Danse Macabre: Of the Dying and Death of Philosophers on Film {… and film as an (archival) afterlife of philosophy}
Author: David H. Fleming
Format: Video Essay
Duration: ′23 ″39
Published: September 2025
Embedded Files
Research Statement
Research Statement
Danse Macabre is a work that invites viewers to interrogate how philosophy’s oral origins and traditions have become remixed and remediated by ever new forms of media and techne. While there are countless books and articles that work to describe and define the qualities and operations of film-philosophy, Danse Macabre creatively deploys the video essay form to reflexively fabricate an illustrative case in point. The stylistic form exposes how different technologies and artefactual forms have always served as vanishing or withdrawn mediators, qua the material (pre)conditions of philosophizing, while allowing video essaying to (media archaeologically) surface as a meta example of screen-philosophy in action. As such, to intercept the mathematical set theory ontologically repurposed by Alain Badiou—the philosopher who incidentally kicks-off this video essay—we might recognise Danse Macabre as a work that demonstrates belonging to its own category or set {of philosophical films that do or perform philosophy}. A feature that also makes it the first work, to my knowledge, to employ a large corpus of films about/featuring real philosophers to make its film-philosophy point. A formal stylistic method I call fractalactic film-philosophy.
Context and Methods
Context and Methods
Encountering death ribs us to grope for sense. Dying alters perception and stimulates a search for meaning. Peradventure why death became closely affined with the art and practice of philosophy. In The Gift of Death, for example, Jacques Derrida reminds us that as far back as the Phaedo Plato defined philosophy as ‘the attentive anticipation of death, the care brought to bear upon dying, the meditation on the best way to receive, give, or give oneself death, [and] the experience of the vigil over the possibility of death’ (1995, pp.12-3). The title of Montaigne’s famous 1580 essay ‘To Learn to Philosophise is to Learn how to Die’ gestures to a continuity of such ideas circulating millennia later. Of interest here, Montaigne’s textual memento mori emerged in the wake of a repolarisation of Hans Holbien’s printed woodblock series The Dance of Death (Rublack in Holbien 2016, p.173). The 41 dynamic scenes of which have been celebrated for introducing an ‘animated’ proto cinematic quality into the philosophical genre (Carels 2012). The Medieval-Renaissance memento mori practice was to be intercepted and remediated in the modern era by a series of moving phantasmagorical Victorian devices, including the cinema. An idea both acknowledged by the dancing Lumiere skeleton from their 1898 film Le squelette joyeux found in Danse Macabre’s opening moments and the writing of the film historian Tom Gunning, who perceives early cinema tout court as ‘a feast of skeletons […] which simultaneously acknowledges our progressive loss of shared realities and provides a festive ground on which this loss can be anticipated, celebrated, mourned and perhaps even transcended’ (1995, p.483; see also Carels 2012).
While these philosophical and artistic traditions serve as prominent tributaries to Danse Macabre’s film thinking, arguably Simon Critchley’s necrotic encyclopaedia The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009) most inspired its form and tone. Certainly, Critchley’s gallows humour profoundly resonated, as did his nihilistic insistence — both there and elsewhere — that humour and philosophy are intertwined ways of looking at and making sense of the world, especially regarding one’s own mortality (1997, 2002). Critchley there framed philosophy as an artform in its own right too, showing how the dying acts of philosophers helped recasts their life’s work. With his signature dark humour, Critchley provokes that, often, ‘the philosopher’s greatest work of art is the manner of their death’ (2009, p.240).
Having a fire lit beneath me, my memento mori strove to probe cinema’s intuitive exploration and expression of similar themes, refracting and diffracting the deaths and dying acts of philosophers on film through the light of their philosophical thoughts and preoccupations (if not vice versa). As with Critchley’s book, my dead philosophers project also productively embraced an expansive and inclusive view on what, or who, constitutes ‘a philosopher’. This openness allowing me to comparatively demonstrate how further East, betwixt the three pillars of Chinese philosophy—Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism—very little, or almost nothing at all was also often made of actual death. Ideas expressed through recut scenes from Chinese cinema featuring Laozi (the “father of Daoism”) and Kongzi (or Confucius, the founder of Confucianism) who do not perceive death as a worrisome end point. For, as an embedded afterlife scene starring the ‘opaque sage’ Laozi shows, death is a porous and ongoing event that co-constitutes life’s dao. Meanwhile, by philosophically distilling and personifying Laozi, Danse Macabre also simultaneously reifies a traditional Confucian ideal: that the remediated remembrance and veneration of worthy ancestors can help instil reflexivity and instruct an ethical way of living.
