Project description
Exploring life and death through film
There often exists a profound disconnection between our daily lives and our understanding of death. We seldom contemplate our mortality in the everyday, yet readily engage with the subject when it’s portrayed in movies and TV. Funded by the European Research Council, the FILM AND DEATH project aims to bridge the gap between our thanatophobic society and the cinematic realm. Based on the hypothesis that to engage in film philosophy is to embark on a journey to understand the essence of mortality itself, the project aims to reshape our perception of film’s role in contemporary philosophy. The project charts a new conceptual map, offering fresh insights into the intricate dance between death and time through the lens of moving images.
Objective
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 paradigm 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.
The project has three key aims: 1) to demonstrate that film-philosophy contains significant philosophical insights; 2) to show that such insights are best understood by means of film’s novel ways of thinking of time, finitude, and death; and 3) 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.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
1099 085 Lisboa
Portugal