. The Special Issue brings together seven original articles examining testament films from a philosophical perspective. Rather than approaching filmmakers’ final works merely as […]
View more
New video! Watch our conversation with Darius Marder at the Cinemateca Portuguesa
During the month of March 2026, in partnership with NOVA FCSH, Teatro Avenidas and the BANDUA project, the FILM AND DEATH project co-organized the Film and Debate Cycle 4 Filmes, 4 Conversas: Saúde Mental, Trabalho e Género [4 Films, 4 Conversations: Mental Health, Work and Gender], curated by Susana Viegas, Lucas Ferraço Nassif, Pedro Florêncio […]
View more