This publication proceeds from a talk given by Corey P. Cribb (Technological University Dublin) at Discovering/Uncovering: The NECS 2025 Conference, Lusófona University, June 19, 2025 (NECS)
The goal of my talk today is to situate presentations by Susana Viegas (“Wandering Toward the End: Existentialism and Death in Gerry”), Lucas Ferraço Nassif (“Into the Wired: Lain and the Clinic of the Unconscious”) and Christine Reeh-Peters (“Postcards for the Future: Haunting Questions and New Worlding) in relation to the “FILM AND DEATH” project at NOVA University Lisbon, and in turn to understand that project’s value in relation to existing research on the topic in the field of Screen Studies. The project builds upon a long history of critical and theoretical meditations on death as it relates to film which, I wish to propose, can be broken into three, non-exclusive strands:
According to the ontological strand, death is in some capacity intrinsic to the medium of film itself or the processes by which cinema mediates the world and living beings. The most famous example of this approach is undoubtedly André Bazin’s identification of a “mummy complex” at the heart of photographic media wherein the creation of images is read as symptomatic of a psychological desire for what he calls the “pérennité” or continued existence of corporeal beings against the passage of time [1]. Being decays and films, while they cannot prevent this decay, psychologically satiate our desire for immortality. Later Bazin seemingly revises this thesis by speaking of an ‘ontological obscenity’ to the recording of death on film (real or fictional) insofar as it permits the repetition of a singular, privileged moment in time (i.e. dying) that in reality can only happen once [2]. A similar ontological line of thought can be detected in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Observations on the Long Take”, where he compares the work of montage to that moment, allegedly before death, when our life flashes before our eyes [3]. He argues that in this moment numerous fragments of meaningless experience are rendered significant, such that our lives become expressive of something ‘in retrospect’. Echoing the ideas of Benedetto Croce, it is death that bestows meaning on life and montage, Pasolini intimates, enacts the work of death. More recently, this ontological strategy has been taken up by Jean-Luc Nancy in his analysis of the famous ending to Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry (1997) [4], which he argues attunes itself to the experience of death in life without seeking to represent it, and by Laura Mulvey in her iconically titled book Death 24x a Second, where she thinks through the way photographic media but also cinema’s narrative paradigms and formal devices negotiate finitude [5].
A second, historical, strand proposes that film history is somehow responsive to and responsible for history itself, and the many catastrophes and causalities which it has beget. We see such a thesis, for example, in Jean-Luc Godard’s monumental film essay Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), which reckons with the consequences of cinema’s failure to record the holocaust and hypothesises that film history was fundamentally altered by the gravity of this event. Another example is the film criticism of Serge Daney, which treads comparable territory by developing of an ethics of cinema wherein cinematic representation must always come at death obliquely, a disposition which he claims was formed as a result of a screening of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) during his teenage years [6]. A similar logic, which views cinematic modernism as a reaction to a loss of collective innocence triggered by WWII, can be found in Deleuze’s books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [7] and Cinema 2: The Time-Image [8] – a pseudo-historical thesis for which he has been criticised by Jacques Rancière among others [9]. Here, however, the historical indiscriminately coalesces with the ontological as the crisis of representation associated with modern cinema unleashes a potential for the direct presentation of a time out of joint that was always said to belong to the image yet was reportedly repressed by classical cinema.
The final aspect (which plays a role in such historical theses) concerns the cinematic representation of death, often interrogating the ethical implications of the recording and exhibition of theatrical and actual deaths. Books like C. Scott Combs’s Deathwatch [10] or Michele Aaron’s Death and the Moving Image [11], both expand and challenge the ontological and historical approaches to death in cinema discussed above by thinking through the implications of the representation of death on cinematic screens. Although there is undoubtedly some overlap between these scholarly works and the “FILM AND DEATH” project at NOVA, the latter’s original contribution to thinking through death and dying in cinema is tethered to the claim – posited in Susana Viegas’s 2023 article “Death as Film-Philosophy’s Muse: Deleuzian Observations on Moving Images and the Nature of Time” [12] – that film is not only a means of representing but of thinking death and dying. Across genre, format and narrative paradigms, Viegas argues that cinema functions as a ‘memento mori’ (that is as a reminder of our own morality) and therefore demonstrates the capacity to meditate upon death and dying in a manner comparable to philosophy itself (which has long been characterised, Viegas shows, by an infatuation with morality).