Critchley’s earlier book Very Little, Almost Nothing (1997) first marked his — if not the modern world of philosophy more generally — (re)turn to death as a key or central theme. Indeed, in the 1998 introduction to Death and Philosophy, Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon note that although there is undeniably a proud ‘ancient tradition that says that philosophy is essentially concerned with death,’ this focus became increasingly disentangled or deterritorialised from modern philosophical practices and beliefs: Particularly as dying became a progressively privatised and professionalised phenomena within modern secular cultures. Detouring such ideas through Daniel Frampton’s claim that at ‘the “end” of philosophy lies film’ (2006, p.183), this Thanatographic project exposes how global films about philosophers appear to atavistically pick up where philosophy left off--an idea that dovetails with Michelle Aaron’s ‘necromantic’ observations that death primarily returned to public discourse as a moving screen phenomenon within modern ‘mortal economies’ (2015).
To intervene in such debates, this autopsical assemblage cuts into the cadavers of philosophical films such as Kǒng Fūzǐ (Fei Mu, 1940), Kǒngzǐ (Hu Mei, 2011), Wittgenstein (Derek Jarman, 1993), Ghost Dance (Ken McMullan, 1983), Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask (Issac Julien, 1995), Derrida (Kirby Dick & Amy Ziering, 2002), Iris (Richard Eyre, 2001), Žižek! (Astra Taylor, 2008), The Pervert’s Guide films (Sophie Fiennes, 2006, 2012), Bliss (Mike Cahill, 2021), and Badiou (Kalyan Bros, 2021). As with Critchley’s inspection of philosophical texts in The Book of Dead Philosophers, Danse Macabre’s survey of philosophical films ultimately reveals that stoical thinkers and social philosophers do, indeed, often structure or relate their philosophical work and worldviews to death. It is worth noting, however, that while many of the above films are ‘biopics’ and biographical documentaries that structure philosophising around death, the significance of life qua biography continues to hold a contested space within philosophical discourse and conceptual debate. For example, although conceding that death likely inspired philosophy’s genius, the erstwhile Nazi Martin Heidegger famously claimed of Aristotle’s biography that everything philosophically meaningful about his life could be distilled into a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died’ (Philipse 1999, p.xiii). Alongside such positions, my ‘material thinking’ (Grant 2014; Carter 2004) with these film philosophical images imparts a sense of how biographical and prosopographical details about philosophers can indeed inflect conceptual insight, especially because so many filmmakers use film form and style to make the lifeworld-worldview continuum poetically palpable. At the same time, however, the film qua film allows these figures to attain a (re)mediated-messianic afterlife as what I herein call—after Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari (1994)— the “cine-conceptual personae”.
Presentation Notes
Formally channelling Donna Haraway’s idea that all is ‘compost’, or that (dis)order is endlessly recycled (2016), Danse Macabre invites viewers to contemplate a ‘compos(i)ted’ (death)bed of film ‘cuts’ and ‘shoots’ that feature remediations and premeditations of the dying acts and deaths of real-world philosophers. This unknitting and reknitting screen experiment — like the larger fractalactic film-philosophy project of which it forms a part — also conceptually toys with a queer image of thought differently expressed by Derrida (1987, pp.17-22) and Deleuze (1995, p.6)): one that pictures the history of philosophy as a form of necrophillic buggery and immaculate conception. That is, where living philosophers insert themselves into — possessing and ventriloquising — their dead predecessors, thus making them return differently, to speak for/as their new author(ity) figure. This philosophical video essay certainly does something akin to this, while it concomitantly stitches together a grotesque animated monster body (pace Victor Frankenstein), composed of cut up film bodies and scarred philosophical corpuses. The grotesque (de)monstration accordingly renders (film-)philosophy an eidōlon (a simulacral double), that comes to replace that which it reflects or repeats.[1] As such, Derrida’s famous purloined image from The Post Card gets twisted together with Deleuze’s oft quoted line about the ‘Lazarean’ (Viegas 2023) nature of (film) philosophers in the film’s opening moments, to provide a mycelium thread to follow through Danse Macabre’s complex of de/re-composed films: ‘Philosophers are beings who have passed through death, who are born from it, and go towards another death, perhaps the same one. The philosopher is someone who believes he has returned from the dead and goes back there. This has been the living formulation of philosophy since Plato’ (Deleuze 2005, p.201).
