Cinema & Philosophy
CineLab (Laboratory of Cinema and Philosophy) develops research on cinema and the moving image within the broader context of contemporary art and culture. The research carried out at CineLab is concerned with the relation between cinema and the real, the political dimension of perception itself, and the ways in which moving images participate in the formation, transformation, and contestation of values. This concern extends to the ecological, social, and aesthetic implications of moving images in the present, as well as to the ways in which cinema and the arts participate in, resist, or problematise the broader transformations of contemporary reality.
The laboratory’s work articulates different intersecting lines of research, without reducing them to a single methodology or to a specific school of thought:
- A first line of research interrogates the ontology of cinema: what the moving image is and how it differs from a mere succession of still images. This line examines the way in which cinema, rather than simply recording the world, produces a perceptual and temporal object with no equivalent outside the filmic experience, making directly visible what would otherwise only be thought: time, duration, memory, or death.
- A second line problematises the relation between concept and cinematic image, interrogating how the encounter between thought and filmic images can be thought and created, with their density, opacity, and singular mode of signification, which is neither reducible to the concept nor simply derived from it. From this perspective, it asks what philosophy can learn from images and what films can learn from philosophical thought, as well as how each informs, displaces, or resists the other.
- A third line of work thinks of films as symptoms of contemporary life: sites where processes of abstraction that traverse the present – from financial value to algorithmic calculation – are condensed and displaced. This line analyses what images repress or make visible about the relation between subject, technics, and capital, and to what extent the very notion of world can still be thought today without such abstraction.
CineLab hosts the first ERC project ever awarded to the philosophy of cinema: FILM AND DEATH — Film-Philosophy as a Meditation on Death, led by Susana Viegas and funded through an ERC Consolidator Grant for the period 2023–2028. The laboratory has also hosted several FCT-funded projects and is responsible for the publication of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, one of the leading international journals in the field of philosophy of cinema.
