Background and key aims

FILM AND DEATH will explore the affinities between film and philosophy by drawing on the ancient practice of meditating on death and the nature of time. According to Plato, Cicero, and many others, death is why we philosophize. In Plato’s Phaedo, for example, Socrates claims that ‘the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death’ (64a), thus rendering philosophy’s pursuit of truth a praxis of death. According to Schopenhauer, without death and a sense of the transient and finite nature of life, there would be no philosophy at all.

In reality, however, we often seek to avoid this praxis. There is an increased structural gap between life’s positivity and death’s negativity, with one’s own death having become a shameful and forbidden topic of discussion. This existential detachment from what is a natural and predictable event can lead to radical positions, including indifference to the topic and thanatophobia (fear of death). This has become all the more pressing in light of the recent large-scale loss of life due to the Covid-19 pandemic and other global conflicts – types of events that are also often depicted in the arts, especially film.

Cinema brings new arguments to this crucial conversation. After all, although we rarely focus on death and mortality in the everyday, we readily discuss it when it is depicted in movies and TV series. Why is this? For one, film and moving images do not shy away from death. Many movies and TV series feature a character who is either dying, trying not to die, questioning the value of life, or has returned from the dead. Just as we discuss many other themes presented to us on the screen, we readily discuss depictions of death in film. This is largely because the subject matters to us on a deep level and because film provides us with a means of thinking about death.

In FILM AND DEATH, we seek to probe this phenomenon. Is it grounded in the fact that films have their own strategies for giving meaning to common questions and doubts about life (whether our own lives or the lives of others), prompting us to think about profound subjects through narrative representation and visual imagination? We argue that the appeal of thinking with and through film is based on the fact that in film people’s thoughts are shown – not asserted – and thus inseparable from sensations. Innovations in film editing (montage) regarding time and its ephemerality challenge the representational model of art (i.e. of what there is to be seen and perceived in the world) in the sense that time is made visible and not just reproduced, which allows us to render death ‘visible’ – as a death-image (an immediate image of death, which per se seems to be incompatible with representation). In other words, editing techniques that manipulate time and temporal order help to put anthropocentric definitions of death into perspective.

The project has three key aims:

01 to demonstrate that film-philosophy contains significant philosophical insights;
02 to show that such insights are best understood by means of film’s novel ways of thinking of time, finitude, and death;
03 to argue that film’s thinking about finite time gives new meaning to philosophy’s traditional role as a meditation on death.

To support this, a new conceptual map for studying the ways in which death and time are linked through moving images is proposed. The project will offer a contemporary view on death as a cultural phenomenon that has shaped twentieth-century thinking in general and films in particular, putting the usual anthropocentric definitions of death into perspective. A timely undertaking given the ever-growing presence of film and moving media in our lives, it will probe and question our own paradoxical existential condition as members of a thanatophobic society that rarely focuses on death in the everyday but discusses it readily when it is depicted in movies and TV.