With respect to my own ‘material thinking’ with the contingent images composing this video project, a eulogistic word about some of the other, arguably less obvious, affective and tangible traces of death haunting the peripheries of its manifold images feels apposite. For instance, the affective nature of cinema’s premediation of death is keenly felt for me in the archival scenes from Ghost Dance, where Pascale Ogier — the young, up and coming star destined to die shortly after the film’s completion — dialogues with the late Derrida about the hauntological nature of cinema as a spiritual medium. That is to say, a technology that allows the dead to return, while the living appear possessed by ghosts. There are phantasmagorical resonances here too, then, with Richard Armstrong’s conceptual framing of the cinema as a vast ‘necropolis’ populated by a growing army of the dead’s image-souls (2012, p.133).
Jarman’s Wittgenstein differently stands out as an example of a philosophical film pervaded by death’s impress. Particularly as this New Queer Cinema project was believed by many (including the director himself) to be the last film Jarman would complete before succumbing to his AIDS-related illness, making it palpably a stoical film about (his) life, death and letting go (Ali 2000). Fei Mu’s earlier philosophical biopic Kǒng Fūzǐ is otherwise percolated by a necrotic national atmosphere. Not least because the patriotic story, set during China’s Warring States period, was manufactured as a National Defence Film designed to raise Chinese spirits (in variegated ways), after around 20 million lives had been lost in the Sino-Japanese conflict.
Materially speaking, Fei’s film was also itself believed to be a casualty of that war, due to a combination of Japanese bombings and tonnes of Chinese film stock being melted down to extract its metallic constituents to support the war effort in a different form (Fleming 2025, p.145). Miraculously, one badly damaged reel survived and was donated to the Hong Kong Film Archive in 2001, allowing a digitally resurrected version to be given its own messianic afterlife in 2009. Through such, notions of material and technological death and rebirth are also poetically woven through the film, with its ‘Exordium’ staging an early compare/contrast exercise between Fei’s first (damaged and degraded) celluloid image-imagining of Confucius (and his death), and China’s second digital screen resurrection of Confucius from 2010. This move primes the compos(i)ted video essay to formally draw attention to the many and manifold deaths and rebirths of cinema that occur alongside, and in tandem with, the philosophers and philosophies screened throughout.
These ideas are literally brought to the fore in this film and are picked up differently in another instalment in the fractalitic film-philosophy project (Walking/Examined-After/Lives: Later-Links and (Re)Rendering the Rem[AI]ns of Film-Philosophy (forthcoming)), which explores ultra-modern uses of posthuman AI imaginaries and posthumous Deepfake images mobilised for contemporary renderings of Confucius.
A mix of the above thoughts and ideas help constitute the conceptual framework or atmospheric matrix through which I would invite viewers to assess my work. A film which hopefully needles us to return, differently, not only to the age-old reeling dance between philosophy and death, philosophizing and dying, but also to that between cinema and death, the death of cinema(s), philosophy and film, and filmmaking as philosophizing. In short, Danse Macabre is a raving mad, scratched-up, Scotch reel that reminds us all that because we must die, we must first love life.
[1] My notion of (de)monstration here evokes Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2005) description of early film images as a form of monstration, or monstrance, which is akin to a form of grounded showing. He submits: “The image is of the order of the monster. […] It is the manifestation of presence, not as appearance, but as exhibiting, as bringing to light and setting forth” (2005, p.22). As noted, the film is here imagined as a form of Frankenstein’s monster that materially (de)monstrates what film philosophy is, or does.
