This symposium offers three reflections on Film from the fields of Philosophy and Science. Estela Jardim discusses how serial photography and early cinema provided essential data on the neurological pathologies of the human body; and how these new image techniques were used and transformed by Francis Dercum/ Muybridge, Gheorghe Marinescu and Egas Moniz. Proceeding from the Deleuzian conceptual framework of cinema as thought, and refocusing it through the lens of the figure of death, Susana Viegas explores the mental and virtual images of depersonalized memories. Drawing on neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese’s model of embodied simulation as well as on studies of empathy in film theory and philosophy, Graça Corrêa investigates how aesthetic modes in film can be emotionally “prefocused.”

Comunicações:
Estela Jardim (CFCUL/GI3) – The pathological body, serial photography and early cinema
Susana Viegas (IFILNOVA, NOVA FCSH) – Cinema, death-image and depersonalised movements
Graça Corrêa (CFCUL/GI3) – Empathy in Art and Science: embodied cognition and affect in film