The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: Maria Serafini (University of Milan)
\nOctober's Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar will be led by Maria Serafini (University of Milan) who will talk about "At the Limits of Mediation: Eulogy\, Digital Afterlife and the Media of Finitude". This will be an online session and will be held on October 28\, 2026\, at 15:00 WET on Microsoft Teams.
ABSTRACT What happens when an image no longer marks the distance between the living and the dead\, but promises to overcome it? Taking the Black Mirror episode &ldquo\;Eulogy&rdquo\; (2025) as its starting point\, this seminar reflects on the image as a limit between presence and absence\, memory and simulation. If Roland Barthes read the photograph as the trace of an irretrievable that-has-been\, &ldquo\;Eulogy&rdquo\; imagines its transformation into an immersive\, inhabitable environment &ndash\; a technology that allows the mourner to enter the photograph and move through memory itself. The episode is approached from two intersecting perspectives. First\, in relation to contemporary digital mourning: what happens to the eulogy when the work of remembrance is mediated through AI\, immersive archives and posthumous data? Second\, as a philosophical reflection on the limits of mediation: the technology promises co-presence\, yet gaps\, omissions and inaccessible memories continually re-emerge within the reconstructed image. Finitude therefore manifests itself on two levels: in human existence\, shaped by mortality\, loss and forgetting\, and in media themselves\, which glitch\, degrade and become obsolete. To enter the image\, in the end\, is not to overcome death\, but to confront the persistence of finitude within mediation itself.
\nBIO Maria Serafini\, PhD\, is a researcher in aesthetics and visual culture who collaborates with the Coordinated Research Centre on Extended Reality (CRC EXT) at the University of Milan. Her work lies at the intersection of aesthetics\, media studies and anthropology\, with a focus on mourning\, images and digital afterlife. She was a doctoral researcher within the ERC Advanced Grant project AN-ICON (2022&ndash\;2025) and a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the Warburg Institute\, London (2024\, 2025). She completed her PhD in Philosophy and Human Sciences in 2026 with a dissertation on lamentation from ritual to the digital\, in dialogue with Ernesto de Martino and Aby Warburg. Her current research focuses on generative AI and technologies of remembrance\, exploring both the digital survival of mourning gestures and the production of posthumous presence.
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Funded by the European Union (ERC\, FILM AND DEATH\, 101088956). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. \;
The FILM AND DEATH project is organizing an international workshop on The Life of Images: Death\, Materiality and Animist Cinema at NOVA FCSH\, Lisbon\, on 11-13 February 2027.
A face that breathes beyond itself\, a maid who buries herself in the earth\, a man dissolving into the river: these are the kinds of moments this workshop takes as its starting point. What does it mean to think of a cinematic image as alive? Cinema has long been understood as a technology that gives life to what is still\, absent\, or dead. The workshop builds on a broader history of thinking about cinema as a medium in which matter becomes strangely animated. Jean Epstein's notion of photogé\;nie\, for instance\, describes the capacity of the cinematic apparatus to reveal in things something that ordinary perception leaves concealed. More recent approaches to cinematic animism have taken this question further\, towards the non- human\, materiality and the formal conditions through which films construct relations between human and non-human worlds.
The workshop asks whether animism might describe an operation of the cinematic image itself\, one that makes the continuity or coexistence of life and death perceptible\, rather than a theme or worldview represented by certain films.
This also means attending to the material conditions of cinematic images. What roles do bodies\, objects\, landscapes\, gestures\, light and movement play in producing forms of vitality and presence? And what happens to these arrangements when death enters the frame? Framing and montage build continuity\, but they can also break it. Duration holds a body in time. Projection brings an image that has already been made back into the present each time it is screened. In each of these operations\, presence and absence\, persistence and disappearance\, are brought into contact.
Seen in this way\, death is a transformation of a particular organisation of matter. What appears as a fixed\, self-identical unit is in fact part of wider material processes. Death is the moment when this becomes visible: the relations between bodies\, matter and their environments are exposed. Life and death can then be approached as different configurations within one continuous material process.
The workshop proposes animism as a possible mode of existence of the cinematic image. Here\, life and death\, human and non-human\, organic and inorganic\, transcendence and immanence are no longer separate orders but phases of the same material and temporal process. Cinema then works as a threshold where bodies and their traces\, presence and absence\, enter into relation\, and each projection does not represent this passage so much as perform it again.
We welcome contributions that explore these questions through films\, filmmakers\, periods\, theoretical traditions or forms of cinematic practice. We are especially interested in approaches that test or challenge the notion of animist cinema itself.
Possible areas of discussion include (but are not limited to):
The workshop is conceived as a space for collective discussion and conceptual exchange. It invites researchers in film studies\, philosophy\, visual culture and related fields\, including doctoral students and early-career researchers\, to a three-day programme of paper presentations\, a keynote lecture and discussion on the ways in which cinema mediates\, repeats and makes perceptible the passage between life and death.
Format
The workshop will take place over three days at NOVA FCSH - Colé\;gio Almada Negreiro
(Campus de Campolide)\, Lisbon. Each speaker will have 20 minutes to present\, followed
by 10 minutes of discussion. The workshop will be held in English.
Organisers:
Patrí\;cia Castello Branco (CineLab\, IFILNOVA)
Lucas Ferraç\;o Nassif (CineLab\, IFILNOVA)
Susana Viegas (NOVA FCSH)
Keynote speaker:
Adrian Ivakhiv (Simon Fraser University)
Special film screening:
"The Dead and the Others" (2018)\, followed by a conversation with filmmakers Joã\;o Salaviza and René\;e Nader Messora.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Please send proposals to: thelifeofimagesworkshop@gmail.com. Submissions should be sent as a single PDF file and include:
Abstracts will be used for selection and to organise the sessions thematically\, so they should clearly state the film(s)\, filmmaker(s) or theoretical question the paper will address. The deadline for submissions is 8 November 2026. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 15 November 2026.
Registration is free. Selected papers may be invited for publication in an edited volume or journal special issue.