Outcomes
Outcomes
Danse Macabre stylistically probes the idea that film became philosophical and philosophy became filmic over the course of the twentieth century, while also attending to what important philosophers from diverse periods and traditions have to say about the nature of media forms that always already conditioned and determined philosophical enquiry. As such, Danse Macabre exposes how film’s remediation of philosophy, and philosophy’s remediation/premediation of death, gesture towards media(tion) as remedy of/for death. By such means, the artefactual or archival work generates new material knowledge while inviting viewers to reflect upon how video essaying extends and modulates historical media-philosophy trends through its encounters (death and rebirth) with new forms of networked software and computational media. Over and above any extrinsic interest in seeing a broad range of real, global philosophers/philosophies being represented on screen, intrinsic value is also offered through the project’s expressive use of form and content to (re)mediate and (de)monstrate (what the author sees as) the core tenants of the ‘film as/does/performs’ philosophy position. An issue hotly debated and productively explored by a long and varied line of interdisciplinary and transcontinental thinkers and filmmakers, the metabolised work of whom often co-constitutes Danse Macabre.
Impact
Impact
After being submitted to Screenworks for consideration, Danse Macabre debuted at the 15th Film-Philosophy conference (articulated to the FEST film festival) in Espihno in 2024. Since then the video essay has screened, either individually or as part of a larger Film-Philos-Orama: A Head-Trip-Tych feature (which can be projected in temporal or spatial arrangements), at various other public events. These include: a public screening at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver Canada (December 2024, with thanks to William Brown and Mila Zou); two screenings at the University of Stirling (September 2024 and January 2025, with thanks to Adrian Hadland and Greg Singh); a Film Studies Seminar at the University of Edinburgh (February 2025, with thanks to Chiara Quaranta and David Sorfa), and as an online CINELAB seminar for the ‘Film and Death’ European Research Council project (April 2025, with thanks to Susana Viegas). Requests for future presentations and discussions are warmly welcomed.
References
References
Aaron, M. 2015. Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ali, T. 2000. ‘No bums or willies please, Derek’ The Guardian (18 June) [Accessed 23 May 2024] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/jun/18/2
Armstrong, R. 2012. Mourning Films: A Critical Study of Loss and Grieving in Cinema. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.
Blanco, María del Pilar and Peeren, E. eds. 2013. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 1-27.
Burik, S. 2019. ‘Darkness and Light: Absence and Presence in Heidegger, Derrida and Daoism’ Dao 18(3), pp.347-370.
Carels, Edwin. 2012. ‘From the ossuary: animation and the danse macabre’ Journal for Media History 15(1), pp.25-42.
Carter, Paul. 2004. Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing.
Critchley, S. 2009. The Book of Dead Philosophers. London: Vintage.
Critchley, S. 2002. On Humour: Thinking in Action. London: Routledge.
Critchley, S. 2009. Very Little, Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy and Literature. London: Routledge.
Deleuze, G. 2005. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1994. What is Philosophy? London: Verso.
Deleuze, G. 1995. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, J. 1995. The Gift of Death. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. 1987. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Fisher. M. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater.
Fleming, David H. forthcoming. Waking/Examined-After/Lives: Later-Links and (Re)Rendering the Rem[AI]ns of Film-Philosophy. Screened as WIP at University of British Columbia Critical Thinkers Seminar series (6 Dec 2024), University of Edinburgh Film Seminar Series (7 February 2025), and the 16th Film-Philosophy conference at the University of Malta (23 June, 2025).
Fleming, David H. 2025. Cinematically Rendering Confucius: Chinese Film Philosophy and the Efficacious Screen-Play. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Frampton, D. 2006. Filmosophy. London: Wallflower.
Grant, Catherine. 2014. ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking’ ANIKI: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, 1(1), pp.49-62.
Gunning, Tom. 1995. ‘”Animated Pictures” Tales of Cinema’s Forgotten Futures.’ Michigan Quarterly Review, 34(4), pp.465-85.
Herman, P. 1999. Heidegger's Philosophy of Being. Princeton University Press.
Lippit, A. M. 2016. Cinema Without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift. University of Minnesota Press.
Malpas, J. Solomon, R. C. eds. 1998 Death and Philosophy. London: Routledge.
Plato. 1875. Plato’s Phaedro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Russell, B. 2000. ‘The Philosophical Limit of Film’ Film and Philosophy 4:1, pp.163-167.
Smith, M. 2006. ‘Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64:1, pp.33-42.
Thomson, I. 2019. ‘Derrida: Philosophy and Death’ Theory Underground (16 July) archived online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHYs1FFI4Lk
Viegas, S. 2023. ‘Death as Film-Philosophy’s Muse: Deleuzian Observations on Moving Images and the Nature of Time’ Film-Philosophy, 27:2, pp.222-239.
