Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Film-Philosophy as a Meditation on Death

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-philosophys 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 ones 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 films novel ways of thinking of time, finitude, and death; and 3) to argue that films thinking about finite time gives new meaning to philosophys 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 (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

See all projects funded under this funding scheme

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) ERC-2022-COG

See all projects funded under this call

Host institution

UNIVERSIDADE NOVA DE LISBOA
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 703 834,00
Address
CAMPUS DE CAMPOLIDE
1099 085 Lisboa
Portugal

See on map

Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 703 834,00

Beneficiaries (1)

My booklet 0 0