Film-Philosophy as a Meditation on Death

ongoing

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.