Wittgenstein, L. (2016) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Sweden: Chiron Academic Press.
Peer Reviews
Peer Reviews
All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows
Review 1: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.
This essay film and accompanying research statement develop knowledge about the philosophers performative roles in film as “conceptual personae” Delueze and Guattari (1994) through their propositions towards death and dying. The text places the video assemblage as an approach to film as philosophy. Therefore, by implication, also about the relationship of the medium of film to dying and death. The project draws together wide-ranging sources from ancient to modern, east to continental west. These comments focus on the method as the sources are so diverse.
The method of synthesis is produced through montage forming novel comparative continuity of propositional approaches as well as disjunctive cadences. The method of mixing the author describes as compos(i)ting, implying the creating anew through the mixing and remaking of the many found materials. Then, the author proposes defining this montage method as “fractalactic film-philosophy”, which they develop from Delueze. It would be helpful to read more about how the author understands this is applied. Furthermore, it would be helpful to read more about Badou’s understanding of set theory applied to filmmaking. For example, is this montage-as-multiplicity, as well as fractalistic, a many-within-many. The chapter structure of film works well to produce fractals within the whole fractal of the project.
The method perhaps owes something to scratch video. It cuts speakers mid proposition, in order to produce continuity of thought within each chapter. Refrains of Žižek and Badiou re-sampled from earlier in the film are neatly nested in as voice over, in order to build the fractalistic / compos(i)ted layers. The compactness of the edit gives little space to contrast radically different understandings of mortality and their place in philosophies. For example, the individual subject beyond finitude in Badiou (Logics of Worlds, 2006, compared to the centrality of death event in the formation of a symbolic order for Žižek based in Lacan.
The video essay construction is at time abrasive, while at other points precisely crafted. It is a roller coaster ride through philosophy performed in film. It relies heavily on material from the Žižek film to build intensity. It demands multiple viewings in particular in the sections with inter titles as well as counterpoint voiceover. There is potential obviously to create longer versions of both the research statement and film in order to give the rich layers ideas room to develop for this viewer.
Review 2: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.
David H. Fleming's video essay “Danse Macabre” reflects in a multifaceted way on the reciprocal relationship between philosophy, death, and film, exemplifying that film-philosophy is an artistic practice (and not just a theoretical stance). This video essay is not only a piece of film-philosophy, but also contemplates self-reflexively about the nature of this film-philosophy, its deep rootedness in death, and its multiform interrelations within the triangle ‘philosophy-death-film’. The essay builds on an elaborated, fast rhythmed montage of images and sound (treated as separate elements) to rearrange preexisting cinematic shots and sequences and place them in new contexts together with quotations from philosophical writings. While this method itself is characteristic for scholarly video essays in general, this contribution thrives self-reflexively on the way in which philosophizing and dying (or learning to die) are made tangible through cinema. For example, with film sequences in which philosophers learn to die, transform into conceptual personae (after Deleuze and Guattari) or even become media ghosts: Badiou, Socrates, Zizek, Confucius, Derrida—to name but a few. The video essay explores how these thinkers on screen gain a “messianic screen afterlife”, as described in the research statement. This ‘dying-in-film’ of philosophers creates a philosophically charged performance and unfolds, together with other elements, a dense agency of thought in which image, sound, word, and writing come together polyphonically. It is precisely in this archival, film-philosophical cocktail as an experiment of thought that this essay makes its contribution to artistic research through audio-visual means: the concentrated development of a self-reflexive, relational film thinking that places itself in an explicitly philosophical tradition—film-philosophy in the essayistic sense. In some places, the video’s pace might be a little too dense, some relations only reveal on a second or even third viewing. Anyhow, this might be understood as a sign of depth and does not weaken artistic coherence and quality.
The research statement is well written and adequate to the contents of the video essay; it contextualizes and explains its references from a theoretical perspective in a consistent and precise way. Furthermore, the statement explains some important implications for the future of making film-philosophy and video essays: “Danse Macabre exposes how cinema’s remediation of philosophy, and philosophy’s remediation/premediation of death, gesture towards media(tion) as an imaged-imagined remedy of/for death.”
I do not recommend any changes to this presentation—neither to the video essay nor to the accompanying text.
All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response
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