The crux of this proposition is that death itself precipitates or inspires philosophical thinking, and that we can therefore view think films like Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2002) as analogous to the iconic 20th century meditations on death by the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke, Martin Heidegger and Georges Bataille. In this respect, the research is not merely concerned with the cinematic depiction of death but how moving images negotiate death by cinematic means, even when the event itself is not portrayed. As Viegas explains, such a project need not be read as fundamentally pessimistic or fatalistic insofar as philosophical reflection on death organically leads to the question of how to live what she calls “a good and worthy life” in the knowledge of our finitude [13]. The value of this approach to Screen Studies is therefore both philosophical and film critical – it uses close analysis to trace the thinking of death by cinema, and this methodological approach, as we have seen today, can also be applied to other media like animation and digital media – both of which are denied the ontological relation to death that the analogue photographic arts are said to enjoy by virtue of their indexical deficiencies. We saw this film critical dimension to the project, for example, in Viegas’s presentation today where the formal parameters of two remarkable tracking shots in Gerry are shown to be integral to the means through which cinema, in this example, addresses death.
Lucas Ferraço Nassif’s research, as I grasp it, bypasses what Noël Carroll disparagingly coined the “medium specificity” thesis [14], to explore the relationship between anime and death through a psychoanalytic frame of drives, intensities and desires. Where animation, as its etymology implies, strives to reconstruct the impression of life without recourse to any photographic referent, his work seeks to locate instances where the symbolic register, as it’s known in psychoanalysis, is flooded with the impossible presence of what Ferraço Nassif calls in Unconscious/Television [15], after Freud, ‘the crypt’: a spectre of the real that can no longer be confused with either iconic or photorealistic representation. This would mean, in some respect, to view anime as itself alive, and therefore capable of the kind of drives, perversions and pulsions which characterise human subjectivity in the psychoanalytic tradition. This is to take animation as a form which, like consciousness, is inevitably confronted at moments with its own finitude or vulnerability, a vulnerability that Ferraço Nassif argues can be transfigured into the creation of new worlds and new bodies.
It is this idea, of the creation of a new body, that I would argue offers a point of convergence between Ferraço Nassif’s talk today and Christine Reeh-Peters’s film Postcards for the Future (2024) and corresponding presentation. Reeh-Peters’s concept of the “pandemic-image” – theorised in a forthcoming article as a multi-medial practice of both image making and consumption defined by a heightening sense of proximity – can also be read in this respect as a way of extending the film-philosophical reckoning with finitude into other domains of media wherein a weakening of the indexical register does not imply a lack of introspection or pensivité (pensiveness/thoughtfulness) as Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, spoke of so elegantly with respect to the photograph and its ability to alert us to a death to come [16]. Awareness of our collective finitude, and the finitude of non-human forms of life, was of course very much on the minds of internet users during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – and a more cynical assessment of social media image production and circulation during this period might view the quest for proximity via networked means as a means of avoiding the awareness of death that comes with solitude. However, and I think this one thing that comes across through some of the more playful aspects of Postcards for the Future, the pandemic-image and its unusual ways of trying to substitute human contact with means of self-characterisation is also in some senses an attempt to fashion new ways of living in spite of the restrictions placed upon people movement, socialisation and physical contact across the globe. We can therefore see how both Reeh-Peters’s and Ferraço Nassif’s research extends the film-philosophical project conceptualised by Viegas into the domain of other media insofar as they are committed on some level to understanding what Viegas calls “a philosophical way of life” [17], enacted by animation and digital image production respectively.
Citations:
[1] Bazin. André. 1960. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, trans. Hugh Gray. Film Quarterly 13.4: 4-9.
[2] Bazin. André. 2003. “Death Every Afternoon”, trans. Mark A. Cohen. In Ivone Marguiles’s (ed) Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 27-31.
[3] Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1980. “Observations on the Long Take”, trans. Norman MacAfee and Craig Owens. October 13 (Summer): 3-6.
[4] Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. L’Évidence du film. Brussels: Yves Gevaert Publisher.
[5] Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books.
[6] Daney, Serge. 2004. “The Tracking Shot in Kapo”. Trans. Laurent Kretzschmar. Senses of Cinema 30: not paginated.
[7] Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[8] Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[9] Rancière, Jacques. 2006. “From One Image to Another? Deleuze and the Ages of Cinema” in Film Fables. Trans. Emiliano Battista. London and New York: Berg.
[10] Combs, Scott C. 2014. Deathwatch: American Film, Technology and the End of Life. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press.
[11] Aaron, Michele. 2014. Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
[12] Viegas, Susana. 2023. “Death as Film-Philosophy’s Muse: Deleuzian Observations on Moving Images and the Nature of Time. Film-Philosophy 27.2: 222-239.
[13] Ibid, p. 226.
[14] Carroll, Noël. 1996. “Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self-Consciously Invented Arts: Film, Video and Photography” in Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
[15] Ferraço Nassif, Lucas. 2025. Unconscious/Television. Berlin: Becoming Press.
[16] Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang.
[17] “Death as Film-Philosophy’s Muse”, p. 237.
