CFP: Death in the Eyes 2: Philosophical Perspectives on Film Genres and Death

NOVA University Lisbon, 28-29 May, 2026

Keynote Speakers: Michele Aaron (University of Warwick) and Jean-Baptiste Thoret (Université
de Poitiers)

Like philosophical categories, film genres function as ways of unifying the manifold of experience, determining under what conditions the particular can be subsumed under the universal. This effort of inclusion lies at the very root of Western philosophical thought, a fundamentally synthetic form of thinking driven by the desire to unveil the secret unity of the multiple. Genres follow in the footsteps of the Aristotelian systematization of the categories, regulating the modes of attributing a predicate (the multiple) to a subject (the one), and it is indeed in the wake of Aristotelian thought that – whether knowingly or not –film studies have broached issues of genre from the times of Bazin and Kracauer onwards. Still, has there ever been a moment in film history in which genres were not hybrid, or have they been from the outset undergoing successive and always different waves of hybridization? Despite the profusion of studies and variety of methodologies on the subject, the absence of a rigorously defined canon continues to provoke debate around the specific difference of each genre – that is, the set of codes that allow them to articulate a unique and distinctive vision of the world.

From Spinoza to Jankélévitch, and from Sobchack to Malkowski, several thinkers have described death as an experience that far exceeds symbolic articulation and eludes formal capture at every attempt, or rather as what remains unrepresentable in its lived dimension. Yet, death is an event in cinema, affecting its moving images and plots which constantly try to represent it: showcasing a diverse production of narratives in which characters die, or even exist in the afterlife. Not only patently intersecting philosophical universality in many ways, death also has a privileged relationship with cinema as a medium/art. As an event that resists full translation into visual or narrative form, death interrupts continuity and places pressure on the many structures of representation. In cinema, this limit becomes compositional far beyond direct depiction, as the image encounters death through operations involving absence, delay, fragmentation, or stillness. These strategies mark the passage of something that cannot be stabilised or fixed within the frame and reveal how unique the tension is between aesthetic construction and existential experience, bringing forth a specific and very special relation between cinema and death: giving death space. It is within such a space that disparate genres such as erotica with its exploration of corporeality, the biopic through its construction of individual life stories, and documentary by its commitment to factual representation, articulate death as a temporal condition that shapes cinematic form and binds the unique time of cinema to our awareness of life’s end. Through this, film acts as a reminder of mortality, a memento mori essential for deeper reflection on existence.

Cavell and Deleuze have shown that genres are creations of cinema’s internal movements: displaying its transformations, pragmatics, fluxes, folds, and tensions while underscoring its pluralism of perspectives. Yet, how does death appear and is elaborated by each cinematographic genre? How do film and time based media both think about and depict death within the specificities of each genre? What light do the increasingly prominent analytical, cognitive, affective, and methodological “class/gender/race” frameworks shed not only on genres, but also on the multi-faceted presence of death in them? Beyond representation and meaning, does death have an intensive role in both multiplying and composing new vistas within cinematographic genres?

The ERC Project FILM AND DEATH is organizing, at the NOVA University Lisbon, a 2-day conference that aims to debate how genres, understood as different points of view, each with its own particularity and desire, become processes of meditation about death in the multiplicity that composes the thinking machine that is cinema. Bazin once joked that in canons, like in cannons, the most important part is their central emptiness: unanswerable (or infinitely answerable) questions like “what is a genre?” and “what is film as a medium?” may, once linked to death (that thorniest of philosophical questions), call for a kaleidoscope of enlighteningly oblique, slanting, transversal approaches.

• How do drama films pose questions related to death, and in which ways are these questions different from the ones posed by comedy, horror, musical, thriller, or action films?
• In their similarities, do western and war films conceptualize death in the same way?
• Why are science fiction films interested in creating nonhuman deaths?
• Does bodycount matter besides genres most typically associated with it (e.g. horror)?
• Do genres die? Do they have an afterlife? Born and dead in Hollywood’s 1930s, the gangster genre never stops coming back – even in, say, Nollywood’s straight-to-videos and the like.
• As genres undergo historical metamorphoses, does death change along? E.g. is death the
  same in noir and neo-noir?
• In some genres, death has already been framed theoretically (e.g. gaze theory apropos
  death in Italian Giallo): any intersections between theory and philosophy there?
• Any effects on screen deaths, when melodrama and musical are combined (India, Egypt, etc.), or when a plethora of genres coalesces around the ghost trope (HK), in non-Euro/American ways?
• How is death dealt with in methodologies other than film-philosophy but widely used in
  genre studies (e.g. reception studies)?
• A corpse is no longer a corpse after C.S.I. Any traces of this “revolution” in cinematic crime fiction too?
• In different genres, which characters die and how do they die?
• How is death elaborated beyond representation within genres?
• Does death – in plots or throughout history – alter the structure of genres, does it blend or blur them?
• How do film genres work with the incorporeal?
• From characters to actors, how do films, tv shows, or video art relate aging and genres?

With an eye to a geographical scope as wide as possible, we welcome 20-minute papers investigating film genres, from a broad spectrum ranging from so-called classical genres to hybrid and outright experimental ones, in their philosophical intersections with death. 300-word proposals and a short bionote should be sent to [email protected] before November 30, 2025. Accepted speakers will be notified before December 15, and a 70 euros registration fee (which includes lunches and coffee breaks) will be due in early 2026. A selection of papers presented in the conference will be part of an edited collection planned for 2027.

Organizers: Lucas Ferraço Nassif, Marco Grosoli, Pedro Inock, Susana Viegas, Tiago Cravidão and Vasco Marques